Speculations on the nature of the universe just keep getting stranger!
.....So Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it’s just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it’s because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is equivalent to the "Dirac sea," mentioned earlier, but it is simpler, and it is the explanation currently accepted today.)
..........— Michio Kaku (1947 - ), American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (2008).
.....Now let’s say we have a lump of antimatter and it collides with ordinary matter, creating a huge explosion. There are now trillions of electrons and trillions of antielectrons being annihilated. But if we reversed the direction of the arrow for the antielectron, turning it into an electron going backward in time, this would mean that the same electron went zigzagging backward and forward trillions of times. There was a further curious result: there must be just one electron in the lump of matter. The same electron went whizzing back and forth, zigzagging in time. Each time it did a U-turn in time it became antimatter. But if it did another U-turn in time then it turned into another electron. (With his thesis adviser, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron’s journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it would explain a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. In physics you cannot label electrons. There are no green electrons or Johnny electrons. Electrons have no individuality. You cannot “tag” an electron, like scientists sometimes tag animals in the wild to study them. Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.)
..........— ibid.
Last edited by WT Sharpe; 07-18-2010 at 12:16 AM.
|