In “Physicists Hope to Catch Neutrons in the Act of Jumping from Our Universe to Another”(PopSci , 01.23.2012), Clay Dillow reports,
In a perfect experiment, the neutrons would always decay precisely at a rate equal to the beta decay rate, but this is never the case because neutron bottles aren’t perfect–the rate of decay is always a bit faster, presumably because some of the neutrons escape by means other than decay.
Or maybe they don’t. Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few colleagues have postulated that maybe these neutrons simply depart for another universe. They have already shown how, theoretically, large enough magnetic potentials could provide the basis for inter-universe matter swapping. Now, in a paper available at arXiv, they’ve used decay rate data to place an upper limit on how often this might be able to happen. They found that it’s probably quite rare if it happens at all–according to their figures, the probability of a neutron making the leap to another universe is smaller than one in a million.
… or maybe as good as proof gets in these matters.
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