MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

I have been very busy lately and I have fallen short in watching the many movies that have arrived in theaters. I have wanted to see the movie, Life, only to wet my appetite for the film, Alien Covenant. I hear it is similar to both the films, Gravity and Alien. There is another film that I want to see, but I am embarrassed to admit it. I want to see the Power Rangers movie.

In the pantheon of pop culture’s best superheroes, the Power Rangers are just 90’s relics that don’t rank very high. Even after 25 years, some will say that they lack the prestige afforded to icons like Batman and Superman. There are some writers out there that believe these teens with attitude deserve a legacy.

I know that the Power Rangers are an acquired taste for some people, but I am a Godzilla fan. The Power Rangers always found themselves fighting creatures right out the Japanese man in suit closet and so I was hooked.

I have noticed that the reboot of the Power Rangers is not just limited to the movie theater — it appears that in comic books, the Power Rangers are meeting up with the Justice League.

Forgive me for having my geek check up, but I am sure most of you have you are aware of both the Power Rangers and the Justice League.

They are getting a crossover comic book and there is a panel in the book that got my attention because it had an air of familiarity. In the latest issue of the series, the superheroes gather at the mouth of what seems to be CERN’s Large Hadron Collider located in Geneva.

Both the Justice League and the Power Rangers are discussing how to use the CERN collider to jump across universes. While the thought of using the LHC to open up portals to other dimensions seems to be a purely fictional conceit, the heroes aren’t the first to propose it. Real-life Vanderbilt University physicist Tom Weiler, Ph.D., dreamed it up first.

In the comic, a scientist explains the heroes’ theory like this: “The idea is, if we smash the particles together in the right way, we can open a door, just for a fraction of time, into another universe.” While it’s a bit vague on the details, it’s actually similar to a theory that Weiler introduced in 2011.

According to Weiler and colleague Chui Man Ho, if the Large Hadron Collider succeeds in smashing particles together hard enough to create the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, a side-effect of the reaction might open up a fifth dimension, thus allowing a form of time travel, at least for certain particles.

We’re not too sure what exactly the relationship between “universes” is in the world of DC Comics, but Weiler’s theory certainly raises the possibility of crossing dimensions, which seems to encompass what the heroes are looking to do.

The test of the researchers’ theory will be whether the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously appearing. If they do, Weiler and Ho believe they will have been produced by particles that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them.

Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory, a “theory of everything.” A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity, but it requires 10 or 11 dimensions instead of our familiar four. This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or “brane” floating in a multi-dimensional space-time called the “bulk.”

A brane is an extended object with any given number of dimensions, of which strings in string theory are examples with one dimension. Our universe is a 3-brane.

The basic building blocks of our universe are permanently stuck to the brane and so cannot travel in other dimensions. There are some exceptions, however. Some argue that gravity, for example, is weaker than other fundamental forces because it diffuses into other dimensions. Another possible exception is the proposed Higgs singlet, which responds to gravity but not to any of the other basic forces.

We all know about time travel, or at least the possibility of traveling through time. The idea of this feat can be traced to H.G. Well in the late 1880’s with his book, The Time Machine.

It tells of an unnamed time traveler who rides into the future on an apparatus resembling a bicycle. His voyage is made possible by the fact “there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it” as the Traveler helpfully explains to his temporally challenged friends.

If the literary roots of time travel comes from The Time Machine, then scientific interest originated with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905.

Science gave credibility to the fiction, which made the science more accessible. The combination was so potent, and expanded so quickly, that time travel began to seem like a truly timeless principle.

While Einstein remained skeptical of voyaging through the space-time continuum, his close friend Kurt Gödel mathematically described an alternate universe in which time warped to loop back on itself. Gödel gave the calculation to Einstein for his 70th birthday, often checking later whether his theory had been proven.

Time dilation is the notion that time is dependent upon your relative speed and gravity’s pull. It’s a theory that’s been tested time and time again; first with highly accurate cesium atomic clocks, then with even more accurate strontium atomic clocks, and each time Einstein still comes up correct every time.

The idea of time travel or even preserving the artifacts of time has changed our lives whether we know it or not.

We bury time capsules in the corner stones of government buildings and court houses. Only since the 20th century have we sought ways to communicate with the future. Now we tend to interpret any box of historic artifacts found under a cornerstone as an effort by ancestors to send us a message from the past. In fact, those old cornerstone caches were votive offerings, not meant to be discovered.

Time travel is inherent in the basics of general relativity. Einstein’s theory predicts that time runs more slowly in strong gravity, so you grow old more slowly living in a bungalow than in a skyscraper: being closer to the ground, you are in marginally stronger gravity. So to make a time machine, you simply have to connect two regions where time flows at different rates.

Take, for instance, the Earth and the immediate vicinity of a Black Hole, where strong gravity makes time flow extremely slowly. Say you start two clocks ticking on Monday at the two locations. When Friday comes around on Earth, it will still be only Wednesday by the Black Hole. So if you could travel instantaneously from Earth to near the black hole, you could travel from Friday back to Wednesday. Hey presto: time travel.

The question is, can you? Yes, in principle. According to quantum theory, the fabric of space-time is a tangle of sub-microscopic shortcuts through space and time known as wormholes. A few steps along such a tunnel and you might emerge light years away on the other side of the galaxy, or years in the past or future. It is possible.

Just recently, a group of researchers from the Paris Observatory set up various strontium atomic clocks around Europe to see if their different speeds as the Earth spun affected their relative times the same in which Einstein predicted in his theory of special relativity.

It’s basically showing the effects of gravity and the effects of acceleration are equivalent, so there must be one explanation for gravity and acceleration. That is what the general theory of relativity is – it takes the notion of constant velocity and motion which is special relativity and says how we are going to apply it top accelerated motion along with the idea of the fabric of space and time.

The idea that a parallel universe or many universes multiverses exist, has been around for a while. There is string theory and the “many-worlds” theory and variations upon these. But nobody has ever been able to carry out an experiment capable of successfully testing this.

However, a new proposal which postulates that tiny Black Holes connect us to other universes, has been put forward by Mir Faizal, and Mohammed M. Khalil of the University of Waterloo in Canada. Their study has been published in Physics Letters B and scientists at the LHC will now be testing their theory in practice.

The LCH has already been used to look for tiny black holes, but has so far failed. Now, Faizal and Khalil have proposed alterations to previous experiments, which they hope will confirm their new theory.

If they succeed, it would overturn our entire concept of reality. Such a discovery would mean that many more dimensions exist than those which we can currently conceive of or experience.

It would also challenge the conventionally accepted theory that the universe began with a Big Bang. Instead, it says there was never a singularity and the universe has no beginning – it is timeless and infinite.

Moreover, these parallel universes might not be governed by the same laws of physics that we know of. Or they could follow our laws, but in a way we are not used to. For example, some scientists suggest that there could be an alternative universe in which time goes backwards.

The two scientists also think that such universes wouldn’t be like the “many-worlds” theory, in which, following every decision and action you make, the alternative possibility would split away and exist in another universe – meaning that there exists an infinite number of alternative universes in which you still exist, as if you had taken a different course of action.

Such multi-universes wouldn’t just exist alongside us, we would be connected to them by the miniscule black holes and there would be a physical exchange between us and them. Faizal and Khalil say that gravity from our own universe would flow through these black hole-tunnels into the universes beyond.

The Black Holes are predicted to exist in the “gravity rainbow.” Unlike Einstein’s theory that light is bent by gravity universally, “Rainbow Gravity” theory suggests that gravity affects different wave lengths of light and this means that particles will have different levels of energy.

Using the Rainbow model, the researchers estimated that more energy will be needed to detect tiny Black Holes than previously thought. The LHC has looked for black holes at lower energy levels and the scientists say this is the reason it hasn’t succeeded.

But now re-activated, the new superpower LHC will be capable of smashing particles together at double the force it was doing before, thus making the new experiment feasible.

The idea of time travel never ceases to fascinate us and as CERN continues to tamper with parallel universes and particle physics, it may be surprising to learn there seems to be a few surprises that are being revealed about quantum entanglements and whether or not opening wormholes have been going on in secret without the public’s knowledge.

In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of space-time that is fundamentally a ‘shortcut’ through space and time. Space time can be viewed as a 2D surface, and when ‘folded’ over, a wormhole bridge can be formed. A wormhole has at least two mouths that are connected to a single throat or tube. If the wormhole is traversable, matter can ‘travel’ from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat.

There has always been speculation that scientists have already turned the key to unlock secrets of the multiverse.

You may remember that last year during the hype of the television show Stranger Things Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz appeared on the Chelsea Handler Show. Chelsea started asking him questions about the controversy of the TV show and how it may be rattling the nerves of the Department of Energy with regard to opening up wormholes, time travel and the so-called “Upside Down.”

Moniz believe it or not gave a candid reply to her questioning that resulted in uncomfortable laughter.

Moniz told Chelsea Handler he hadn’t seen “Stranger Things”, but he noted that its theories on the Upside Down ― a parallel universe the federal government accidentally cracks open in the series, may not be so far off.

“We are also a big supporter of very basic science and that includes trying to understand the basic particles of nature and the structure of the universe,” he said. “Theoretical physics … looks at things like higher dimensions than three dimensions, and parallel universes.”

So now we have inkling as to whether or not the U.S. Department of Energy is in the business of understanding alternate universes.

Does this mean that the simplest and most popular cosmological model is now something that is history? If so, that is an awesome irony. Is our observable universe merely a small part of a larger “multiverse?”

The answer true believers may be a resounding, yes.

https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia/votive-offerings-of-time-w-marshall-barnes-april-04-2017

Written by Ron Patton