2020 is like an endless year that had it all, including a pandemic of epic standards.
How could we escape all this? In a parallel universe, like ours more or less, with a detail, that there time runs upside down.
Like a universe that looks like it came out of the movie "Benjamin Button»(2009) that is. And so it is headed towards 2019, when everything seemed normal.
The strange story, of course, went down in the black news of 2020, but it is worth a review for many reasons.
And for the discovery itself, and for the "cans" of researchers, but also for how they sometimes play some news, going beyond the usual moderation of science.
This time it was a team of scientists NASA working on an experiment in Antarctica that identified anomalies that cannot be explained by particle physics.
And so they talked about the parallel universe we were talking about, a place where the laws of physics are completely different from our own.
The strange particles observed in the cosmic ray detection experiment on the icy continent may indicate an alternative reality where everything works differently.
After all, the idea of a parallel universe has been flirting with science since the 1960s and is not just a fantasy of science fiction minds.
In the icy steppes of Antarctica, everything works differently. And Peter Gorham of the University of Hawaii knows this better than anyone. For at least a month a year, he and his colleagues sit and watch a huge balloon hovering in the sky over a series of antennas.
The balloon scans over 1 million square kilometers of icy landscape in search of high-energy particles arriving from the Space. When he returned from his first mission, he had nothing terrible to show in his investigations, except perhaps an annoying anomaly: some strange noises made by the antennas.
The same thing happened on his second trip, more than a year later. When the balloon went up in the sky for the third time, the researchers decided to check the signals they had been catching for 2 years and described them as just "noise".
These signals were not noise, but signaled the existence of high-energy particles, like the ones they were looking for. Only they were not exactly what they were looking for. Because what they found was impossible to have found. What they found does not exist.
They were particles that instead of coming from space, seemed to be emitted from the ground.
These strange findings took place in 2016. They caused cracks, of course, in the building of science and too many hypotheses have been made to explain it. All within the science we know as physics.
Only in the end all the proposed explanations were ruled out. The only thing left standing, as a research hypothesis at least, is shocking even as reasoning…
If the strange findings are to be explained in a way that is consistent not only with current scientific methodology, but also with the epistemology itself, we must accept that signals presuppose the existence of a universe that brings it upside down. Literally.
The alternative universe was created by him Big Bang which yielded ours and exists in parallel with ours. In this mirror world, the positive is negative, the right is left, and time counts down.
It is indeed an idea that knots the mind and certainly the strangest thing that Antarctic research stations have ever done. The particles you see cannot be explained by the physics developed by man as an interpretation of the physical world.
NASA researchers use this balloon with particle detectors, ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna), since 2006. However, the findings that do not make sense were observed for the first time in 2014.
The high-energy particle was detected traveling at an angle indicating that it had just passed through our planet unhindered. The huge ANITA flies at an altitude of 37 kilometers over Antarctica for a whole month at a time.
The radio signal detectors on the balloon, in conjunction with the IceCube neutrino telescope, a special experimental device for the observation of neutrinos that is buried in the ice of Antarctica, caught this strange high-frequency cosmic radiation.
Protons and other nucleons that reach Earth from space and mysteriously, many times, have the highest power.
The noise in the radio waves picked up by Eric Grashorn and his team from Ohio State University did not seem to be accidental, but it had a common pattern in its frequencies. He described the discovery as "a happy one".
Why does it subvert what we know? THE physics tells us that low-energy and very light subatomic particles, with a mass close to zero, can pass through the Earth. But not high energy particles.
Such particles descend to Earth from space. The ANITA team, however, identified heavier particles, such as neutrino which do not descend from the Famous, but "ascend" from the Earth. And they go up in quotes because that is practically impossible.
The only way to explain the fact that it defies the laws of nature is to accept, as uncomfortable as it may seem, that these particles move back in time. And for that to happen, there has to be a framework (a parallel universe) that supports that.
Gorham, who was the lead researcher in the 2016 Cornell University study, even told New Scientist magazine that their research recorded several "weak phenomena." And it all points to the awkward assumption of a parallel universe where the hands of the clock are turning upside down.
"Not everyone is comfortable with such a case," he concluded.
As we have said, all the theories that have been proposed since 2016 to explain the unexplained have been refuted. And so we are left with only one working hypothesis.
The best explanation we have so far for the strange phenomenon, which physics characterizes as impossible, is that at the time of the Big Bang, 13,8 billion years ago, two universes were formed: ours and another, which from our perspective moves in the opposite direction.
If this world has its own inhabitants of course, then for them we are the ones who go upside down. "We were left with the most exciting of all the boring chances," Ibrahim Safa, one of the scientists who worked on the experiment, confirmed at one point.
Particles cannot be from our Universe. If they were, they could not pass through our planet. So maybe it's from an alternative universe, for which we may have even found the way it works.
The leptons they detected are even 1 million times more powerful than we can make.
As Gorham put it, "not everyone is comfortable with such a case." And he is obviously right, as many distinguished scientists have taken a stand. Others appear more skeptical and others are ready to ride in the chariot of alternative reality.
Pat Scott, of the University of Queensland, said that while the idea of a parallel universe "makes sense", he emphasized that it was not the only explanation for the mysterious phenomenon.
Academic astrophysicist Geraint Lewis seems to believe the same: "While parallel universes look fascinating and sexy when we talk about the ANITA brand, alternative ideas remain on the table. "
Still others believe that the researchers pulled it from the hair. Or that it's the fault of the media, even very serious media like the "New Scientist", that took a scientific working hypothesis and popularized it for the sake of the reading public.
Here, however, a clarification is needed: No one disputes the experiment or its equally uncomfortable conclusion, that it has found fundamental particles that subvert the natural science itself.
The objections have to do with the hypothesis proposed to explain the anomaly. An anomaly that can overturn everything in the end.
The story has two words as follows, for anyone who wants to look for it more. In 2016, the original study was released of Gorham and his colleagues at ANITA, who found "cosmic rays moving upwards."
In 2018 came one second important research work, in response to the ANITA experiment, and tells us that Antarctic exports provide evidence of a "symmetric universe with inversion of charge (C), parity (P) and time (T)".
In this universe time goes backwards from the moment of its birth and is dominated by antimatter.
And, thirdly, there is the new study from the IceCube neutrino telescope, published in The Astrophysical Journal, which concludes that we need to think of alternative explanations for ANITA's findings.
Some insist that the stratospheric balloon results simply show that the Standard Model of Particle Physics cannot explain why these fundamental particles behave in such a strange way.
"The events of ANITA are undoubtedly interesting, but we are far from claiming that there is a new physics, let alone an entire universe," says Ibrahim Safa.
However, ANITA scientists insist that this is not just a physical anomaly. Their findings show an extremely high-energy neutrino coming from the Earth's bowels to its surface, without even a source.
Even in IceCube Neutrino Observatory announcement It is typically emphasized that "alternative interpretations of signal anomalies, which most likely involve exotic physics, must be taken into account".
The Antarctic neutrino telescope, which has dispersed 5.160 sensors on the ice to capture neutrinos passing through and interacting with the oxygen or hydrogen atoms of the ice, operates in addition to ANITA recorders.
Scientists who have tested ANITA signals by comparing them to IceCube data also speak of "inconsistency with the cosmogenic interpretation", using phrases such as "new physics".
However, everyone agrees that all we know for sure at the moment is the fact that we do not know where these particles come from. But also to explain them, modern physics does not help us at all.
The eyes of astrophysicists have been fixed on Antarctica, as the next series of experiments, now that we know exactly what we are looking for, may reveal more about the mysterious signals.
Such discussions effortlessly bring to mind the monumental lecture of the Nobel Prize-winning founder of quantum physics Erwin Schrödinger, who uttered the "multiverse" case in front of an audience in 1952, hastening to note that "it may seem crazy."
And some of his other ideas seemed crazy, until it finally turned out that God was really playing dice with the world…