Mark Megahan
There really might be another whole universe behind the looking glass, an invisible “mirror world” of particles which interact with our domain only through gravity. The math all adds up and it would certainly solve the pesky “Hubble constant problem.”
Dark matter in the mirror
A team of researchers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico came up with the idea of an undetectable “mirror world,” to explain “a major puzzle in cosmology today.” The high IQ types who worry about things like the current rate of universe expansion call the number the “Hubble constant.”
The problem with it is that the data from measurements pegs it a lot higher than what the accepted model says it should be. That’s why everyone’s on a Bigfoot hunt for dark matter or dark energy.
On the surface it seems that either the model is wrong or reality is wrong but there may be a third possibility where they are both right.
The math equals out if you postulate a mirror universe to match our own. Cosmologists really don’t like the thought of having to modify their beloved “standard model.”
Any magic mirror theory will also have to account for some things that the standard model has nailed down pretty hard already. Things like the cosmic microwave background.
Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, assistant professor in the University of New Mexico, along with Fei Ge, and Lloyd Knox from the University of California, Davis, think they got their heads around it.
A bigger bang than thought
Our standard model is often called the “Big Bang” theory and if the team is right it might have been bigger than anyone realized, blowing mirror image bubbles of inflating universes out in two opposite directions at once.
Neither one can tell the other is there but they are tethered together through gravity. The multi-verse concept has been kicked around for a long time as a candidate for all the missing mass.
The whole key to the discovery is the fact “a uniform scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates and photon-electron scattering rate leaves most dimensionless cosmological observables nearly invariant.” Oh, of course, how obvious.
“Basically, we point out that a lot of the observations we do in cosmology have an inherent symmetry under rescaling the universe as a whole.” Symmetry as in mirror image.
“This result opens a new approach to reconciling cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure observations with high values of the Hubble constant H0.” The whole trick is to “find a cosmological model in which the scaling transformation can be realized without violating any measurements of quantities not protected by the symmetry.”
They hope to be able to find a reason for “the inferred primordial abundances of deuterium and helium” in their mirror. When they do that, they’ll be certain to earn some dynamite money in the form of a Nobel prize. “This might seem crazy at face value, but such mirror worlds have a large physics literature in a completely different context since they can help solve important problem in particle physics,” explains Cyr-Racine.
