Discovery of a Parallel Universe?

Two years ago, two bizarre detections were made by the radio telescope ANITA. ANITA sits on top of a balloon over Antarctica and its job is to detect high-energy particles called cosmic rays that rain down from space. The detections were from high energy neutrinos that were apparently coming from the ground instead of outer space. According to the standard model, neutrinos with energy should interact with matter normally (Usually neutrinos go through matter as if it wasn’t there), thus the Earth would’ve stopped these particles from reaching the detector if the particles were from outer space. Even though neutrino interactions are one part of the standard model, proving one part of it wrong experimentally, leads to the collapse of many of our fundamental theories. So what happened?

ANITA

Well, instead of saying that a really powerful supernova released a lot of these high energy neutrinos so at least a couple would’ve made it through, some people assumed we found another universe… Before the team had enough time to investigate this matter, a paper with the title “Upgoing ANITA events as evidence of the CPT symmetric universe” was published. The paper discusses how these anomalies could potentially prove the extremely hypothetical CPT universe. The CPT model suggests that it is theoretically possible that a mirror antimatter universe where times goes backward can exist (the math works out).

So far we have four possibilites:

  1. Our fundamental understanding of particle physics is flawed.
  2. There was a massive explosion of a supernova that led to a couple of neutrinos making through Earth. However, this possibility has been ruled out because other detectors did not detect this anomaly.
  3. We detected a parallel universe that is the image of ours.
  4. Nobody has figure it out yet.

When reporters covered this story, it was in their interest to talk about possibility 3. What happened here was a classical model of exactly what happens whenever there’s an anomaly is detected. Scientists detect something weird and then others hypothesize possibilities from theoretical, practical, and realistic approaches.

University of Hawai’i at Mānoa experimental particle physicist and PI of ANITA Peter Gorham told ScienceAlert, “in this case, one or more journalists have evidently moved ahead with an article which was not verified, and for reasons which are not clear, have ascribed research and papers to us which we never wrote, and theories, such as those involving parallel universes, which neither we nor our collaborators hypothesised about or discussed in any publication before these results were attributed to our experiment.”

To not shatter your dreams, I can say that while there is no evidence what so ever that we detected such a thing, there is no evidence that contradicts its existence.

Link to the speculative paper : http://journals.andromedapublisher.com/index.php/LHEP/article/view/67/31

Cool articles to check out: https://www.sciencealert.com/of-course-nasa-did-not-detect-a-parallel-universe-in-antarctica, https://www.sciencealert.com/standard-physics-has-been-ruled-out-for-neutrino-like-particles-slipping-through-our-planet, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/05/22/ask-ethan-have-we-finally-found-evidence-for-a-parallel-universe/#3f4f01d942fc,https://www.cnet.com/news/no-nasa-didnt-find-a-parallel-universe-where-time-runs-backward/

Images: https://stratocat.com.ar/fichas-e/2016/MCM-20161202.htm, https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/nasa-discovers-parallel-universe-where-time-runs-backwards-know-the-truth-fact-check-120052300113_1.html