Comic Book Physics: The Multiverse (and Other Dimensions)

Brad Severa and Mike Kamm Author

05/08/2017 Added

103 Plays

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Universal Incursions, Convergence, Crisis on Infinite Earths - DC & Marvel both imagine a multiverse of alternate realities, while physicists speculate, postulate, and search for evidence of other dimensions.

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[00:00:06.786]Even before last summer's big movie blockbuster,
[00:00:10.082]Captain America: Civil War,
[00:00:11.778]the Marvel comic book universe was rocked by secret wars.
[00:00:15.237]Superheroes did fight superheroes,
[00:00:17.029]but it was their alternate universe,
[00:00:19.016]other-dimensional selves.
[00:00:20.691]This was the culmination of a story arc
[00:00:22.893]involving incursions, wherein one world, an alternate earth,
[00:00:26.813]encounters another, catastrophically destroying both,
[00:00:29.582]and resulting in a cascade of incursions
[00:00:31.727]across the multiplicity of universes
[00:00:34.128]that comprise the multiverse.
[00:00:35.991]This was a science fiction plot device employed
[00:00:38.842]years earlier, when the DC multiverse collapsed
[00:00:42.152]in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
[00:00:44.558]The idea of alternate universes existing
[00:00:47.152]in other dimensions date back into the comics over 70 years.
[00:00:51.488]Mister Mxyzptlk, an impish antagonist who loved
[00:00:55.564]playing practical jokes on Superman,
[00:00:57.374]was a highly evolved being from the fifth dimension,
[00:01:01.810]who proved popular enough to return again and again
[00:01:04.715]to plague Superman, but Mxyzptlk was DC merely
[00:01:08.586]one-upping Eugene the Jeep.
[00:01:11.336]A phantom from a four-dimensional world,
[00:01:15.456]introduced in Thimble Theater, the newspaper comic strip
[00:01:18.552]that gave us Popeye.
[00:01:20.286]The jeep is able to enter and leave locked rooms,
[00:01:23.026]avoiding obstacles by merely stepping
[00:01:24.729]in and out of the fourth dimension.
[00:01:28.696]In the same way that a conventional chessboard
[00:01:31.723]expanded into 3-D chess allows pieces
[00:01:35.093]to pop in and out of the playing field.
[00:01:38.390]Unlike Dr. Manhattan, another multidimensional being,
[00:01:42.745]you and I inhabit a three-dimensional world.
[00:01:46.027]If fourth or fifth dimensions even exist,
[00:01:48.770]we can't seem to peer along them, move into them,
[00:01:54.080]or even point in their direction.
[00:01:56.955]Were I able to, I'd be capable of moving
[00:01:59.625]not only forward and back, left and right,
[00:02:05.587]up and down, but somehow in and out.
[00:02:09.207]I can't, I don't even know how to,
[00:02:11.659]although Dr. Strange seems to be able to do it with ease.
[00:02:16.173]The Flash was introduced in 1940, when graduate chemistry
[00:02:19.730]student Jay Garrick was studying the gases
[00:02:22.295]emanating from hard water.
[00:02:24.385]I assume writer Gardner Fox meant heavy water,
[00:02:28.321]deuterium oxide.
[00:02:29.632]In any event, should any of you ever be working
[00:02:31.766]in a chemistry lab, I hope you know better
[00:02:33.705]than to smoke there.
[00:02:35.985]Oh, unless of course you want
[00:02:37.262]something really cool to happen.
[00:02:40.042]16 years later, editor Julius Schwartz,
[00:02:42.903]in an effort to revive the flagging superhero genre,
[00:02:46.802]retooled the Flash, and in the retelling of his origin,
[00:02:50.266]it's a lightning strike to the forensic lab
[00:02:53.424]of police scientist Barry Allen that endowed
[00:02:55.264]Barry with the powers of a speedster.
[00:02:57.937]Once Barry Allen became the Flash, DC pretty much
[00:03:00.136]forgot about Jay Garrick, but not astute readers,
[00:03:03.540]who wrote in wondering what was up
[00:03:05.391]with two entirely different Flashes.
[00:03:08.244]A problem not completely resolved until 1961's
[00:03:10.846]Flash 123, where the two Flashes are explained
[00:03:14.653]as coming from parallel universes,
[00:03:17.248]adjacent to one another along some extra dimension.
[00:03:21.547]Is there any scientific reason, any theory,
[00:03:25.731]no matter how speculative, that would suggest to us
[00:03:29.066]that we should even believe in things like other dimensions?
[00:03:33.658]Now planaria, flatworms, they're not really truly
[00:03:37.310]two-dimensional creatures, but I like to use them
[00:03:39.951]to illustrate what life in a two-dimensional universe
[00:03:42.841]might be like.
[00:03:44.491]Imagine being a flatworm.
[00:03:47.221]Your entire existence is confined to the surface
[00:03:50.091]across which you crawl.
[00:03:51.922]You can see and sense the objects before you,
[00:03:55.483]feel those that you bump into on the sides,
[00:03:58.400]but you cannot lift your head.
[00:04:00.563]You can't look up or down, nor would you, I guess,
[00:04:03.004]ever think to do so.
[00:04:04.398]Concepts like up and down would be totally
[00:04:06.677]unfamiliar to you.
[00:04:08.684]Despite the fact that it's possible that
[00:04:10.567]your entire existence could be confined to a single page
[00:04:15.228]of some massive tome, and other creatures,
[00:04:19.273]other colonies, other civilizations, entirely other worlds,
[00:04:23.069]could exist, just in a dimension you can't conceive of.
[00:04:29.455]One year ago, the announcement of the direct observation
[00:04:33.062]of gravitational waves sent many of you
[00:04:36.168]into the tailspin of realizing our universe was far more
[00:04:39.809]peculiar than you might ever have been able to imagine.
[00:04:43.127]And in the paper, the signal detected
[00:04:46.313]was explained as due to the merger
[00:04:50.056]of two very distant black holes.
[00:04:52.908]The signal itself, described as a compression and elongation
[00:04:57.673]of our three-dimensional space itself,
[00:04:59.603]and graphics like this representing the waves
[00:05:02.175]certainly strongly suggested that our space
[00:05:05.122]could somehow be warped or bent into some other dimension?
[00:05:12.581]In fact, Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity
[00:05:17.068]insisted that three-dimensional space
[00:05:19.061]is warped by the presence of mass.
[00:05:22.142]And gravitational effects are simply due to objects
[00:05:25.858]trying to move through that warped space, being forced
[00:05:28.463]into the trajectories that we recognize for objects
[00:05:30.929]falling freely near massive planets or stars.
[00:05:35.173]How much the space is disturbed depends upon the mass
[00:05:38.659]of the object.
[00:05:39.746]Notice what happens when two large astronomical objects,
[00:05:43.393]think stars or even galaxies, are close to one another.
[00:05:48.884]The warping of one enhances the warping of its neighbor,
[00:05:52.058]if they're close enough together, they can, in fact,
[00:05:55.411]produce this overall bowing of the otherwise flat,
[00:05:59.414]three-dimensional universe.
[00:06:01.558]If our universe were filled with sufficient number
[00:06:03.836]of galaxies, and they were distributed close enough
[00:06:06.100]together, our three-dimensional space might in fact be,
[00:06:10.819]display an overall curvature,
[00:06:13.899]that could, quite possibly, fold over upon itself,
[00:06:17.492]placing us on the three-dimensional surface
[00:06:20.307]of some four-dimensional sphere.
[00:06:22.965]If our universe is a four-dimensional sphere,
[00:06:26.719]what is inside, and what is out here?
[00:06:34.132]Look what happens when the Fantastic Four
[00:06:36.658]pursue the Skrulls to the Andromeda Galaxy.
[00:06:41.009]How Reed Richards explains their route to his copilot,
[00:06:43.520]Benjamin J. Grimm.
[00:06:46.036]Like tunneling through the Earth is a shortcut
[00:06:48.109]to reaching China, they will travel
[00:06:50.431]below our three-dimensional space, through subspace,
[00:06:53.734]to emerge on the other side at the Andromeda Galaxy,
[00:06:57.396]some two and 1/2 million light years away
[00:06:59.649]in a matter of two or three comic book panels.
[00:07:02.612]A flatworm confined to the surface of some gigantic sphere
[00:07:07.095]perhaps believes his world is simple, his space is flat.
[00:07:12.015]But imagine going on an exploratory journey
[00:07:15.863]to the farthest recesses of the universe, on a one-way trip,
[00:07:21.551]only to find one day, the old familiar landmarks
[00:07:24.966]reappearing from the opposite direction.
[00:07:28.117]Astronomers are always seeking to see if there's any
[00:07:31.066]evidence that our three-dimensional world displays
[00:07:34.343]that sort of fourth-dimensional curvature.
[00:07:36.687]They do it by looking at the distribution of galaxies,
[00:07:39.212]measuring their recessional speeds,
[00:07:41.960]comparing the equilibrium conditions of disparate
[00:07:44.552]points of space.
[00:07:46.339]Most of that work done by looking at the W-MAP data,
[00:07:51.636]of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic
[00:07:53.927]microwave background radiation.
[00:07:56.216]So far, the evidence of curvature is inconclusive.
[00:08:01.861]But if we existed on the surface of a four-dimensional ball,
[00:08:05.828]and the space beneath and outside were inhabited
[00:08:10.424]by other universes, what would it,
[00:08:13.422]that were independently expanding,
[00:08:15.440]what would happen if they ever bumped into one another,
[00:08:18.594]or passed through one another?
[00:08:20.989]Funny you should ask.
[00:08:22.807]Half-dozen years ago, couple of theorists applied
[00:08:25.961]a pattern recognition program to that W-MAP data,
[00:08:29.215]and they found some interesting structure
[00:08:31.094]that you see here as circles and ripples.
[00:08:34.794]Here's the paper, if you don't recognize either
[00:08:36.544]of the authors' names, let me point out that R. Penrose
[00:08:40.778]is Sir Roger Penrose of Oxford,
[00:08:44.499]an internationally-known, heavily-cited,
[00:08:47.008]and award-winning physicist.
[00:08:51.245]The algorithm they applied looked for adjacent
[00:08:54.449]temperature fluctuations that fluctuated the same way,
[00:08:57.449]to see if they were part of any neighboring structure.
[00:09:00.175]It's where they believed they saw these faint
[00:09:03.322]and possibly fading circles,
[00:09:06.551]and ripples in space.
[00:09:10.321]The incursions of Marvel's secret wars.
[00:09:14.353]You gotta be careful when you're looking
[00:09:15.976]for patterns in data.
[00:09:17.934]Consider this display of random electronic noise,
[00:09:21.653]and I want you to squint at it and see if you see
[00:09:24.827]any signs of circles, even faintly, there in the background.
[00:09:33.191]Look here.
[00:09:35.034]I see a face.
[00:09:38.656]A man in the moon, do you see it?
[00:09:42.278]And here, another face.
[00:09:45.656]Are those images really there?
[00:09:48.345]Well, a year later, a group of graduate students
[00:09:51.735]did something interesting, they took the W-MAP data,
[00:09:54.546]and they simply randomly shuffled it,
[00:09:57.279]and then applied the same pattern recognition program.
[00:10:01.569]Invariably, every time they repeated that random shuffling,
[00:10:05.090]they would find evidence for circles.
[00:10:08.777]By sheer chance.
[00:10:11.051]What does that mean? I guess we have not found
[00:10:14.159]conclusive evidence of the occurrence
[00:10:16.442]of incursions into our universe.
[00:10:18.467]Is it possible, though, that those other dimensions
[00:10:21.118]that we have not yet detected are there,
[00:10:23.499]but we haven't been looking in the right place?
[00:10:27.194]This group of theorists, Dimopoulos et al.,
[00:10:30.017]have proposed that we inhabit
[00:10:31.770]an eleven-dimensional universe.
[00:10:34.512]Most of those dimensions tightly compactified
[00:10:38.390]at a microscopic level.
[00:10:40.788]I want you to think of that overall curvature
[00:10:42.906]of a universe in a four-dimensional ball,
[00:10:45.820]occurring in very tiny subatomic distances.
[00:10:50.749]They certainly would be dimensions you and I
[00:10:52.909]couldn't observe, we're too big.
[00:10:54.516]In the same way that this tightrope walker
[00:10:57.423]navigates easily, well, not so easily,
[00:10:59.987]but one single dimension, oblivious to the tightly-coiled
[00:11:04.103]dimension beneath his feet, one that can be explored
[00:11:06.968]by smaller entities like the ant I've illustrated.
[00:11:10.374]I'm talking about dimensions that are so small
[00:11:12.571]that perhaps only subatomic particles could probe them.
[00:11:18.591]This should excite the fanboys out there,
[00:11:20.094]because it does in fact sound like I've been talking
[00:11:22.626]about the microverse, discovered by Dr. Doom,
[00:11:25.525]pursued there by the Fantastic Four, who went on
[00:11:28.214]to explore that domain.
[00:11:31.581]The Silver Surfer escaping to it briefly,
[00:11:34.175]and last summer, Ant-Man encounter it.
[00:11:38.101]At the Large Hadron Collider,
[00:11:41.227]at the laboratory of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland,
[00:11:43.834]high-energy physicists are looking at data,
[00:11:47.042]searching for evidence of those microscopic
[00:11:49.986]additional dimensions.
[00:11:51.988]We're always looking for exciting new discoveries.
[00:11:54.773]Back in 2012, we announced the discovery of the Higgs-Boson,
[00:11:58.236]you'll remember, but most of the time we're combing
[00:12:00.443]through the commonplace everyday debris
[00:12:02.618]of the 31.6 million proton-proton collisions
[00:12:06.202]generated at the CERN laboratory every second.
[00:12:09.867]These collisions can be as different as snowflakes,
[00:12:12.515]but we learn to classify them and categorize them.
[00:12:15.701]For example, those that produce four electrons
[00:12:17.956]are four-electron events, distinct from four-muon events,
[00:12:21.098]or two-electron, two-muon events.
[00:12:23.703]When phenomena becomes familiar, we learn
[00:12:26.819]how to predict their recurrence,
[00:12:29.890]the frequency with which, or probability
[00:12:31.794]that they will recur.
[00:12:35.252]For example, consider a box of 1,000 coins,
[00:12:38.494]dumped on the table.
[00:12:40.206]The most reasonable expectation would be to see
[00:12:42.070]500 heads, or something close to it.
[00:12:44.197]Pick up all of those coins, dump the box again 1,000 times.
[00:12:48.276]We won't see 500 heads exactly every time,
[00:12:51.957]but a distribution like this is perfectly reasonable.
[00:12:55.445]Were I to see anything else, like this,
[00:12:58.541]I might suspect that not all of the coins
[00:13:00.701]were flipped under the identical conditions.
[00:13:04.147]A result like this might mean we just suspect
[00:13:06.312]that the coins are slightly weighted in favor of heads.
[00:13:09.680]In fact, any distribution other than the one we anticipate
[00:13:12.374]would tell us there's something peculiar
[00:13:14.003]about that box of 1,000 coins.
[00:13:16.563]In the high-energy experiments that I describe,
[00:13:19.212]we look at lots of observables.
[00:13:20.991]We measure quantities, and study their distribution,
[00:13:23.558]looking for any anomalies that tell us that something
[00:13:26.050]different from what was expected was occurring.
[00:13:28.861]This is missing energy
[00:13:31.695]due to the occurrence of neutrinos in the collisions.
[00:13:36.219]Neutrinos, which are chargeless, nearly massless particles,
[00:13:41.126]easily escape detection.
[00:13:44.097]The data points are the black circles.
[00:13:47.098]The colored regions are the contributions
[00:13:48.923]that are predicted for known physical processes
[00:13:52.402]that produce neutrinos, in precise number,
[00:13:56.449]and with predictable energies.
[00:13:58.464]Notice how well the data fits the predictions.
[00:14:02.432]This tells us we understand the underlying physics
[00:14:04.847]of these processes pretty well, and understand
[00:14:08.126]the performance of our detector, as well.
[00:14:12.238]I guess in this plot, it looks like there is no anomalous
[00:14:15.341]behavior that needs to be explained as any new discovery.
[00:14:21.592]We all know that gravitational fields weaken with distance.
[00:14:25.083]The further you are from the Earth, the weaker
[00:14:27.140]and more feeble its pull is, because of the way
[00:14:29.490]gravity fans out to fill three-dimensional space.
[00:14:33.367]Same would be true for even subatomic particles,
[00:14:36.285]like a proton, whose gravitational field must be minuscule
[00:14:39.558]to begin with.
[00:14:40.561]Well, it must flare out in the same way.
[00:14:42.268]If the microscopic dimensions that we've been speculating on
[00:14:45.640]existed, then it's possible that a,
[00:14:48.931]and that the gravity fills all the available space
[00:14:52.698]of all the dimensions, the fraction of it
[00:14:54.921]that gets captured into that little micro-dimension
[00:14:58.362]would wrap over on itself many times.
[00:15:00.655]And the theory we're talking about speculates
[00:15:02.589]there could be many such hidden dimensions.
[00:15:05.142]This sort of suggests a region outside of which
[00:15:08.299]the normal Newton's law of gravity apply,
[00:15:12.860]but that if we could probe in close enough,
[00:15:15.465]the gravitational fields cycle, recycle so often,
[00:15:19.362]that become explosively exponentially high.
[00:15:22.237]At the energies available at the CERN collider
[00:15:24.571]protons certainly must be able to approach one another
[00:15:27.517]close enough to invade that space.
[00:15:30.071]Where if they found gravitational fields becoming
[00:15:32.787]explosively high, compressed them into mini black holes.
[00:15:36.654]Mini black holes should almost instantly evaporate
[00:15:40.889]by Hawking radiation, but the result of that
[00:15:43.153]would be high-speed subatomic decay fragments.
[00:15:49.247]In an effort to see if anything like that ever happens
[00:15:51.670]within our detector in our experiment,
[00:15:55.134]we run experiments and then simply summed up the energy
[00:15:59.561]measured for all observable particles:
[00:16:03.743]photons, electrons,
[00:16:05.616]muons, jets.
[00:16:08.873]And the black circles are the data points.
[00:16:13.411]They’re represented with their error bars,
[00:16:15.289]that notice are expanding as we get to the tail
[00:16:17.584]of this distribution, where statistics
[00:16:19.785]are starting to run out.
[00:16:22.550]Smack down the middle is this dashed blue line.
[00:16:25.521]Which is the predicted sum
[00:16:29.311]of all known physics processes,
[00:16:34.585]and our uncertainty in those predictions
[00:16:37.227]are represented by the gray area that surrounds it.
[00:16:39.939]Notice the data points fall so beautifully in line
[00:16:44.313]with the expected distribution.
[00:16:46.805]There are some other curves that you see.
[00:16:49.338]This blue, this red, this magenta one for example.
[00:16:52.891]They are the predictions for the formation
[00:16:55.830]of mini black holes, decaying under different scenarios,
[00:17:03.160]that are distinguished by the number of available
[00:17:05.938]extra dimensions that the gravity bleeds into,
[00:17:09.435]and then the size, of how tightly-coiled they might be.
[00:17:13.119]It looks like the data that we've generated
[00:17:16.267]disproves the blue model.
[00:17:20.550]No way that's consistent.
[00:17:23.199]The red model is also looking like it's unlikely.
[00:17:27.840]But the magenta model, our data, particularly given
[00:17:32.105]the error bars is insufficient to say.
[00:17:35.180]We need to conduct more experiments, collect more data,
[00:17:39.080]and until the results of that data
[00:17:41.906]are reported, I'll merely have to say for now,
[00:17:45.851]to be continued.

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Comic Book Physics: The Multiverse (and Other Dimensions)

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