By Paul Baldwin
Scientists are searching for proof of the baffling ‘brane’ theory (short for membrane) which says a series of ‘two-dimensional’ universes may be only microscopic distances from ours – and they may be contactable, or even act as doorways from one to the other.
Oh and they exist in nine dimensions.
But, buoyed by the successful physical discovery of Higgs Boson – which had only been a piece of maths on a blackboard for decades – hard evidence of branes is exactly what the scientists at the Cern atom-smasher are looking for.
Theoretical physicist and author Christophe Galfard, who has researched with Stephen Hawking, said the branes were the most impressive alternate universes science had so far come up with and added: “They can be of many different dimensions, and they can all turn into one another and act like strings themselves.”
He suggested energy leaked from our universe to others and that it was likely black holes were the source of the leak “through a tube of distorted space time.”
He added: “You suddenly wonder if, by any chance there might be other people living in those other branes.
One way of testing for extra dimensions at the LHC would be to discover evidence of particles that can exist only if extra dimensions are real.
Lisa Randall, professor of physics at Harvard University, said theories about extra dimensions relied on discovering special particles.