No, NASA didn’t find evidence of a parallel universe where time runs backward
Let’s play a game of bad news, good news, bad news.
Bad news first: 2020. Literally all of it. Every second. Every waking moment of 2020. It’s grim, I know. Bushfires, pandemic, murder hornets. When will it end?
But the good news: Apparently, scientists have discovered a parallel universe, just like our own. It’s a little different to ours though. In this mirror world, time runs backward. It’s like a Benjamin Button universe. That means they’re heading back to 2019, the good ol’ days, right?
Well, now more bad news: I’m here to spoil the parallel universe party. Scientists haven’t actually discovered a parallel universe, but you might think they have, based on multiple reports from across the web.
In the last few days a number of publications have suggested scientists “found evidence” for a parallel universe where time runs backward. These mind-bending articles posit that an experiment in Antarctica detected particles that break the laws of physics. All the reports pull from the same source of information: A pay-walled report by New Scientist on April 8 titled “We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time.”
At the center of the report are findings from the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna or ANITA, an experiment maintained by researchers at NASA. It involves an array of radio antennas attached to a helium balloon which flies over the Antarctic ice sheet at 37,000 meters, almost four times as high as a commercial flight. At such a height, the antennas can “listen” to the cosmos and detect high-energy particles, known as neutrinos, which constantly bombard the planet.
