Monday, May 02, 2016

Confirmation of Santilli's detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lenses: really?

encountered in Facebook a really bizarre sounding title reading The incredible pictures scientists say prove invisible alien entities ARE here on Earth (see this) and just for curiosity decided to add one click to the web page in question (means higher income from ads) knowing that this is just what they want me to do! The story involves aliens spying us so that that the street credibility index of the story reduced zero. The tool to detect the spies would be Santilli's telescope using concave lenses. Santilli, whose work is familiar to me, also talks about two types of invisible terrestrials detected by his telescope. It would be easy to ridicule but let us be patient.

An earlier article with title Apparent detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with convex lenses (see this) reports a detection of antimatter galaxies. There is also an article with title "Confirmation of Santilli’s detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lenses" published in American Journal of Modern Physics claiming an independent observation of antimatter galaxies, antimater asteroids, and antimatter cosmic rays by Santilli's telescope (see this). These articles say nothing about aliens spying us.

Since I suffer from a pathological trait of taking half-seriously even the weirdest stories, I decided to learn what Santilli's telescope using concave lenses might mean. Ordinary telescope uses convex lenses (see this). The light rays coming from the other side converge to form a picture of the source. For concave lense the light rays coming from the other side diverge so that concave lense does not sound like a good idea for detecting light coming from distant objects.

It is however claimed that Santilli's telescope detects light sources in darkness. This is only possible if the index of refraction n=c/v characterizing the medium via the ratio of light velocity in vacuum to the velocity of light in medium changes sign. From Snell's law n1sin(θ1)= n2sin(θ2) follow the basic facts about lenses (see this). It is possible to construct lenses which have negative index of refraction so that concave lense behaves like convex one. Presumably this is not be the case now since according to the existing theory, ordinary light would have the negative index of reflection (unless it is somehow transformed when arriving to the lense).

Concerning the theoretical arguments Santilli makes several claims, which do not make sense to me.

  1. The photons are identified as antimatter photons assumed to have negative energies. These antimatter photons are assumed to have repulsive gravitational interaction with ordinary matter. The claim is that this implies negative index of refraction. This does not make sense since gravitational interaction is quite too weak to cause refraction. Electromagnetic interaction must be in question. Antimatter photons are claimed to propagate with superluminal speeds and arrive instantaneously from remote galaxies. The assumption is in dramatic conflict with what we know about antimatter.

  2. Refractive index is claimed to be a property of light. This does not make sense: refractive index characterizes medium. Its sign however changes when the energy of photon changes sign. From Snell's law the sign of refractive index must change sign as the light enters to the concave lense. This would require that Santilli's antimatter photons transform to ordinary photons.

These arguments are more than enough for dooming the claims of Santilli as pseudoscience but what if there is something in it? The experimental finding is so simple that if it is not an artefact of poor experimentation, some interesting - possibly new - physics could be involved. So let us looks the situation from different point of view forgetting the theory behind it and taking seriously the claimed observations. Could one explain the findings in TGD framework?

Zero energy ontology (ZEO) is one of the cornerstones of TGD and could indeed explain the claims of Santilli and colleagues. In ZEO zero energy states are pairs of positive and negative energy states at opposite light-like boundaries of causal diamonds (CD) forming a scale hierarchy. Zero energy states are counterparts of physical events in standard ontology.

  1. ZEO predicts that the arrow of time can have both directions. In ZEO based quantum measurement theory state function reductions occur at either boundary of CD. Conscious entities correspond to sequences of reductions leaving everything unaffected at the boundary (Zeno effect) but changing the situation at the opposite boundary, in particular increasing its distance from the fixed boundary, which gives rise to the experienced flow of time. The first reduction to opposite boundary replaces the zero energy state with time reversed one. This can happen also for photons.

  2. The particles with non-standard arrow of time are not antimatter (I have considered also this possibility since it might explain the experimental absence of antimatter) but propagate in reverse time direction and have negative energies. There is a considerable evidence for this notion. Phase conjugate laser beams known to obey second law in reverse time direction would be one example. There are also old observations of Akimov and Kozyrev claiming that the instrument of Akimov gives three images of distant astrophysical objects: one would be from past, one from recent, and one from future. I do not know about the construction of Kozyrev's instrument but one can ask whether it involved concave lenses. Also the notion of syntropy introduced by the Italian physicists Fantappie conforms with this picture. In biology syntropy is in central role since in biology time reversed radiation would play a key role.

  3. Since the sign of the energy is negative for phase conjugate photons, their refractive index is negative. n2 for concave lense and n1 for the medium behind lense must have opposite signs to explain the claims of Santilli and colleagues. This happens if the incoming negative energy photons from the geometric future are transformed to positive energy photons photons at the surface of the lense. This process would represent time reflection of the incoming negative energy photons
    to ordinary positive energy photons propagating inside lense.

The claimed results could be an outcome of a bad experimentation. What however remains is a test of ZEO - or more precisely, the notion of time reversed photons - using telescopes with convex lenses. The implication would be possibility to see to the geometric future using telescopes with concave lenses! An entire geometric future of the Universe would be open to us! This possibility is a good enough reason for seeing the trouble of proving experimentally that Santilli is (and I am) wrong! Negative index of refraction as a function of frequency is a real phenomenon in condensed matter physics (see this), and one can of course ask whether also it involves the transformation of positive energy photons to negative energy photons.

For background see the chapter TGD About Concrete Realization of Remote Metabolism of "Bio-Systems as Conscious Holograms".

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

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