Laws of Physics Vary Throughout the Universe

A team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England has uncovered evidence that the laws of physics are different in different parts of the universe.

The team -- from the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge -- has submitted a report of the discovery for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. A preliminary version of the paper is currently under peer review.

The report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of Nature appears not to be constant after all. Instead, this 'magic number' known as the fine-structure constant -- 'alpha' for short -- appears to vary throughout the universe.


"After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe," Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

"The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely 'local by-laws', it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it."

"If our results are correct, clearly we shall need new physical theories to satisfactorily describe them."

The researchers' conclusions are based on new measurements taken with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, along with their previous measurements from the world's largest optical telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Mr Julian King from the University of New South Wales explained how, after combining the two sets of measurements, the new result 'struck' them. "The Keck telescopes and the VLT are in different hemispheres -- they look in different directions through the universe. Looking to the north with Keck we see, on average, a smaller alpha in distant galaxies, but when looking south with the VLT we see a larger alpha."

"It varies by only a tiny amount -- about one part in 100,000 -- over most of the observable universe, but it's possible that much larger variations could occur beyond our observable horizon," Mr King said.

The discovery will force scientists to rethink their understanding of Nature's laws. "The fine structure constant, and other fundamental constants, are absolutely central to our current theory of physics. If they really do vary, we'll need a better, deeper theory," Dr Michael Murphy from Swinburne University said.

"While a 'varying constant' would shake our understanding of the world around us extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we're finding is extraordinary, no doubt about that."

"It's one of the biggest questions of modern science -- are the laws of physics the same everywhere in the universe and throughout its entire history? We're determined to answer this burning question one way or the other."

Other researchers involved in the research are Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Matthew Bainbridge from the University of New South Wales, and Professor Bob Carswell at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Source: Daily Science

Bettany Hughes' Ancient Worlds

Great series covering the Minoans, Troy, Spartans, Athenians and the Moors

Constitutes pretty much required viewed for anyone with a passing interest in the ancient world.

1. The Minoans
Bettany Hughes visits Crete to recount the story one of the greatest   archaeological discoveries ever made.

2. Helen of Troy
She is 'the face that launched a thousand ships'; the woman blamed for the Trojan War - a conflict that caused countless deaths - but who was the real Helen of Troy?

3. The Spartans
Bettany Hughes chronicles the rise and fall of one of the most extreme civilisations the world has ever seen, one founded on discipline, sacrifice and frugality where the onus was on the collective and the goal was to create the perfect state and the perfect warrior.

4. Athens: The Truth About Democracy
Bettany Hughes goes in search of the truth about the 'Golden Age' of Ancient Athens, asking how a barren rock wedged between the East and West became the first democracy 2,500 years ago

5. When the Moors Ruled in Europe
Bettany Hughes traces the story of the mysterious and misunderstood Moors, the Islamic society that ruled in Spain for 700 years, but whose legacy was virtually erased from Western history

Also, if you can find the links, Bettany covers 'Alexandria: The Greatest City' and 'Engineering Ancient Egypt'

Man on the Moon

The Science is Compelling

If they could pull this off then...

Galaxy May Be Full of 'Earths,' Alien Life

By A. Pawlowski
CNN

As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.

Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."

He made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.

"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."

Putting a number on alien worlds

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.

"The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs," Forgan said.

"I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish."

Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- discovered so far.

The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe's COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.

Hunt for habitable planets

NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.

Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front of it -- an event called a transit.

"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.

The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star's habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could exist. Watch a NASA scientist explain the search for habitable planets

Boss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.

Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn't unique and aliens are common, why haven't they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?"

The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.

"Civilizations come and go," Boss said. "Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it's not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it's not going to form for another billion years."

Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.

As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors. iReport.com: Share your view of the universe

To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.

"So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon," Boss said.

The Humiliation of America

Paul Craig Roberts

Served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics".  A former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.

"Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution to a UNSC vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it." Olmert said.

“I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call.”

Olmert gloated as he told Israelis how he had shamed US Secretary of State Condi Rice by preventing the American Secretary of State from supporting a resolution that she had helped to craft. Olmert proudly related how he had interrupted President Bush’s speech in order to give Bush his marching orders on the UN vote.

“Let me see if I understand this,” wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. “On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit--and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship.”

Israeli politicians have been bragging for decades about the control they exercise over the US government. In his final press conference, President Bush, deluded to the very end, said that the whole world respects America. In fact, when the world looks at America, what it sees is an Israeli colony.

Responding to mounting reports from the Red Cross and human rights organizations of Israel’s massive war crimes in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 33-1 on January 12 to condemn Israel for grave offenses against human rights.

On January 13, the London Times reported that Israelis have gathered on a hillside overlooking Gaza to enjoy the slaughter of Palestinians in what the Times calls “the ultimate spectator sport.”

It is American supplied F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships, missiles, and bombs that are destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and murdering the Palestinians who have been packed into the tiny strip of land. What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons. It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes.

Yet in his farewell press conference on January 12, Bush said that the world respects America for its compassion.

The compassion of bombing a UN school for girls?

The compassion of herding 100 Palestinians into one house and then shelling it?

The compassion of bombing hospitals and mosques?

The compassion of depriving 1.5 million Palestinians of food, medicine, and energy?

The compassion of violently overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government?

The compassion of blowing up the infrastructure of one of the poorest and most deprived people on earth?

The compassion of abstaining from a Security Council vote condemning these actions?

And this is a repeat of what the Israelis and Americans did to Lebanon in 2006, what the Americans did to Iraqis for six years and are continuing to do to Afghans after seven years. And still hope to do to the Iranians and Syrians.

In 2002 I designated George W. Bush “the White House Moron.” If there ever was any doubt about this designation, Bush’s final press conference dispelled it.

Bush talked about connecting the dots, but Bush has failed to connect any dots for eight solid years. “Our” president was a puppet for a cabal led by Dick Cheney and a handful of Jewish neoconservatives, who took control of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and “Homeland Security.” From these power positions, the neocon cabal used lies and deception to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, pointless wars that have cost Americans $3 trillion, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, their pensions, and their access to health care.

“These obviously very difficult economic times,” Bush said in his press conference, “started before my presidency.”

Bush has plenty of liberal company in failing to connect a $3 trillion dollar war with hard times. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blames Bush’s tax cut, not the wars, for “the fiscal deterioration.”

Bush told the White House Press Corps, a useless collection of non-journalists, that the two mistakes of his invasion of Iraq were: (1) Putting up the “mission accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier, which, he said, “sent the wrong message,” and (2) the absence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction that he used to justify the invasion.

Although Bush now admits that there were not any such weapons in Iraq, Bush said that the invasion was still the right thing to do.

The deaths of 1.25 million Iraqis, the displacement of 4 million Iraqis, and the destruction of a country’s infrastructure and economy are merely the collateral damage associated with “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East.

Unless George W. Bush is the best actor in human history, he truly believes what he told the White House Press Corps.

What Bush did not explain is how America is respected when its people put a moron in charge for eight years.

Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza

Gerald Kaufman MP Denounces Israel

The inimitable Galloway

*****

Related Material...

Hard Talking Galloway

If Today Were the Last Day of My Life

Connecting the Dots

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

When It Smells Like It, Feels Like It, and Looks Like It

Call it What it Is

So this year...

From one of my favourite Mancunian bands, James.

The Measurement Problem

Arguably the most onerous philosophical question attached to Quantum Mechanics is that of Measurement. The accepted (a.k.a. Copenhagen) Interpretation of QM says that our very act of conscious, intelligent, observable measurement – determines the outcome of the measurement in the quantum (microcosmic) realm.

It seems that just by knowing the results of a measurement – we determine its outcome, determine the state of the system and, by implication, the state of the Universe as a whole.

This notion is so counter-intuitive that it fostered a raging debate which has been on going for more than 7 decades now.

The conclusions are obviously subjective, as is, as it seems is reality.

*****

Related Material...

Our World May Be a Giant Hologram
Science: Things That Do Not Make Sense

Holding Back the Tears

Nothing Had the Chance to Be Good

Keep holding on...

The Miracle Birth (Repost)

As explained in the Qur'an

Stoning for adultery, or other similar acts, was practiced at the time, however, for some reason Mary was spared.

Eid Mubarak

Jihad: the inner battle

Peace to people of all faiths.

Those who advocate murder of innocents are merely agencies of evil, educate and protect yourself from those of fork tongues - Seek the truth.

Celente Says:

When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente. — CNN Headline News

A network of 25 experts whose range of specialties would rival many university faculties. —The Economist

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

"There will be a revolution in this country," he said. "It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen."

Gerald Celente has earned is reputation as "The most trusted name in trends" by accurately forecasting hundreds of social, business, consumer, environmental, economic, political, entertainment, technology trends, etc

The greater depression...

Related Material...

Money as Debt
The American Dream

Eisenhower's Fears

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation in what is called his Military Industrial Complex Speech, said:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

His children suggest that in an earlier draft of the speech, he refered to the "military-industrial-congressional complex".

Anyway, here's how it works...

Still have confidence in the 'official' 911 report?

Related Material...

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The Empire Strkes Back

The Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing occurred on 20 September 2008, when a dump truck filled with explosives detonated in front of the Marriott Hotel.

The attack occurred mere hours after President Asif Ali Zardari made his first speech to the parliament.

A case of with us or against us?

A mere slap on the wrist, this time.

The End of the Snowman

Due to overriding commitments, Pasha Law will be going into recess.

Note for other bloggers, feel free to link to, or even extract, any of the fascinating articles from archives into your own sites.

And for our readers who want to stay topical, Pasha Law recommends that you hook on over to Weazl's Revenge

Food Shortages: 'Problem-Reaction-Solution' ?

Times

Expensive food will make economic slowdowns a lot harder to manage.

Over the past half-century, Western consumers have come to expect plentiful food supplies, at costs that have declined both in real terms and as a proportion of their earnings. Had it not been for the price-distorting peculiarities of the Common Agricultural Policy, the benefits for Europe of these years of plenty would have been still more marked, but the cost of food has in general been one thing that governments in industrialised countries have not needed to worry about.

The “Great Grain Robbery” in the 1970s, when massive Soviet purchases of US grain sent world prices through the roof, was an exception that proved the rule; Moscow was denounced so bitterly at the time precisely because stable supplies and prices were thought of in rich nations almost as a birthright. Similarly, what Europeans most resented about the adoption of the euro was the way that their grocery bills jumped overnight.

The grocery bills are jumping again today, not just in Europe but all over the world. The age of cheap food has abruptly come to an end, and food prices are likely to remain high for some considerable time. The reasons are soaring demand in the developing world, high oil prices contributing to the costs of planting, fertiliser, harvesting and transport, poor harvests in major grain and rice-producing regions because of drought in Australia and cold summers in Europe and parts of North America, and, finally, disastrously timed official policies on ethanol and other biofuels. Take all these together, and the result is a jump of 40 per cent in the UN's 2007 global food price index.

For British households, more expensive food means less spare cash at the end of the month. For Afghans faced by flour costing up to 80 per cent more, it means going hungry - and, probably, even greater political instability.

For many governments, from Mexico to Malaysia, it means food riots. For everyone, persistently higher food costs will translate into hefty wage demands, and make it much harder for governments to finesse the nasty combination of weakening economies and gathering inflationary pressures. No one is talking stagflation yet, nor should they - but double-digit inflation of any kind is bad news and commodities such as soya beans, maize and wheat are up by as much as 100 per cent.

Governments are worried not only by costs, but by supply, as traditional sources of imports dry up. US wheat stocks are at their lowest since just after the Second World War, and in Europe proverbial seas and mountains of surplus produce have vanished. Argentina has set ceilings on its beef exports, and China, where inflation is at a ten-year high in large part because the prices of pork and other staple foods have gone through the roof, has, Heinz-like, slapped export taxes on 57 varieties of farm produce.

Export tariffs are the worst possible response to shortages. Farmers need every encouragement to expand production. Trade barriers send the opposite signal. There is scope for increasing productivity per hectare right across Asia and, even more so, in Africa. Genetics has the potential to usher in a second green revolution, if science is not fettered by superstition. But these are long-term solutions. There is one thing that politicians can do in the here and now: free up farm trade while the going (for farmers) is good, and when even the EU is busy cutting tariffs unilaterally and has eliminated, albeit “temporarily”, all barriers to cereal imports. A Doha deal will be done this year, or not at all. The time is now.

Source: Times Online

***

Pasha Law: Points to Note

- Companies such as Monsanto have successfully copyrighted seeds that farmers around the world have used for centuries.

- One of the most active funders of GM research has been the Rockefeller Foundation.

- Henry Kissinger’s words in the 1970s capture the motivation: ’Control the oil and you can control entire continents. Control food and you control people ...’


Further Reading:

Scientists Warn of Wheat Disease

Who is Responsible?

LHC: Curiosity that Killed at CET?

Located in Switzerland, LHC is a bold six billion dollar experiment to enable physicists to look back in time by recreating the conditions of the BIG BANG!

However, safety concerns have been expressed by many in various scientific journals, mainly pertaining to:

1. Micro blackholes, according to the 'standard calculations' these are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation, the problem is that Hawking radiation (which is still debated) is not yet an experimentally-tested phenomenon, and so micro black holes might not decay as rapidly as calculated, and accumulate inside the earth and eventually devour it.

2. If the hypothetical Strangelets exist, and produced at LHC, they could initiate a uncontrolable fusion where the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter.

Anyway, sync your watches to Central European Time 10th September 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider project becomes operational, however, the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21st October, 2008.

New Way to Kill Viruses: Shake Them to Death

Live Science

Scientists may one day be able to destroy viruses in the same way that opera singers presumably shatter wine glasses. New research mathematically determined the frequencies at which simple viruses could be shaken to death.

"The capsid of a virus is something like the shell of a turtle," said physicist Otto Sankey of Arizona State University. "If the shell can be compromised [by mechanical vibrations], the virus can be inactivated."



Recent experimental evidence has shown that laser pulses tuned to the right frequency can kill certain viruses. However, locating these so-called resonant frequencies is a bit of trial and error.

"Experiments must just try a wide variety of conditions and hope that conditions are found that can lead to success," Sankey told LiveScience.

To expedite this search, Sankey and his student Eric Dykeman have developed a way to calculate the vibrational motion of every atom in a virus shell. From this, they can determine the lowest resonant frequencies.

As an example of their technique, the team modeled the satellite tobacco necrosis virus and found this small virus resonates strongly around 60 Gigahertz (where one Gigahertz is a billion cycles per second), as reported in the Jan. 14 issue of Physical Review Letters.

A virus' death knell

All objects have resonant frequencies at which they naturally oscillate. Pluck a guitar string and it will vibrate at a resonant frequency.

But resonating can get out of control. A famous example is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which warped and finally collapsed in 1940 due to a wind that rocked the bridge back and forth at one of its resonant frequencies.



Viruses are susceptible to the same kind of mechanical excitation. An experimental group led by K. T. Tsen from Arizona State University have recently shown that pulses of laser light can induce destructive vibrations in virus shells.

"The idea is that the time that the pulse is on is about a quarter of a period of a vibration," Sankey said. "Like pushing a child on a swing from rest, one impulsive push gets the virus shaking."

It is difficult to calculate what sort of push will kill a virus, since there can be millions of atoms in its shell structure. A direct computation of each atom's movements would take several hundred thousand Gigabytes of computer memory, Sankey explained.

He and Dykeman have found a method to calculate the resonant frequencies with much less memory.

In practice

The team plans to use their technique to study other, more complicated viruses. However, it is still a long way from using this to neutralize the viruses in infected people.

One challenge is that laser light cannot penetrate the skin very deeply. But Sankey imagines that a patient might be hooked up to a dialysis-like machine that cycles blood through a tube where it can be hit with a laser. Or perhaps, ultrasound can be used instead of lasers.

These treatments would presumably be safer for patients than many antiviral drugs that can have terrible side-effects. Normal cells should not be affected by the virus-killing lasers or sound waves because they have resonant frequencies much lower than those of viruses, Sankey said.

Moreover, it is unlikely that viruses will develop resistance to mechanical shaking, as they do to drugs.

"This is such a new field, and there are so few experiments, that the science has not yet had sufficient time to prove itself," Sankey said. "We remain hopeful but remain sceptical at the same time."

Source: Live Science

Travel to Parallel Universes

New Scientist

Wormholes, time travel, white holes, extra spacial dimensions, parallel universes - all arose as solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity, meaning theoretical physics predicts they should all be likely to exist in the fabric of space-time. ere

But will we ever be able to open a wormhole into space-time to travel towards a parallel universe, and how would we even know if we did? Russian physicist Alexander Shatskiy from the Lebedev Physical Institute argues we have already seen the evidence that indeed parallel universes exist in the gravitational lensing effects that are able to bend light in a unnatural way.

The first prediction of the possibility of traveling to parallel universes was made shortly after Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity. Austrian physicists Ludwig Flamm found that the field equations of general relativity pointed towards the existence of a structure commonly known today as a wormhole, a connection between two regions of space which would permit faster-than-light travel between them. Matter entering one end of the wormhole would immediately exit the other end, at least as long as the wormhole is stable and remains open during the process.

Shatskiy says the only reason why we haven't been able to directly observe wormholes yet is because they are indistinguishable from the black holes. The only problem is that we seem to know more about wormholes than the actual singularity of the black hole. Furthermore, wormholes are though to be extremely unstable, collapsing out of existence as soon as they form. A way to keep a wormhole open for an indefinite amount of time would involve the use of exotic matter, presenting negative energy and mass.

Ordinary matter has positive energy and mass, meaning that massive objects such as black holes bend light through gravitational lensing much in the same way a optical lens would do here on Earth. However, the unique characteristics of the exotic matter would have the exact opposite effect, deflecting light as it passes through a wormhole from a universe to another. Thus, if a star would shine light into a wormhole, at the other end it would emerge in a divergent pattern to form a bright ring of light.

By detecting such signatures, one might point towards the existence of wormhole. The problem is that black holes and large mass accumulations also have the capability of forming rings of light through the gravitational lensing effect, the well known Einstein rings. While Lawrence Krauss from the Case Western Reserve University seems to appreciate Shatskiy's theoretical study, by pointing out the immense effort made by the Russian physicist to find the signature of real wormholes, critics add that Shatskiy avoided to specify the characteristics of the required exotic matter, and even the basic interactions with light.

Furthermore, it is not known yet if exotic matter even exists, but, even if it does, the signature proposed by Shatskiy is indistinguishable from a series of other signatures routinely detected throughout the universe. They do not dispute the fact that wormholes might exist, but they argue that such a possibility is extremely remote.

Source: New Scientist