Big Bang Could Be Recreated Inside a Metamaterial 113
Posted
by
kdawson
from the never-met-a-material-i-didn't-like dept.
from the never-met-a-material-i-didn't-like dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Metamaterials are substances with a permittivity and permeability that has been manipulated in a way that allows fine control over the behavior of light. They have famously been used to create an invisibility cloak that hides objects from view. Now Igor Smolyaninov, a physicist in the US, has calculated how metamaterials could be used for a much more profound demonstration: to reproduce the behavior of light in various kinds of spacetimes, in particular a (2+2) spacetime (one having two dimensions of space and two of time). His method is to show that there is formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials and spacetimes affect light. He goes on to show how a phase transition in a (2+2) spacetime leads to the creation of a (2+1) spacetime filled with photons, an event analogous to the Big Bang." Here are the abstract and the preprint (PDF).
metamaterials are just periodic structures (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Typical Bad Title (Score:3, Informative)
Re:metamaterials are just periodic structures (Score:3, Informative)
Re:2+2 spacetime? (Score:5, Informative)
It probably just means the spacetime metric has two positive terms and two negative terms. Instead of
ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - dt^2
you have
ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2 - dt^2 - du^2
Can a real physicist speak to this?
Re:2+2 spacetime? (Score:3, Informative)
It probably just means the spacetime metric has two positive terms and two negative terms
That is correct. The paper points out that "due to causality restrictions the analogy is purely formal" or words to that effect.
As someone else pointed out above, the /. article title, which uncritically apes the title of the linked article, is false. A correct title would be "Toy Model Analog of Big Bang Could Be Created Inside Metameterials." As it stands the title is as correct as "Supertanker can float in bathtub" when linked to a story about the latest Fisher Price supertanker bathtub toy.