Well, you knew it had to be somewhere. didn’t you?
A series of viral articles claimed that NASA had discovered particles from another parallel universe in which time runs backward. These claims were incorrect. The true story is far more exciting and strange, involving a journey into the Big Bang and out the other side.
The sensational headlines had muddled the findings of an obscure 2018 paper, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, which argued that our universe might have a mirror reflection across time, a partner universe that stretches beyond the Big Bang. If that’s the case, and a series of other extremely unlikely and outlandish hypotheses turn out to be true, the paper argued, then that in turn could explain a mysterious signal hinting that a completely new particle is flying out of the ice in Antarctica.
Rafi Letzter, “Why some physicists really think there’s a ‘mirror universe’ hiding in space-time” at Spacecom
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon kindly writes to say,
The article starts out admitting there are real problems with the Lambda-CDM Big Bang model–and honesty is always refreshing–but you knew from all those Darwinian admissions, that this revelation comes with a newly discovered cure. The article does not disappoint, moving on to “mirror universes” that conserve CPT and its support for “sterile neutrinos” that solve the “dark matter” problem culminating in a mysterious data blip from the Antarctic experiment ANITA. My enthusiasm was drenched somewhere around the mirror universe point, and I was about to give my usual sigh, when the antepenultimate paragraph made me laugh.
“Amongst cosmology folks there’s … an idea that you get to use a ‘tooth fairy’ once in your cosmology model but twice is simply not credible,” he said. “And I think we needed the tooth fairy two or three times to make this one work, so, oh well.”
I don’t know if I need to give the medal to the author or the science-journo. Refreshing honesty at the beginning and the end. A very rare sight indeed.
It’ll likely get rarer. This stuff MUST exist! Otherwise there are no invented gods. Right?