Will Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicists, led by Leah Broussard, open a door to a parallel universe?
If this hypothesis seems unlikely, they will still try to conduct a series of experiments whose objective will be to verify whether or not such a "mirror world" can exist.
At the end of the tunnel, on the other side of the mirror
The mysterious disappearances in the series The Leftovers, the portal to other planets Stargate SG1, or the terrifying parallel world of Stranger Things: and if it was really possible to open a portal to another dimension?
Like the Dyson spheres and other O'Neill cylinders, this idea may seem like pure science fiction, but physicists have been interested in it for many years. Indeed, the idea of multiple universes is not so recent and many intellectuals have considered that there may exist other worlds, superimposed on ours. Since then, questions raised by quantum physics, notably the paradox of the Schrödinger cat, have been the source of more or less conceivable theories.
This is an experiment, first performed in 1990, which surprised the scientific community. As stated in the article by our colleagues at NBCNews, this experiment consisted of measuring the lifetime of a neutron in two different contexts. Logically, no gap should have been observed, but the neutrons took another nine seconds to transform into protons when they were extracted from the nucleus of an atom from a nuclear reactor.
This gap of just ten short seconds seems nothing, except that it could be explained by the existence of a parallel world. According to the researchers, 1% of the move to another dimension before turning into a proton. In addition, more precise and more recent measures have confirmed the gap between the two methods and consequently reinforced the researchers' conviction that there is a need to prove, once and for all, whether a parallel world exists.
Benjamin Grinstein, an expert in particle physics at the University of California San Diego, explains, " I take the differences very seriously. It's not just between two experiences. It is a collection of many independent experiments by several groups. The latest experiences, designed in part to resolve the disagreement, have only made things worse. "
Will neutrons reach a "ghost world"?
To try to prove the existence of this parallel world, the researchers will use a nuclear reactor with a power of 85 megawatts to generate several billion neutrons. The objective here will be to project a beam of neutrons into a tunnel 15 meters long against an impenetrable wall. Sensors will be installed on the other side of the wall to detect neutrons that would have been able to cross through an " oscillation ".
Leah Broussard expects to detect nothing, otherwise, it would be a real surprise. She explains, "It all boils down to whether we are able to pass neutrons through a wall Before adding: " We should not see any neutrons, according to the standard model of particle physics ".
This series of experiments should not last more than a day and its estimated cost is quite low. The in-depth analysis of the results obtained should require several weeks!
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