Recreating the Big Bang Inside Metamaterials
Found on Technology Review on Friday, 21 August 2009
A formal mathematical analogy between the way metamaterials and spacetime effect light could allow scientists to recreate Big Bang-type events in the lab.
His piece de resistance, however, is a mathematical demonstration of an event in which a phase transition inside a (2+2) metamaterial leads to the sudden creation of a 2+1 spacetime (two dimensions of space and one of time) together with a large population of particles.
In principle that's an experiment that could be done in the lab in which you could watch the Big Bang in action.
Then, in about 14 billion years, scientists are thinking about the origin of the universe and someone comes up with an experiment to re-create the Big Bang. They decide to give it a try. Then, in about 14 billion years, scientists are...