Monday, June 30, 2014

SN 1987A and many-sheeted space-time

Lubos has written a highly rhetoric, polemic, and adrenaline rich comments posting about the mediabuzz related to supernova SN 1987 A. The target of Lubos is the explanation proposed by James Franson from the University of Maryland for the findings discussed in Physics Archive Blog.I do not have any strong attitude to Franson's explanation but the buzz is about very real thing: unfortunately Lubos tends to forget the facts in his extreme orthodoxy.

What happened was following. Two separate neutrino bursts arrived from SN1987 A. At 7.35 AM Kamionakande detected 11 antineutrons, IMB 8 antineutrinos, and Baksan 5 antineutrinos. Approximately 3 hours later Mont Blanc liquid scintillator detected 5 antineutrinos. Optical signal came 4.7 hours later.

The are several very real problems as one can get convinced by going to Wikipedia:

  1. If neutrinos and photons are emitted simultaneously and propagate with the same speed, they should arrive simultaneously. I am notspecialist enough to try to explain this difference in terms of standard astrophysics. Franson however sees this difference as something not easy to explain and tries to explain it in his own model.

  2. There are two neutrino bursts rather than one. A modification of the model of supernova explosion allowing two bursts of neutrinos would be needed but this would suggest also two photon bursts.
These problems have been put under the carpet. Those who are labelled as crackpots often are much more aware about real problems than the academic career builders.

In TGD framework the explanation would be in terms of many-sheeted space-time. In GRT limit of TGD the sheets of the many-sheeted space-time time are lumped to single sheet: Minkowski space with effective metric defined by the sum of Minkowski metric and deviations of the metrics of the various sheets from Minkowski metric. The same recipe gives effective gauge potentials in terms of induced gauge potentials.

Different arrival times for neutrinos and photons would be however a direct signature of the many-sheeted space-time since the propagation velocity along space-time sheets depends on the induced metric. The larger the deviation from the flat metric is, the slower the propagation velocity and thus longer the arrival time is. Two neutrino bursts would have explanation as arrivals along two different space-time sheets. Different velocity for photons and neutrinos could be explained if they arrive along different space-time sheets. I proposed for more than two decades ago this mechanism as an explanation for the finding of cosmologists that there are two different Hubble constants: they would correspond to different space-time sheets.

The distance of SN1987A is 168,000 light years. This means that the difference between velocities is Δ c/c ≈ Δ T/T≈ 3 hours/168 × 103≈ 2× 10-9. The long distance is what makes the effect visible.

I proposed earlier sub-manifold gravity as an explanation for the claimed super-luminality of the neutrinos coming to Gran Sasso from CERN and mentioned in this context also SN1987A but did not compare the deviations from the light velocity. In this case the effect would have been Δ c/c≈ 2.5× 10-5 and thus four orders of magnitude larger than four supernova neutrinos. It however turned out that the effect was not real.

For details see the chapter TGD and potential anomalies of GRT of "Physics in many-sheeted space-time".

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