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A single universe, or two?

What are the speculative ideas currently in vogue?

Two references:

R. Foot and R.R. Volkas, Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 52, No. 11, December 1, 1995
Z.G. Berezhiani and R.N. Mohapatra, Phys. Rev., Vol. 52, No. 11, December 1, 1995.

These two works address the solar neutrino deficit problem. Foot and Volkas propose that the Universe is composed of two enantiomorphic "sectors." They refer to the second sector as a "mirror sector" (perhaps a reference to the Jonas effect). This second universe is P-symmetric (see Geometrical Physics B, devoted to group theory). Foot and Volkas suggest that the energy at the center of the sun is carried by normal neutrinos and "mirror-neutrinos." They propose extending our universe to include a P-symmetrical sector. Since the 1950s, we have known that our universe is not perfectly symmetrical. See: T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang, Phys. Rev. 104, 254 (1956).

When typically "right-handed" processes occur over a certain characteristic time, the symmetrical "left-handed," mirror-symmetrical process implies a slightly different characteristic time (the difference is 10⁻⁹). The symmetrical process belongs to the antimatter world. It was predicted and observed (Nobel Prize). This is called the violation of the Parity Principle. This refers to "our sector." Foot and Volkas suggest the existence of a twin universe with inverse parity violation. They assume that the whole—our sector plus the mirror sector—composes a fully P-symmetrical entity. The "mirror sector" of Foot and Volkas is P-symmetrical with respect to ours.

As presented in Geometrical Physics B:
J.P. Petit & P. Midy: Geometrization of antimatter through the coadjoint action of a group on its momentum space. 4: Twin group [Geometrical Physics B, 4, 1998].

We have constructed a CPT-symmetrical twin world. Following this idea, 50% of the released energy could be carried by "CPT-symmetrical mirror neutrinos."

There is another reason to try to imagine something different from the Standard Model. In the very early universe, the world is comparable to the Jewish tohu-bohu (chaos). As Steven Weinberg stated, at that time, the Universe was a mixture of all kinds of radiation. He means that if one finds photons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos, the massive particles (and their antiparticles) move at a velocity very close to the speed of light.

Photons produce particle-antiparticle pairs. These latter then collide and annihilate, producing high-energy photons. And so on.

Then the expansion cools the photons, whose radiation temperature varies as 1/R, where R is the mean distance between two particles. When they no longer have enough energy to produce pairs, this production stops. Then annihilation destroys matter and antimatter through an irreversible process.

The main question becomes:

• Why are we here, you and I? Why has this mutual annihilation not completely vanished the two enemy-sisters: matter and antimatter?

Answer?
No answer......

Half of the universe is lost. If anyone has any information, please contact any theoretical physics laboratory immediately.

In 1967, the Russian academician Andrei Sakharov was the first to suggest that "cosmogenesis" could have produced two universes instead of a single one:

A. Sakharov: "CP violation and baryonic asymmetry of the Universe." ZhETF Pis'ma 5: 32-35 (1967); Translation JETP Lett. 5: 24-27 (1967)
A. Sakharov: "A multisheet Cosmological model." Preprint Institute of Applied Mathematics, Moscow 1970
A. Sakharov: "Cosmological model of the Universe with a time vector inversion." ZhETF 79: 689-693 (1980); Translation in Sov. Phys. JETP 52: 349-351 (1980)
A. Sakharov: "Topological structure of elementary particles and CPT asymmetry" in "Problems in theoretical physics," dedicated to the memory of I.E. Tamm, Nauka, Moscow 1972, pp. 243-247

In Sakharov's vision, the two arrows of time are reversed. He also suggested that his twin Universes could be enantiomorphic.

I proposed the same idea ten years later, unaware of Sakharov's work. Reference:

[1]: J.P. Petit: Univers enantiomorphes à flèches du temps opposées. French Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris, t. 284, serie A, 1977, p. 1315
(Enantiomorphic universes with opposite time arrows)

[2]: J.P. Petit: Univers en interaction avec leur image dans le miroir du temps. French Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris, t. 284, serie A, (June 6) 1977, p. 1413
(Universe interacting with its space-time mirror image): the "Jonas-effect."

Superstring theorists are investigating the fundamental object that makes up the universe, the key to the Theory of Everything (TOE). They believe they have established the symmetry properties that this unknown object should possess (according to different variants), based on group theory. The group E8 x E8 is one of the variants. Groups "father" geometry. The Galilean group, which translates all the properties of our space-time (spatial translations, rotations, plus temporal translations), in their most naive view (Euclidean, with absolute time), fathers a Euclidean space-time.

The Lorentz group generates Minkowski space-time (that of Special Relativity).

Superstring theorists are searching for the geometry of a ten-dimensional space that obeys the special symmetry properties to which all elementary particles, known and unknown, conform.

Let us suppose that I have six quantities:

x, y, z, a, b, g.

I decide, for example, that I can add to or subtract from the first three a whole number of times a quantity a, and that I can add to or subtract from the following three p/2 a whole number of times. This constitutes a group. Its neutral elements consist of adding or subtracting a null quantity. An object exists satisfying these relations—the cube. The space flowing from this group structure is three-dimensional, paved with cubes. A sort of crystal.

Crystallography is entirely based on group theory. When we have the group, we have the way in which the crystal is built.

We might say that superstring theorists think they already possess the correct groups, but are now looking for the corresponding crystal. A ten-dimensional crystal. They have the groups, but not the object. They have the keystone, but not the edifice accompanying it.

All this gives rise to truly surrealistic exchanges in colloquia, like that which recently took place in Aspen, Colorado. The journal Scientific American reported in its issue of January 1996, in an article entitled "Explaining everything," by Madhusree Mukerjee, staff writer. [...]

Seeking this magical object supposed to organize the ten-dimensional universe, some people speak about "studded spheres," hedgehogs bristling with vectors, or "hairy caterpillars," membranes with five dimensions (Duff, of London's Imperial College), capable of rolling onto themselves "like the skin of a sausage."

Schwarz, of Caltech (one of the pioneers of the theory), adds, "I should have been a truck driver!"

Others speak of "black holes with zero mass."

Jeffrey A. Harvey, of the University of Chicago, cried out:

"Does that mean that your black holes have zero mass? Do they move at the speed of light?"

"No, they have nothing, no momentum," Gary T. Horowitz of the University of California at Santa Barbara replies.

"Oh, baloney!" That was Leonard Susskind of Stanford.

"They have no energy, no momentum—there's nothing there!" Harvey protests.

Strominger: "Somewhere in the universe, portions of space might exist in the shape of little drops, entering into which black holes would be transformed into strings, and vice-versa. In our environment, these little drops could seem to navigate in virtual universes, which would exist for an infinitesimal period of time, since they would immediately disappear, before they could be observed."

Susskind: "I personally think it's a lot of crap."

In 1986, someone asked a researcher to sum up the "Theory of Everything" in seven words, and he answered:

• Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me?

All this is interesting, but it's not over, as we can see. Never in the history of physics has a body of theory given rise to such convulsions as now, when ten articles are being published on the subject every day. And we cannot say whether the mountain will give birth to a mouse or the mouse to a mountain.

Anyway, some superstring theorists:

• Schwarz (Caltech)

• Green (Queen Mary College)

• Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam (Director of the theoretical physics center of Trieste, Italy, and professor at Imperial College London).

Their starting point: E8 x E8.

Reference: "Superstrings, a theory of everything?" P.C.W. Davis & J. Brown, Cambridge University Press 1988.

John Schwarz:

The second symmetry refers to another kind of matter, that we often call shadow-matter. Such shadow-objects would be invisible to us.

Michael Green:

From the theory, we find a new kind of matter we could not observe directly, optically, for it should interact with normal matter through gravitational force only. But shadow particles could interact with one another through other forces.

Abdus Salam:

From superstring theory we can build another universe which would interact with ours only through gravitational force. This could explain why supersymmetry is broken in our own universe and could bring some original insight on the problem of the different particles mass spectrum.

Anyway, nothing more seems to come, except these short sentences.

How could we imagine two worlds interacting only through gravitation? Let us return to the checkers board, with the two distinct teams of players.