Scientists eye parallel universe

And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the “New Physics” on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.

“Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions… These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments.”

As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the “universe’s extra bits” – if they do exist as predicted – should be brought into computerised, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.

Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN – in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland – has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.

Proton collisions
By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of five million a second – two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.

By next year, collisions will be occurring – if all continues to go well – at a rate producing what physicists call one “inverse femtobarn”, best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder. The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval “Big Bang” 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.

Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet earth, only four percent of that universe is known – because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy.

Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors – and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe – to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.

The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing – presumably into them – and then back into the classical four.

Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated – a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.