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Did NASA Find Evidence Of A Parallel Universe? Not yet!

These aren't the Parallel Universes you're looking for.

By Silek Wed 27 May, 2020 12:57 PM
It is kind of a let down, but science can be a fickle mistress. One day she is promising flying cars and teleportation, the next she's explaining that Land Speeder repulsion technology is probably confined to works of fiction and the efforts of George Lucas to copy write it.Looking at it closer, it may not be the so much the fault of science itself, but the sensationalism of capturing the imagination our friends in the publishing world put before us.

You may have been one of the many to catch a few of these headline screaming at us from the New York Post, the Daily Star, or the Express, claiming that scientists have found evidence proving the existence of parallel universes. If this wasn't eye catching enough, these stories go so far as to claim that time itself flows backwards in these new frontiers.

As thought provoking as this idea is, and with the possibility that these concepts may actually be key in answering some tough question in string theory rectifying differences observed on the quantum level, nothing observed in the recent 'Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna' (ANITA) experiment, partially funded by NASA, suggest this to be the case.As most of these things do, it started out innocently enough.

ANITA is a balloon based experiment that points complex and sophisticated radio antennae at the Earth from the stratosphere, trying to detect radio waves emitted by very rare, high energy neutrinos striking atoms in the ice. This is the first NASA neutrino observatory of it's kind.

Although publication of papers on what ANITA's findings might mean have just been published this month, the observations were actually detected in 2016. At this time ANITA discovered evidence of a high energy particle, extremely high energy neutrinos to be specific, coming up from the Earth's surface. This would seem to be impossible as it's source cannot be explained with our current model of physics. This has led researchers to conclude that either something truly crazy is going on, or that it could be something as simple as the set up of the experiment itself.

Much of this sensationalist response can be attributed to a 'pay walled' article in the 'New Scientist' which went on to speculate about these anomalies stating, “Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards.”

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa experimental particle physicist Peter Gorham, principal investigator of ANITA went on record as saying, “We have encountered a small number of anomalies in our data, and once we have exhausted all of the possible explanations within the Standard Model of physics, only then is it time to consider other ideas that push those boundaries . We are really not there yet, certainly not at the point where parallel universes are necessary!

The job of following up on the ANITA's observations falls to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory on the South Pole in Antarctica. This observatory consists of 5,160 optical detectors buried in the ice that detect neutrinos reacting with the oxygen and hydrogen atoms below the surface.

Anastasia Barbano of the University of Geneva in Switzerland has stated, “This process makes IceCube a remarkable tool to follow up the ANITA observations, because for each anomalous event that ANITA detects, IceCube should have detected many, many more which, in these cases, we didn’t. That means that we can rule out the idea that these events came from some intense point source, because the odds of ANITA seeing an event and IceCube not seeing anything are so slim.”

Ibrahim Safa of the University of Wisconsin, lead author of the research paper 'A search for IceCube events in the direction of ANITA neutrino candidates' published by Cornell University, has a very no nonsense view of the stories that have been spun from his, and his fellow scientist's research.

Safa has also been quoted as saying, “While it has been an exciting time for physicists trying to explain these events, it looks like we’ll have to wait for the next generation of experiments, which will increase exposure and sensitivity, to get a clear understanding of this anomaly. An astrophysical explanation of these anomalous events under standard model assumptions is severely constrained regardless of source spectrum.” What this means is we don't know where these neutrinos came from unfortunately, however it doesn't mean they came from a parallel universe.

I would love to think that there may be other universes where I might have solved world hunger, or cured cancer. Nothing in these experiments disproves theories that these might in fact exist, but unfortunately, regardless of the headlines we may have been inundated with this week, nothing in them points to that fact either.

What did you think of this article? Let us know!

WRITTEN BY Silek
EDITED BY Infinity
- lewis.larsen@ufplanets.com
2 Comments
Wed 27 May, 2020 4:53 PM
Am interesting read there Silek, let's see what comes of it in the decades to come
Fri 29 May, 2020 5:35 AM
let's see what comes of it in the decades to come