Wacky new theory about dark matter

Mitchell Porter (mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com)
Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:58:56 PST

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/9911386

The idea here is as follows:

  1. There are extra dimensions whose radius is only a bit less than a millimeter.
  2. The reason we don't observe atoms leaking out into the extra space is because all the matter that we can see lives in a "3-brane", a three-dimensional extended object or 'membrane'. *This* object has full freedom of motion in all the extra dimensions, but we are stuck in it or on it, and only have three spatial degrees of freedom in which to move.

This much is not original to the preprint above; it's a scenario that has been developed throughout the past year or so.

The new twist is:

3) The brane we inhabit is folded back on itself in the extra dimensions. Electromagnetic and other 'gauge' interactions are confined to the interior of the brane, but gravity can travel through the 'bulk', the external space in which the brane is embedded. The dark matter whose gravitational influence we observe in astronomy is just ordinary matter in a neighboring fold of the brane: less than a millimeter away through the bulk, but perhaps trillions of light-years away through the brane!


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