During May and June, perhaps the most widely circulated scientific news related to NASA was that it was finally able to discover the existence of a universe parallel to the universe in which we live but the time is due backward, the news swept through Arab social media And universality, what divided the discussion about it into two groups, the first completely believes the news, and the second rejects the same idea in the absolute and thinks that it is just dreams of birds.
The news was already exaggerated, as he built himself on recent findings that came from (1) ANITA, a smart experiment that aims to use the entire Antarctic continent as a laboratory! Where high-energy cosmic neutrinos are supposed to interact with the continent's massive ice sheet, causing a reflection of a specific pattern of radio pulses that can be picked up by antennas suspended in a helium balloon flying at a height of about 37 km in the sky of the frozen continent.
ANITA, the Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna, detects ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Here it is in front of Mount Erebus,
It's seen some amazing things ... possibly signs of physics beyond the Standard Model! But first let's talk about how it works.
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- John Carlos Baez (@johncarlosbaez) October 1, 2018
A neutrino is a particle without an atomic so small that a trillion particles of it will pass through one of your fingers within a second, but this particle is poorly interacted in such a way that only one "neutrino" can interact with your body throughout your entire life. They are particles without charge and do not carry - almost - A mass, which is why grabbing a neutrino has always been more like grabbing ghosts, and it always required smart tricks - like "Anita" - to grab a high-energy type of it.
In 2018, the Anita experiment began receiving anomalous radio signals (2) from what was expected of it, which seemed to have occurred due to particles that passed through the Earth to the southern continent and then to Anita, and not reflected from the ice cover of Antarctica, that door opened to a group of interpretations That includes saying that this is only related to the nature of the ice itself in Antarctica, but some have indicated that this may be evidence of something else that falls far beyond our imaginations.
At that point, a hypothesis topped by a research paper issued (3) comes at the same time. This hypothesis suggests that the universe we know is more like a mirror image of another universe, and both universes started from the same point, which is the Big Bang.
To understand the matter, let's start from the currently most accepted model of cosmology (4) (abbreviated called the “lambda-CDM” model), which assumes that our universe started from the Big Bang, we notice that when we look at the universe we see it expanding at rates Accelerating, therefore, if we imagine that the universe is a movie now showing and we want to bring the viewer back for about 13.8 billion years, this expansion will be reflected to reach one point from which the entire universe begins.
We do not yet know much about this point, and we cannot observe anything that occurred during or during the first four hundred years of the history of the universe, where it was opaque that does not pass any light, and as soon as the first cosmic atoms formed until the first photons of light were released, but we only assume their existence based on Lots of hard evidence.
Here this new model asks, "Why don't we keep turning the film backward even after the Big Bang?", Of course that's not just an idea that suddenly appeared in the brains of some physicists, but it's their habit to follow mathematical equations to whatever way you take them, and equations usually start One of the problems facing cosmic physicists.
One of these problems is that the “lambda-CDM model” in some cases violates what is termed “parity of charge, parity and time” (5) (CPT - Symmetry). To understand the idea, let's consider a smooth ball, when we look at it from any position, from For example, the right, the left, the top, or the bottom, its shape does not change, but the cube - for example - we cannot see it in the same way from all directions, once you will meet its borders, and once you will meet one of the faces, and once you will meet one of its projections.
Here we say that the cube “breaks the rotational symmetry”, but the ball is rotationally symmetric, in particle physics there are also several types of symmetry (but of course with large differences, such as the ball only for approximation), and most physicists assume (6) that this type, is identical to charge Parity and time should not be broken. At this point this new assumption is that in order to preserve the symmetry we must assume that there is a universe other than our own in the background.
But this assumption does not avoid the Big Bang, but rather continues its solutions directly through the Big Bang to what happened before it, from that point of view the explosion is only the point at which the direction of the universe is reflected. In other words, on the other side of the Big Bang there is spacetime - spatial temporal tissue - similar to that in which we live but it is reversed in everything.
For example, time on this other side will appear, for us, as if it is going backward and not forward, as well as everything on this other side will look inverted as if it were a picture in the mirror, but note that it appears so in relation to this only, but the residents of this other cosmic side - if They were present - nothing looks inverted, everything is normal, but if they look at our side they will see it as if it were a mirror image of them. In other words, the two universes will meet at the moment of the Big Bang, and each side will imagine that the other happened after its past!
On that point you might ask: What is the relationship of Anita's experience with all of this inverse universe? The answer is that the new paradigm of the inverse universe assumes (7) the emergence of a new type of neutrino particle that was not previously found in the physical model of particle physics that we currently know, and it may be that these particles are what the Anita experiment observed.
It must be made clear that the problem is not in the hypothesis that the results of Anita's experiences relate to the inverse universe, but rather in talking about its results being confirmation or even an indication of the existence of this inverse universe, while it is - at its most - just a guess, and even as we discover these particles it remains a guess, because it is It can also refer to other things.
However, the hypothesis of the existence of a universe opposite to the universe in which we live already exists, and even a Oxford University research team (8) referred several years ago to a similar hypothesis, in a study published in the journal Physics Letters B, that says the Big Bang was not, in the form We can imagine, the starting point for both time and space, but it was the moment when the direction of space changed.
Like its predecessor, this new paradigm does not avoid the Big Bang, but rather continues its solutions directly through the Big Bang to what happened before it, thus it does not introduce any new principles, nor introduces any modifications to Einstein's theory of general relativity that explains the evolution of the universe accurately, and only builds itself - Similar to its predecessor as well - on a problem it has to solve, this time it is called the Horizon Problem (9).
Where we know that very early in the history of the universe the speed of cosmic expansion was greater than the speed of light, which means that there were elementary particles that appeared immediately after the Big Bang but they never had the opportunity to meet each other, to understand that, imagine that we had a cup of hot water and a cup of water Cool We took them away from each other as soon as they formed, here one will remain cold and the other hot for a while, but when we leave them together for some time, then we move them to the right and left, each of them will be about the same temperature.
Here the problem of the horizon appears, where the particles that rapidly separated at the beginning of the universe are supposed to differ in their characteristics from each other, but the effect of this does not appear in the universe we see before us, it is homogeneous, its parts are similar to each other in all directions, here the main question appears: What made regions of the universe that never contacted each other so homogeneously?
At that point two ways of answering appear, the first having to do with the physics after the Big Bang, this solution imagines that something happened in the first moments of the life of the universe, and caused this impossible connection, perhaps the space itself was different from what we are now entrusted, and the speed of light was probably greater As for the second way, he says that, as it seems, the big bang was not the beginning of time in the first place. Rather, those particles had, in a way, time before the big bang to mix with each other, then the big bang came.
All these hypotheses did not appear from a vacuum, but are solutions to problems that already exist in the current models that explain the universe. Take, for example, this research paper (10) that sparked controversy in the research field in 2017 when it indicated that another universe could collide with our being at a very early stage From its history, the hypothesis of this research paper relied on a region in the microwave background radiation that current models can only explain with an idea borrowed from the "bubble universes" hypothesis that came as a result of the Eternal Inflation hypothesis (11).
But these hypotheses about the other universes face a fundamental problem, which is our ability to confirm them empirically, the question of "Are there other universes already?" It is difficult to answer in our current scientific situation, and we may never be able to answer it, but who knows? Maybe we do. All we need now is to continue working to develop more accurate tools and clearer, more acceptable models of denial so that we can - perhaps one day - be sure of that idea.
Until such a moment comes, we cannot treat these models as a reality on the ground, we are still in a land closer to the imagination, but it is a fantasy worth contemplating and working on, perhaps one day we will answer our most urgent questions: What is dark energy? What is dark matter? What happened at the very moment of the Big Bang? What time What is life? who are we?
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