Is There A Parallel Universe 'Where Time Flows Backwards,' As NASA Claims? The Facts Behind the News

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 | Chimniii Desk

It's happened again, thanks to the internet. Today, stories from tabloids such as the New York Post, Express, and Daily Star abound, most of them referencing one another, focusing on allegations that NASA scientists have evidence that could prove the existence of parallel worlds.

It's all blown out of proportion and misrepresents the research at hand. Scientists have discovered evidence (signals) of fundamental particles that may challenge existing physics theory. It could possibly be a problem with the way particles interact with ice.

To be clear, there is no evidence of "a parallel reality, right next to ours, where all the rules of physics seem to be acting in reverse," as the Daily Star claims.

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Here's what Ibrahim Safa of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was a primary author on a research article describing the Antarctica experiment in question, has to say about the recent "news" headlines linking his research to evidence for a parallel universe:

The many, many articles now online appear to be rooted in a six-week-old New Scientist storey in which the admittedly alarming headline—We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time—is backed-up by a well-written and thought-provoking article about some puzzling results from studies conducted in Antarctica of cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles arriving from outside Earth's atmosphere) arriving from outside Earth's atmosphere. Along with some far-fetched "what if" speculations about the enigmatic origins of these particles. It's time to start talking about parallel universes.

It all has something to do with three scientific papers:

The initial research report from the ANITA (ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna)—a balloon-based experiment—which discovered "upward-pointing cosmic ray-like-events."
In response, ANITA data may provide evidence for a "CPT symmetric world," in which time would run backwards from the Big Bang and antimatter would predominate, according to a study report issued in response. "In this scenario, the universe before the Big Bang and the universe after the Big Bang is reinterpreted as a universe/anti-universe pair that is formed from nothing," the paper says.
A study published in The Astrophysical Journal by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory recommends that alternate explanations for the ANITA data should be considered.

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The only meaningful conclusion is that the Standard Model for neutrinos—fundamental particles—cannot account for ANITA's detection of a rare type of event.

"ANITA's happenings are fascinating," Safa remarked, "but we're still a long way from claiming any novel physics, let alone a complete universe."

What exactly is the ANITA?

It's a stratospheric balloon-based experiment in Antarctica that uses a radio antennae pointing back to Earth to detect radio waves released by extremely high-energy neutrinos that collide with an atom in the ice. ANITA is a radio telescope that is the first NASA neutrino observatory of any type. As a result, there's a NASA connection.

What exactly did the ANITA discover?

ANITA discovered some "abnormal" data in 2016: indications of a high-energy particle—extremely high-energy neutrinos—coming up from the Earth's surface, but no source. According to the New Scientist article, this "seemed implausible," and it went on to say:

"Explaining this signal necessitates the existence of a wacky universe that arose from the same big bang as ours and exists in parallel with it." Positive is negative, left is right, and time moves backwards in this mirror universe."

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That is the symmetric universe of CPT.

"Other explanations for the abnormal signals—possibly involving exotic physics—must be examined," according to the research paper's news release.

Scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory then tried to figure out what was causing the powerful neutrino signals.

What is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, and what does it do?

It's made up of 5,160 optical detectors buried in the ice near the South Pole that detect neutrinos travelling through the ice and reacting with hydrogen or oxygen atoms.

"This technique makes IceCube a remarkable instrument for following up on the ANITA findings," said Anastasia Barbano of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. "For each unusual event that ANITA discovers, IceCube should have identified many, many more—which, in these situations, we didn't," she said. "We can rule out the hypothesis that these events were caused by an extreme point source because the chances of ANITA witnessing an event and IceCube not seeing anything are so remote."

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What was the conclusion of the academic paper?

The results of the IceCube check on ANITA detections conclude with language like "inconsistent with a cosmogenic explanation" and "novel physics," and are described as follows:

"Under standard model assumptions, an astrophysical explanation of these aberrant events is strongly restricted, regardless of source spectrum."

We don't know where these signals came from yet, to be precise.

These high-energy neutrinos arrived from a parallel universe, which is incorrect.

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