What is Parallel Universe?
A parallel universe, also
known as a parallel dimension, alternate universe,
or alternate reality, is a hypothetical self-contained plane
of existence, co-existing with one's own. The sum of all potential parallel universes
that constitute reality is often called a “multiverse".
The late physicist Stephen Hawking
accepted the idea of a parallel
universe. His research paper, which was published before his death, was on
this subject.
Now the Question is "Has NASA found a parallel universe?"
These stories claim that the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) that is partially funded by NASA, has found evidence for the existence of parallel universes. Unfortunately, this is not really what's happening here.
Basically, ANITA is a large balloon about 35 km above the surface of the Earth. As its name suggests, it's situated over Antarctica. It is a detector designed to look for particles known as neutrinos, coming from outer space. Now normally, neutrinos are very nonreactive particles, passing through atoms very easily. In fact, physicists estimate that there are millions of neutrinos passing through every square centimetre of our skin, every second.
However, if the neutrinos have high enough energies, then they do
interact with matter. Instead of passing straight through everything, they
smash into atoms. This collision produces particles that ANITA detects. The
types of particles produced tells ANITA that a neutrino must have generated
them, and the direction in which they move tell ANITA something about the
direction in which the neutrino would have been moving before the collision
occurred in the first place.
Now ANITA was put up above
Antarctica to study neutrinos coming from high-energy events occurring in outer
space. And it's doing that brilliantly. However, it did also spot a couple of
neutrinos that seemed to be coming from below - through the Earth, and up to
ANITA.
This is highly unusual. High-energy
neutrinos, which is what ANITA is calibrated to look for, are highly unlikely
to come all the way through the Earth and reach the other side. So once
scientists confirmed that these measurements were not due to some sort of error
in the technology or experimental method and setup, they had to find a way to
explain them. One hypothesis suggested that there was a large Neutrino source
on the other side of the Earth, emitting lots of high-energy neutrinos. If this
were the case, then it would be reasonable for a couple of them to make it all
the way through the Earth and be detected by ANITA.
However, another neutrino
observatory in Antarctica, the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory (run by CERN), has
found that this is not the case. From what I can tell, every possible
explanation based on physics that we already know about, has been found to be
untrue. But if that is the case, then scientists must delve into the realm of
new physics.
One possible explanation of this is that a parallel universe
exists where time runs backwards and these neutrinos coming through the Earth
are just neutrinos from outer space running backwards in time. However, this
hypothesis is just that - a hypothesis. It's not thoroughly developed, and it's
certainly not the only explanation for what's going on. Most importantly, the discovery
of these anomalous neutrinos is not automatically evidence for the existence of
parallel universes.
Unfortunately,
though, the idea of a parallel universe is exciting to read about, so it's been
making the headlines - and this is another case of a scientific discovery being
blown out of both context, and proportion.
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