The Universe in a Test Tube?

"In effect, we have made a universe in a test tube."
Richard Haley -Lancaster University


A "universe in a test tube" that could be used to prove theories of everything has been created by physicists using liquid helium and a magnetic field to build a finger-sized representation of the early cosmos.

The low-temperature team at Great Britain's Lancaster University may have found a laboratory test of the ‘untestable’ string theory, made popular by Brian Greene at Columbia University. Within string theory, a brane is a large surface embedded in higher dimensional space — our Universe could occupy such a brane.

The findings of the Lancaster University team according to nature.com could help string theorists to refine their models. A popular theory amongst string theorists is that inflation was caused by the collision of two 'branes'. A brane (derived from the word 'membrane') is a three-dimensional object suspended in a higher-dimensional space. One tenet of string theory is that a collision between a brane and an antibrane could have triggered the Big Bang itself and drove inflation of the universe.

A collision between a brane and an antibrane can leave behind topological defects, including perhaps the Big Bang itself. But however elegant this theory, the problem with string theory is that it makes no falsifiable predictions, scientists being unable to find two Universe-sized objects that you can crash into each other. According to Richard Haley, who led the team at Lancaster University, a testable model can be found in a test tube of liquid helium.

more:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/the-universe-in-a-test-tube.html

right now in a measuring cup in my kitchen. I'm not sure how well I've controlled it though. Don't be too surprised if the universe is destroyed sometime later this morning. }(

Wow, that is almost unfathomable.

Here is a link to the groups home page

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/physics/research/condmatt/ult/index.htm

dictionary.com definition #6 under "elegant"


When I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos it struck me as odd that string theory would be called 'elegant' when he frequently mentions that the equations are so complex that most string theorists spend a lot of time just trying to make sense of them.

In the early '60s there was the "particle zoo" of exotic kinds of matter found in accelerators, which quark theory and the Standard Model that emerged from it put in an "elegant" framework of a small number of fundamental particles. String theory (and its successors) further economize on the number of kinds of "stuff" (strings, branes) and the range of phenomena it could (if successful) gather under its umbrealla, and so has a certain elegance in being just one theory ("of everything") compared to the "inelegance" of having one theory of gravitation that applies at large scales (general relativity) and a different one at very short length scales.

Whether having a unified theory expressed in dauntingly complex math and proliferating dimensions and even universes is more "elegant" than a collection of somewhat different theories with different domains of applicability that live in a single 4-D universe is probably a matter of taste more than anything else...

Around here all we usually get to hear about are collisions between brains and anitbrains.

Thanks for posting.

:hi: