Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 23:02:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Victor Grauer 
To: Philip Gibbs 
Subject: Re: Tiny Alice

The Inside-Out Symmetrical Tiny Everywhere Universe (Tiny Alice)

by Victor Grauer

Somewhere around early 1975 I found myself contemplating the cover of an issue of Scientific American magazine on which an anamorphic projection appeared. (Anamorphic projections are systematic distortions of an image which can often make it completely unrecognizable -- the image can be reconstitued only when viewed from a certain angle or with the aid of a reflective cylinder or cone.) This image was more complex than most: it turned the two-dimensional space of the original picture inside out! The center of the original was literally spread out all over the periphery of the image, while the original periphery was compressed into the center. When viewed through a properly placed sheet of reflective material shaped into a cone, the original inside-in image was restored. Was it this that gave me the idea, or did I have the idea already, with this striking me as the perfect model of one aspect of it? In any case, it was then that I sensed I might be on to something and decided to take my crackpot theory seriously. The " theory " (really more of a model than a theory) was formulated at first as a way of accounting for what happened to all the antimatter that should have been produced by the Big Bang. If the antimatter had been allowed to interact with matter, they would have destroyed each other and there would be no universe today. (Yes I'm aware of proton decay and the " residue " theory but find it unconvincing and ugly.) But what if the antimatter had been created as part of the creation of a symmetrical universe which developed in a completely different (i.e. other dimensional) space. The vague idea of such a description of space has, however, always bothered me. It's easy to talk about and impossible to describe and seems like a cop-out. So it ocurred to me that one could think of such a space in terms of something more concrete: an implosion formed as an equal and opposite reaction to the explosion that was the creation of our universe. The antimatter could have been created in such an anti-universe. Since the original pre-Big Bang material was extremely small and condensed, the antimatter universe, since it was formed in an implosion, would have to be very small and also inside-out! Since it was so small and inside out, its galaxies would be the smallest things in it, so tiny that they could not possibly interact with our galaxies in any sort of mutual destruction. I still really like this idea, and it may still really have something, but as I continued to ponder the ramifications, the original antimatter universe idea became less interesting to me than some other aspects which are, in all likelihood, incompatible with it. So the following description is free of any reference to antimatter, and could be a description simply of a universe which is in every way like our own, except very tiny and inside out (and everywhere). The following is a brief description of the essentials of what I had in mind back in 1975 (minus the references to antimatter):

Let us assume that a pair of universes might have been created by the big bang. Lots of things in physics happen in pairs and symmetry saturates physics, so why not symmetry right off the bat? The question would then be, where is this 2nd universe? Why aren't we aware of it? One answer could be that the " twin " or " mirror " universe " imploded " as our universe exploded. Since the original seed out of which both grew was extremely dense and small (compared to what our universe has become), the universe that imploded must be regarded, from our point of view, as also very small. Having imploded, it must also be inside out. In other words the largest things in it are particles and the smallest things are galaxies.

This tiny universe is naturally unapprehensible by us because it is so small. But where is it? Naturally it would have to be everywhere (since, according to the most widely accepted Big Bang model, the center of the universe is everywere). My original theory spoke of this tiny universe as consisting of a single particle (containing within it everything else, atoms, molecules, pebbles, galaxies, etc.), which pivoted in an infinite number of directions, each representing a different view into Tiny Alice (my name for the tiny everywhere universe). This pivoting gives the impression that there was an infinite number of such particles, each directly mirroring a particle in our own universe. Thus Tiny Alice could be thought of both as a tiny singularity somewhere lost in the center of our universe (wherever that could be) and at the same time everywhere in our universe, tucked away just out of " sight ". This is not so crazy as it sounds. Whenever we talk of something existing in a different set of dimensions we may well be implying just such a " contradiction. " In this sense Tiny Alice could also be thought of as a normal sized inside-in " parallel " universe, existing in a different set of dimensions. Its just that I find the previous sentence indescribably vague. What if in fact our tiny everywhere universe were about the size of subatomic particles? Being everywhere, it would get mixed up with our observations of such particles and make it very hard for us to understand what is going on down there. Moreover, we must recall that Tiny Alice is a mirror of our own universe and that it is inside out. Thus, the particles of Tiny Alice and the particles of our universe could be directlly encountering and interacting with one another. They would also be mirroring one another. Could such a hall of mirrors be responsible for some or all of the strangeness of the quantum world? And couldn't this explain the embarassing fact that particles seem to be " made up " of " smaller " particles which in turn are made up of those same " larger " particles? Could some of the particles we see be mirror images of one another, one set in our universe, the other in Tiny Alice? Could some of the particles we see be inside-out mirror images of larger entities in our own universe, Tiny Alice's atoms, molecules or dust motes?

Now we can ask: Where is the point of symmetry? The most interesting answer would be the atomic nucleus. If this were so, we would be able to unify the strong force and gravity because Tiny Alice has to be a black hole (since it mirrors our universe, a white hole). Thus the strong force could be understood in terms of the extremely strong gravitational pull of a tiny black hole with a mass the size of a universe. (A major problem here, of course, is that only certain particles feel the strong force, while all particles feel gravity -- and to get this more in line with string theory (see below), we might need to locate the symmetry point somewhere around the Plank scale.)

There are some other interesting possibilities. For example, the eightfold way which led to quark theory has often been compared with the periodic table of the elements. This might be literally true, the eightfold way possibly being the Tiny Alice mirror of the periodic table.

Now for a disclaimer. Is this a crank theory? Of course. Could it in some sense be meaningful and/or useful? In my (humble) opinion, yes. I don't for a moment believe any of this to be literally " true " and there is certainly no point in attempting to either verify OR falsify it. It is intended as a model, a way of stretching our thoughts AND a way of visualizing certain things, especially what a grand unified theory might " look " like stripped of all the math. I am very curious as to what real physicists might think of this and would appreciate any (serious) responses. Contact me at grauer@pps.pgh.pa.us

Victor Grauer

Concluding unscientific postscript

While this twenty one year old theory hardly counts as physics, makes no verifiable predictions and is thus pretty clearly untestable (and hence, what is worse, unfalsifiable) it has had a pretty good track record as a predictor of where the outer reaches of theoretical physics were to take us in the Eighties and Nineties. What follows is a relevant sampling from the popular physics literature of the last 15 years:

1. Michio Kaku in Beyond Einstein , 1987, p. 13: " If this theory (superstrings) is true, it means that our universe actually has a sister universe that co-exists with our universe. " p. 14: " According to the superstring theory the other multidimensional universe has shrunk to such an incredibly small size . . . that it can never be reached by humans. " p. 163: " Today theoretical physicists are making intense efforts to prove that the lowest energy state predicted by the superstring model is a universe in which six dimensions have curled up . . . "

2. Marek Abramowicz in " Black Holes and the Centrifugal Force Paradox, " in Scientific American, March 1993, p. 74: " According to our calculations, in the region close to a black hole not only does the centrifugal force reverse direction but all dynamic effects that depend on the sense of inward and outward are also reversed. " p. 80: " Perhaps the most important general result obtained with the help of optical geometry is that in certain situations space appears to be turned inside out." p. 80: " I found that the space close to the black hole [in his thought experiment] is turned inside out. " p. 81: " On a more basic level, optical geometry shows that `inward' and `outward' are not absolute concepts; they are relative in spaces warped by strong gravitational fields. "

3. Madhusree Mukerjee in " Explaining Everything " [report on the latest trends in string theory], Scientific American, Jan. 1996, p. 89: " A peculiar new symmetry, called duality, is making all the different strings twine into one another . . . " ". . . the world according to duality is getting even more bizarre. Strings mutate with ease into black holes and vice versa. " " More specifically, duality makes elementary and composite objects interchangeable. " p. 92: " If the original mass [of a black hole] were made up of strings, the decay would ultimately lead to an object with zero size -- an " extremal " black hole, looking in fact rather like a particle. "