--- Horace Heffner writes: > Here is a way out there improbable thought for you. One CF joker may be mirror matter.
For those who haven't seen it, Wiki has a pretty good entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_matter ...but it would be nice to reconcile mirror matter and anti-matter elegantly, assuming that the two are not mutually exclusive... Apparently Robert Forward did not do this. It would also be nice to reconcile the Dirac epo field with mirror matter. Wonder if anyone has considered the dimensional (fractal) angle? In response to the related question- Are mirror matter particles related to supersymmetry "partner particles"? Robert Foot answered as follows: There's really no relation. Mirror symmery is a different type of symmetry to supersymmetry. The only similarity is that both ideas require a "doubling" of the number of elementary particles. (in mirror symmetry, the mirror particles form an almost decoupled sector -- similar to ordinary particles but where left and right are interchanged). Mirror symmetry is a discrete symmetry (i.e. not a continuous symmetry), which allows this type of theory to exhibit space-reflection as a symmetry, while supersymmetry is nothing to do with space-reflection, but is a continuous symmetry relating particles with differenct spin: each ordinary particle has a hypothetical superpartner. However supersymmetry must be broken because if it was unbroken the SUSY particles would have been discovered already). Nevertheless, supersymmetry is very popular, but there really is no evidence for it (despite multi-billion dollar searches for it!!). It survives only because it is popular. As you know, mirror symmetry is not so popular but I like to think there is a lot of evidence for it -- certainly more than for supersymmetry. If I can give you an example: both theories claim to provide an explanation for dark matter, but I would argue that the mirror symmetry explanation is the more natural. Why? Because it explains the basic properties of dark matter. Mirror particles couple extremely weakly to photons, so mirror matter is dark. mirror atoms are also stable for the same reason that ordinary ones are. In other words, with the one hypothesis, mirror symmetry, one predicts the existence of invisible stable matter in the Universe. The abundance is not predicted. Well - Foot is a bold one...and has put his best theory Forward, so to speak. Jones
