It’s a saying that’s been quoted by others, usually scientists and science writers, thousands of times by now, yet it retains the element of a profound insight. And that is ‘the Universe is not only far stranger than we imagine, it’s far stranger than we can imagine’. Every time you turn a corner, there’s an unexpected and rather shocking surprise staring you in the face! Mother Nature never seems to run out of curve balls. Anyway, one such imagination could have our Universe’s strangeness level increased a notch or so in that it allows for micro (quantum) time travel and that perhaps can lead to a Universe that consists of way less stuff than that contained in the smallest speck of dust.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
Associated Cosmology:
A better output of the antimatter-going-back-in-time as pseudo-matter concept is that – as hinted above - it explains the lack of antimatter in our current cosmos. Theory suggests that at the time of the Big Bang event, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created. Of course had that been the case, all matter would have annihilated all the antimatter (and vice versa), and our cosmos would be nearly just pure photon energy. Now some of that photon energy would now and again spontaneously turn into a matter/antimatter particle pair, but overall there would be relatively little solid stuff at all. We note that this Universe would still contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but it doesn’t. The accepted way around that is the assumption that there was ever a slight excess of matter created vis-à-vis antimatter, so after all the annihilations; matter was the winner and dominated the cosmos, which is what we see today, and what little photon energy transmutes back into matter and antimatter hardly is enough to alter the ratio.
However, what if equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the Big Bang event? If antimatter has a slightly greater affinity for backwards time travel, then maybe even hardly any matter-antimatter annihilation could occur, as much of the antimatter separated from the matter by fleeing backwards in time (as pseudo-matter), or the matter separated from the antimatter by fleeing forward in time – same thing. Just as all matter (our Universe) is travelling forward in time (from our perspective) at one second per second, there must be another antimatter (pseudo-matter) universe travelling backward in time (again from our perspective) at one second per second.
That leads to a new novel cosmology, courtesy of yours truly. Assume that antimatter (as pseudo-matter) travels into the past at the same rate as ordinary matter travels into the future – one second per second. There’s a separation between the Big Bang’s antimatter component and the matter component. Or, in other words, the Big Bang event created two universes, one each of charged matter, uncharged matter (the neutral particles of matter), photons and the other neutral force particles (like the graviton); one of charged antimatter, uncharged antimatter (the neutral antimatter particles), anti-photons and other antimatter neutral force particles (like an anti-graviton). Oh, as per CPT, each universe is the mirror image of the other. Perhaps the concept of a mirror universe (as seen in several Star Trek episodes) might not be quite so sci-fi after all! Our Universe, say is a left-handed Universe; our antimatter counterpart is a right-handed universe. So, one has total symmetry between the two cosmos’s. That should please physicists! Of course each cosmos is in itself asymmetric with respect to their matter-antimatter ratio.
Each universe appears to be retreating or going backwards in time from the perspective of the other, (in a similar way that you are getting further and further away in time from any event in the past you care to identify, which equally applies from the point of view of that event contemplating you – if it could). Anyway, that’s all academic since there’s no longer any actual contact between the two universes. Each universe is in isolation and all is as it should be within each self-contained cosmos.
Of course in each universe, some particles reverse charge due to photon energy, and then reverse again, perhaps again and again and again, so that the matter universe has a small but continuous creation component of antimatter – which doesn’t last long; the antimatter universe has a small continuous creation component of matter – which doesn’t last long.
The vast majority of all these zillions of photons created at the Big Bang event, and present in each of the dual universes, including those we are awash with in the here and now, don’t constantly mutate into a matter/antimatter pair, so that’s a rarity in the cosmic scheme of things. If we’re matter by a vast percentage, then the few photons that temporarily create a bit of antimatter doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, and in any event, that antimatter will meet quick smart matter and it’s photon time again, regardless whether the antimatter bit came from our future to our now, or was created in our now and has skipped back to our past, all at the rate of one second per second. Antimatter doesn’t stick around in our here and now, but if it travelled back in time, turned into an electron, that electron would be in forward time step with us. In fact, that electron would exist in our here and now since matter that existed in our past, exists now.
I wonder whether or not a further consequence of all this time travelling is that we need a wave equation for position in time as well as position in space. All particles (for that matter, all macro objects made up of particles) have a quantum wave function associated with them that gives the probability that that particle (or macro object) will be at some location or other (the quantum uncertainty principle dictates that we can only know the probability that a particle will be a location X). So, if we want to know where a specific electron is, we can say (for example) it’s 90% likely to be within one radius from a specific position, or 99% certain to be within two radii, or 99.9% to be within three radii, etc. Do we now need a wave equation to tell us that a positron/electron is say 90% certain to be within one time unit in the past/future, 99% certain to be within two time units in the past/future, or 99.9 % certain to be within three time units in the past/future, etc.? I would assume so since the positron/electron can U-turn at any unknown time in the past/future.
An Analogy:
When everything is moving together forward (or backward) in time, there’s relatively less scope for interactions and associated baggage compared to head-on (past hits future) interactions. Past-future interactions are bound to be pretty inevitable. It’s only the relative rarity of opposite direction past-future interactions that make them harder to detect.
Analogies are useful when the going gets sticky. Let’s say we have 1000 cars in the (present time) parking lot. There are 500 black cars (call them antimatter cars) and 500 white (or matter) cars.
Now say 500 cars head toward the north (future time) exit, 99% of which are matter cars and 1% antimatter cars. In keeping with symmetry, we have 500 cars head for the south (past time) exist, of which 99% are black antimatter automobiles and 1 % are the white matter automobiles. Apart from a few possible bender-benders as the cars jockey for the two exits (I’ll assume here that the black cars only bump fenders with other black cars and white cars vice versa), I’ll take it as given that 495 white and 5 black cars make it to the north exit and the northbound freeway, and 495 black and 5 white cars ditto than heading southbound, towards the past.
In fairly quick order, you have two separate groups heading away from each other, never to interact with each other again. (See my potential cosmology example above.) Alternatively, you could just have all 1000 cars head out of the north exit and travel on the northbound (heading towards the future) freeway. But, you’d need 99% of your cars to be matter white cars (990 of them) and 1% antimatter black cars (10 of them) to reflect the fact that because they represent the matter/antimatter distribution of our Universe, and there’s way more of the former than the latter.
In our Universe, it’s the northbound traffic on the freeway that’s the parallel analogy. We’re heading towards the future in a predominately matter based Universe. (I’m ignoring ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ here since we don’t have much of a handle on what exactly they are.)
Because the northbound traffic is all travelling at the same speed, one second per second, there’s not too much interaction between the cars going on, apart from those inattentive drivers who drift sideways. So, cars can interact, explosively if a black car drifts into the pathway of a white car (or vice versa), but not that often, relatively speaking.
Now in our northbound freeway traffic of 495 matter cars and 5 antimatter cars, every now and then one of the cars does a U-turn - now something interesting is bound to happen, keeping in mind that a black car becomes pseudo-white and a white car, pseudo-black. Cars travelling all in the same direction don’t interact much; but if a rogue car starts travelling down the wrong way, going south in the northbound lane (or vice-versa), well headlines are bound to be made. You have the following options: A wrong way pseudo-white car meets head-on a white or black car; a wrong way pseudo-black car meets head-on a black or white car. If pseudo-black meets white, or pseudo-white meets black, that’s like matter-antimatter annihilation. But if pseudo-black meets black, or pseudo white meets white, then things are more complicated.
Value-Adding:
So, when ‘interesting’ things happen, how do these interesting events actually explain spooky physical (quantum) phenomena? Well one possibility, as given above, is that it explains why all electrons or positrons or protons or antiprotons or neutrons or antineutrons, etc. are the same. There’s just one of each! Apart from that, it can explain Einstein’s objection to quantum entanglement – spooky action at a distance, where apparently, two particles can ‘communicate’ or interact at faster-than-light speeds. For example, say an elementary particle leave the Sun’s visible surface at say 6 a.m. your local time. It then reverses time direction back to say 3 a.m. your local time. It reverses time direction again and since it’s now had plenty of time to travel the distance, hits your particle detector at 6 a.m. your local time. That particle has travelled from the Sun to the Earth, not in the normal eight light minutes, but instantaneously. One other bit is that if a particle travels into the past that adds to the collective amount of stuff at some point in space as well as in the past. Again, say a particle at 6 a.m. in Sydney Canberra
Conclusions:
Either you accept that at the micro (quantum) level time can flow in either direction, or you stick steadfastly to the arrow-of-time of the everyday macro world as something that applies equally as well to all things micro. Either way apparently is a valid point of view. Different strokes for different folks.
Some additional references are:
Davies, Paul; The arrow of time; (in) About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution; Penguin Books, London
Fraser, Gordon; The back passage of time; (in) Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Gott, J. Richard; Time travel to the past; (in) Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time; Phoenix London
Oerter, Robert; The bizarre reality of QED; (in) The Theory of Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics; Plume, N.Y.; 2006; p.93-120 (esp. 114-120):
Some further readings about antimatter in general:
Close, Frank; Antimatter; Oxford University Press, Oxford
Fraser, Gordon; Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Nir,Yossi & Quinn, Helen R.; The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter; Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; 2008:
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