Extra Dimensions of Space

Factual Questions
21

JoeyBlades:
I have to dispute your facts when you claim that antimatter exists all around our planet. As i understand it, antimatter–that is, matter composed of a negatively charged nucleus surrounded by protons–by definition cannot coexist with matter, due to the opposite charge that its atomic particles are carrying. When antimatter is placed in contact with matter, the result is thought to be the instant anihilation of both substances. Thus it must be assumed that any traces of antimatter that found themselves on our planet would instantly go poof!

I should clarify one thing, however, antimatter may have been demonstrated on this planet. A researcher this year claims to have produced a couple of atoms of antimatter by “knocking” its electrons out of orbit and replacing them with protons. The resulting substance was observed for about a nanosecond before it reacted with the air around it and disappeared.

22

Well, I DOUBT this was what he did, since replacing an electron (a baryon, with fine structrue and all) with a proton (a lepton) is a physical impossiblity. On a size scale, that would be like knocking the earth out of its orbit around the sun and replacing it with another sun.

What he probably did (and I have not been keeping up on this) is somehow replace a electron with a positron, which is rather abundant for antimater. He’d still have to get some anti-protons and anti-neutrons around. Most likely he put a positron in orbit around an anti-proton (no small feat in itself) and generated anti-hydrogen. Any antimatter more complex than anti-helium would be nigh-impossible to create using this method.

Jason R Remy

“And it could be safely said that at that moment, in the whole of India, no one, absolutely no one, was f^(king a goat.”
– John Irving A Son of the Circus (1994)

23

oops, I reversed my baryons and leptons. I should have said that the proton was a baryon (heavy particle, composed of quarks) and the electron was a lepton (elementary particle w/o fine structure) I feel like an idiot.

Jason R Remy

“And it could be safely said that at that moment, in the whole of India, no one, absolutely no one, was f^(king a goat.”
– John Irving A Son of the Circus (1994)

24

you got me, jayron. my apologies–of course the nucleic particles of antimatter are positrons, not electrons, and they are surrounded by anti-electrons rather than protons. I’m working from memories of college here, meshed with a drunken night of learning channel.

25

Zooey,

You wrote:

Sorry, I should have been more clear… this is not my claim, but rather a claim made by Stephen Hawking, though I’ve certainly read many other books and papers that support this claim. Hawking is merely where I was first introduced to the idea that antimatter is all around us…

Quite true, however antimatter is created from the natural radioactive decay of some elements. Also small quantities of antimatter “rain” down from space. So while it may not last long, it is all around us, nevertheless.

You’re talking about atomic scale antimatter. BTW, the first anti-hydrogen atom was actually produced in 1995. Check out this link:

http://www.cern.ch/Press/Releases96/PR01.96EAntiHydrogen.html

Actual detection of antimatter occured over 30 years ago during the study of K-meson decays.

Antielectrons, antiprotons, and antineutrinos have been produced commercially for several years. Some of this antimatter is used, for instance, in Positron Emission Tomography (AKA PET scans),and has other uses in medical research, as well. It is also being evaluated as a possible source of “ignition” for fusion reactions for such notable research facilities as Penn State’s Laboratory for Elementary Particle Science (LEPS) and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / Space Sciences Laboratory… to name but a couple…

26

Sounds like you are referring to spontaneous virtual particle pairs. While these do exist everywhere in a sense, they are not very useful or detectable most of the time. Certainly harvesting energy from these wouldn’t be practical, as the net energy of a virtual particle pair is zero. :slight_smile:

Those little guys are the basis for the concept of Hawking radiation, which is the concept that allows a black hole to emit energy, and as a result, give off valid thermodynamic blackbody radiation.

Certainly it seems that anti-matter was a bad example of something that isn’t proven, as it is a very well established and frequently observed thing. Like you said, it has long been observable in cosmic rays (cosmic rays were kinda like our first particle accelerators) as extremely fast particles from space collide with the atmosphere, and of course they have become an everyday thing for high-energy physics experiments.

I doubt this, although I may have missed something. The only emmissions I am aware of from radioactive decay are alpha (helium nucleus), beta (electron), and gamma (photon). However, positrons are definitely emitted from some natural nuclear reactions, such as solar fusion. In some fusion reactions, a proton transforms into a neutron and emits a positron (and a neutrino).

27

Zooey71, I recommend you pick up a copy of “Hyperspace” by Michiu Kaku. It takes a while for him to get to it, because he builds upon one concept after another, but he does reach point where he explains why it seems (at the present,i.e., at the time of publication) that the universe about us may have up to 10 dimensions. The book is 3-4 years old.

28

Um… positrons are anti-electrons. :slight_smile:

I think you meant that the nucleic particles were anti-protons.

29

Well, I’ll take back the thing about elements emitting positrons. I was just reading something about PET scans, and it did mention various positron-emitting isotopes. I wonder why this isn’t classified as another fundamental radiation type. Perhaps it doesn’t exist in isotopes that are found naturally.

30

Undead dude,

You wrote:

I think the record will show that I agree with this… [wink]

31

Well, yeah. :slight_smile:
I was just kinda throwing emphasis on the fact that there is no energy there to harvest.

32

Size DOES matter.

33

I think part of the difficulty here is that some are defining “anti-matter” to mean “contra-terrene atoms” and some are defining it to mean “contra-terrene particles”. The latter exists (in small amounts, and very briefly) on Earth due to natural causes. The former exists in far smaller amounts, and only in the laboratory.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

34

As to the ORIGINAL topic, the existence of extra-dimensional states, I still submit that though these dimensions can be proven mathematically, they cannot be conceived by our mind because, quite simply, our mind is itself three-dimensional. Try as you might, you’ll never be able to “figure out”–that is, imagine spatially–a basketball turning inside out with out poking a hole in it…though this is shown in mathematics as possible.

35

Zooey71 writes:

Whoa Nellie. First of all, space-time is 4 dimensions not three. Second of all, while I can’t draw things in more than 3 space dimensions, I can certainly visualize them in my mind. Third of all, it’s somewhat naive to assume that any real extra dimensions are spacial. Finally, why do you assume that the mind is 3-dimensional. The brain is 3-dimensional, but our minds may be extra dimensional or anti dimensional.

Open your eyes and you can see everything in front of you - open your mind and you can see much, much more.

36

Holy smokes, Joeyblades! Throw me a bone here–check out my VERY FIRST POSTING and see that yes i realize we operate in l,w,h, AND time. “Secondly”, since your brain (assumming you’re not one of those being hunted by agent moulder et al) has evolved into the same soft gray control center the rest of us have, it’s generally theorized that however we might try, we truly cannot pictorially grasp a higher dimension than that in which we operate. we can come close, with metaphors and such, but we always slip at the last moment. so i hold suspect your claims that you can visualize higher dimensions. “Thirdly” i don’t believe i ever assummed higher dimensions to be necessarily all spacial. In fact, it is quite possible that successive dim’s expand upon the one dim of time we understand, somehow mirroring the 3 known dim’s of space. “Finally” i use “mind” and “thought” interchangeably when not righting haiku. the mind is simply the poetic word we have made up to refer to the actions of the brain. “Mind”=brain as “Window”=eyeball as “superhighway”=al gore’s brainchild (just kidding)

Heck, give me some shrooms and i could see God!

37

It is hard to imagine our one-dimensional concept of time–think, a “line”–having “width”. (Co-planal / chronological realities?)
Boggles the mind!

38

I can imagine things in more than the “normal” dimensions-- three, plus time, plus one more (or maybe two). I have a clear mental picture of how a hollow sphere may evert itself through a fourth dimension. That’s just the way my mind works.

But I can’t draw you a picture, and I can’t really explain it in words; the vocabulary just doesn’t exist. There’s no way I can show you my imagination, so you’d have to take my word that I can visualize higher dimensions.

If you don’t think this sort of visualization is actually possible-- maybe I’m mistaken somehow-- I cannot possibly prove what I imagine. However, you can also not prove the impossibility, so you can’t prove to me that I’m mistaken.

Therefore, let’s please not argue about whether or not it’s possible to imagine something. Let’s just say that it’s not provable in either direction (or else start a new thread in GD).

39

There certainly are ways to ‘see’ more than 3D.

If a hypersphere were to intersect my 3D world right in front of me. I would see a point grow into a sphere, get bigger, then start shrinking back down to a point, and then disappear.

Now, I can assign direction names for travel in the 4th dimension, perhaps call them fourwards and quatwards. Then when the sphere appeared again and was growing before me, I can call to the hypersphere, ‘Stop!’ and it would remain in the same size.

Then I’d say, “Which direction are you going?”

“Fourwards,” the hypersphere would reply.

“Go three inches quatwards, please,” I would say.

“Sure.” And the sphere would shrink a bit.

Then I’d think, “Now, if I were able to go three inches quatwards, I’d see it grow back into the size it was when I said ‘stop.’”

Thus, I’d be putting together in my mind, the total shape of the hypersphere, even if I couldn’t see it all at once.

It’s like watching a merry-go-round. You don’t see all the horses at once, but you get an intuitive feel of where all the horses are at any one time. You can, in your mind, open up the merry-go-round and see all the horses lined up in order in a straight line. You can’t see all the sides at the same time with actual sight, but you get an intuitive sight of the entire structure.

There are other tricks to help the mind ‘see’ more than the three spatial dimensions.

When I used to play the ancient video game, Asteroids; I used to be quite good ‘visualizing’ how I can shoot off one side of the screen to hit something on the other side of the scree (a wrap-around screen world). Though I couldn’t see it with actual sight, I intuitively could see it.

Skeet shooting is 4D sight, if you count time as a fourth dimension (which you can, thanks to Einstein). You’re targeting in 3D, but have to antipate future placement in the 3D world in time. That’s seeing in 4D.

Peace.

40

Zooey71,

You wrote:

I’ve never heard that theory… A very peculiar one, since in actuality your brain (the part that perceives images, senses, and remembers) is actually a two dimensional surface. Furthermore, what you think you perceive in your brain as three or four dimensional space, is merely a trick. The way you perceive and remember things closely resembles a movie - a collection of two dimensional images (with perspective) chained together to create the illusion of timelapse playback. If your two dimensional brain can trick you into visualizing the world in three or four dimensions, why is it so hard for you to extend the illusion to five or more?

Moriah gave an example of one way to visualize a hypersphere moving in five dimensions. A slightly more simplistic one might be to visualize a sphere in space-time, that changes color as it convolves in it’s (non spacial) fifth dimension.

A slightly more complex visualization can show one way that your basketball can convolve to an “inside out” state without necessitating any surface holes. Don’t get wrapped up in the “science” required to produce this effect. It’s mostly contrived to help you visualize. Let’s say that we’ve just invented a new energy beam. When we point this beam at our basketball, two things happen:

(1) Matter on the interior surface of the ball is attracted toward the exterior.

(2) All of the matter in the ball undergoes a change at the sub-sub-sub-atomic level such that “particles” at this level can exchange places without affecting the overall atomic structure. Basically, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, and even quarks can turn themselves inside out, but otherwise remain unchanged.

In this scenario, the inner surface would appear to “melt” outward and the basketball would turn itself inside out.

Operating at these sub-sub-sub-atomic levels is where some scientist believe we may yet discover extra dimensions.

As I said, that is merely one possible visualization. Like AuraSeer, I can convolve the sphere through a virtual fourth spacial dimension, in my mind’s eye. It’s a bit hard to describe, but you have to allow that the surface is at once, both spherical and saddle shaped…