While working on an experiment in Antarctica, a group of NASA scientists have discovered evidence to suggest that there is a parallel universe in which the rules of physics are opposite to our own.
The first multiverse theory was proposed back in 1952 when Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger introduced the concept of many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Now, an experiment from NASA detecting cosmic rays has found particles that suggest the existence of a parallel universe that was born along our own during the Big Bang. The scientists employed the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a giant balloon that goes high above Antarctica, where the dryness in the air provides an ideal environment free of radio noise that can affect the Antenna's findings.
Earth constantly receives a 'wind' of high energy particles arriving from outer space. At the same time, low-energy subatomic particles with a mass close to zero, called 'neutrinos,' can pass through the Earth. The higher energy particles are stopped from passing through by the matter of our planet and are only detected as coming down from space. However, ANITA managed to detect even heavier particles, called 'tau neutrinos', which are found as coming 'up' out of the Earth. The findings suggest that these particles are traveling backward in time, which could be evidence of an alternative reality.
ANITA's principal investigator, experimental particle physicist Peter Gorham from the University of Hawaii, infers that the only explanation for the tau neutrino behaving this way is the particle changing into a different type of particle before passing through the Earth and then back again. Groham, who is also the lead author on a paper by Cornell University, notes that he and his colleagues had observed numerous of these "impossible events", a phenomenon so odd that leaves many skeptical.
He tells New Scientist that, "Not everyone is comfortable with the hypothesis".
So far, the simplest explanation for the phenomenon has been that, when the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, two universes were formed, the one we are in and one in which things run in reverse from our perspective, with time running backward. Which means that, if we were the inhabitants of that parallel universe, it would be this reality that we would perceive as being reversed.
Ibrahim Safa, another member of the team working on the experiment said, “We’re left with the most exciting or most boring possibilities”.
A thorough analysis conducted since then has concluded that the phenomenon cannot be explained by our current understanding of physics.
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