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IN BRIEF
- The Facts: A new study claims to have found an explanation for dark matter but relies on the discovery of a particle that leads to another dimension.
- Reflect On: How do discoveries shift our understanding of reality and perhaps, who we are? Can a journey down the rabbit hole of non-material science cause understanding of the nature of human consciousness that can shift how we live our lives?
I know, it sounds like science fiction a little bit, but our world is a hell of a lot more mysterious and fascinating than much of our mainstream news and information lets on. A quick tour down the lane of post-material science returns many fascinating discoveries about superhuman abilities, extrasensory perception, remote viewing, non-local consciousness, and more. In short, we are extraordinary, and I believe science has shown this, even though mainstream culture lags behind in opening up to these ideas.
In a new study in The European Physical Journal C scientists are proposing the there exists a particle that can act as a portal to a fifth dimension. What exactly is the 5th dimension? Good question. Let’s start with what we know now about dimensions. To scientists, there have been four known dimensions in our universe. Three that makeup space (up and down, left and right, back and forth) this gives you “3D,” and the fourth dimension of time.
To understand the 5th dimension, we have to begin looking into dark matter, which is what scientists believe makes up most of the mass in our universe. Dark matter happens to be something we don’t know too much about as well. We technically can’t see it, and so scientists measure what effects its mass has on other observable matter. In the most recent study the authors – Adrian Carmona, Javier Castellano Ruiz, Matthias Neubert – said their original intention was to “explain the possible origin of fermion (particle) masses in theories with a warped extra dimension”. They sketched out a new scalar associated with the fermion, which they claim is similar to the Higgs field and Higgs boson particle.
“We found that the new scalar field had an interesting, non-trivial behaviour along the extra dimension,” the researchers told VICE. “If this heavy particle exists, it would necessarily connect the visible matter that we know and that we have studied in detail with the constituents of dark matter, assuming the dark matter is composed out of fundamental fermions, which live in the extra dimension.”
In simpler terms, this new study suggests that the particle in question may be able to provide a greater explanation for dark matter, the more we know about dark matter, the more we can understand the finer workings of our unseen universe.
The authors described the particle as “a possible new messenger to the dark sector”.
The hard-working is just beginning, however. Scientists have to now isolate this particle. The Higgs boson particle mentioned above was spotted by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. However, it is not powerful enough to find this new particle and thus a new device would have to be created.
What intrigued me about this story was one of the statements physicists made about a new study they wrote exploring the potential of a 5th dimension:
“This new particle could play an important role in the cosmological history of the universe, and might produce gravitational waves that can be searched for with future gravitational-wave detectors.”
