Parallel Universe Found

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,153
I don't feel like paying to read the rest of the article, but so far I don't see the need to bring a parallel Universe into the conversation. We know neutrinos often pass right through the earth without much interference, thus they would appear to be shooting out of the earth as they exit and we can see cloud chamber images of positrons zipping through a cloud chamber as the move backwards in time.
 

OBW0549

Joined Mar 2, 2015
3,566
Oh, dear... where to begin?

Scientist working with the ANITA project gives interview in which he briefly discusses some odd results obtained from a big-assed balloon-borne antenna launched over the Antarctic. Strangely-behaving subatomic particles were apparently detected (or something was, anyway), and he conjectures that these might foretell something new-- and hard to explain-- in the field of physics.

Young beat reporter working for WHDH News 7 Boston (other articles: "53-year-old tortoise in need of home after owner dies from coronavirus"; "Search underway for monkey that’s on the loose in Tewksbury"; "Jeep slams through front door of Danvers home, comes to rest in living room"; "Worcester’s last candlepin bowling alley closes for good"; and "Woman accused of beating wife to death with wine chiller") latches onto said interview, tries to understand it through the prism of his journalism training and his vast accumulated life wisdom, and concludes that a "bizarre parallel universe where physics and time operate in reverse" is at hand (something not even suggested in the interview with the scientist).

Sigh...

Moral of the Story: Don't believe everything you hear on the news. Better yet, don't believe ANYTHING you hear on the news.
 

Thread Starter

MrAl

Joined Jun 17, 2014
11,389
Hi again,

Yes it all sounds very questionable at the very least.

But what do you expect from "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah".
The guy consistently misquotes people especially the current President of the US.
I have a feeling he is just reading material from a screen someone else types for him.
He is also very bad at imitating people as he often thinks he is doing during which the misquotes come flying out of his mouth one after the other.
It is supposed to be a comedy show but they use it as a means to mock government officials and sway public opinion.
 

ZCochran98

Joined Jul 24, 2018
303
Moral of the Story: Don't believe everything you hear on the news. Better yet, don't believe ANYTHING you hear on the news.
Indeed. There are several things the media typically get wrong about science/physics (and a lot of things, frankly), the most frequent of which are things related to time (especially time-reversal and the abominably-named "time crystal" - though blame the physicists for the bad naming conventions) and parallel universes. So lemme attempt clarify a few terms we physicists tend to casually throw around, for those who are curious or care (ignore the monologue if you aren't or don't)....

Time cannot be reversed - "time-reversal" in physics typically refers to a reverse of momentum or transfer of energy (an energy decay replaced with an energy gain, but NOT by passive means). It does not mean to "literally go backwards in time." That is impossible (requires superluminal speeds, imaginary mass, and some other mind-bending and physics-breaking things). The concept of "time reversal" is a subset of the study of CPT-symmetry - charge, parity, and time symmetry (for example: for every particle created from an equivalent amount of energy with a specific charge, spin/helicity, and direction of motion, there is an equivalent antiparticle created with opposite charge (charge reversal), spin/helicity (parity reversal), and momentum (time reversal). Likewise, a system of coupled oscillators, one with passive decay and the other with active energy gain (from some external source) is PT-symmetric (in that if you flip the position of the oscillators and reverse the behavior so gain becomes loss and vice-versa, the system should appear the same as the original - this is one area of my research, actually).

The "time crystal," which was a somewhat sensational topic a year or so back, is a real crystal structure that is periodic in space (per the definition of a crystal) and in time. What that means, for those who don't know, is the crystal's structure may vary over time, but ALWAYS returns to its previous form and starts over. They're very hard to create, apparently. They aren't, however, literal particles of crystallized time (that makes no sense, as time is largely perceived from motion and is not considered a "force," and thus has no particle representation/interaction, unlike the fundamental forces we do know if - it's just a property of the universe, particularly the "geometry" of it).

When it comes to "parallel universes," those are the results of PURELY MATHEMATICAL models of the universe that are, themselves, untestable (I'm looking at you, string theory, with your 11 dimensions). It has been shown (by people like the late Dr. Hawking) that if parallel universes do exist (for which there is no evidence), then we will NEVER be able to interact with them (i.e.: experimentally determine their existence). Basically, if we live in a multiverse, we'll never know it.

Now, as to the sources of these rogue neutrinos, we know they're from Earth (if I recall correctly), but where is another mystery. However, "new physics" doesn't need to be brought into it - any time an atom undergoes beta decay, a neutron becomes a proton and releases an electron and antielectron neutrino (called \beta^- decay). Another form that few people are aware of is if a proton somehow undergoes the same process, spitting out an antielectron and an electron neutrino (called \beta^+ decay). There's even a version called "electron capture beta decay" which has a proton somehow "absorbing" an electron and becoming a neutron and electron neutrino. So, basically, a possible source of these neutrinos is anything undergoing beta decay, especially isotopes of those nuclei that have an overabundance of neutrons or protons. Where these isotopes are? Who knows. THAT is what future research will need to determine.

Now, as a disclaimer, if these neutrinos are a more "exotic" type (i.e.: not electron or antielectron neutrinos, which are the most common kind), then more research (unrelated to radioactive decays) will need to be done. But again: we most likely don't need to bring "new physics" into it, and definitely not "parallel universes."

Tl;dr: To reiterate what other folks on this forum have said, don't rely on news media for any kind of accurate scientific reporting. Even be a little wary of Scientific American or Popular Science - they may be science journalists, but even they aren't "the experts," and can over-sensationalize stuff or misreport things (though they typically are more accurate than regular news for science stuff).
 

ZCochran98

Joined Jul 24, 2018
303
I've seen this before as well (if you're curious, the original paper can be seen here), and, after having given it thought when I first saw it, remain unconvinced, just like I am with Stephen Wolfram's recent theory of quantum gravity: while the hypothesis is interesting, it has its issues (which, in this particular case, are severe-enough that I remain unconvinced).

The primary issue I take with it, from a physics and scientific-method standpoint, is that the simulation here (not "experiment," as the article suggests - as a theoretical physicist and engineer both, I cannot emphasize that distinction enough) is completely artificial without any "real" physical motivation why time would appear to move backwards or forward (which is done manually in their simulation - they don't just let gravity do all the work; they do a time-step-based calculation, like normal simulations, letting the time step determine the next state, so going "forward" or "backward" is entirely based on the simulator's choice of delta-t.) So, to me, their interpretation of "parallel universes going opposite directions in time," to paraphrase, seems somewhat arbitrary and contrived from a "toy" (basic, likely incomplete, modifiable model) simulation.

I also suspect, as a side note based on what I know of the (Newtonian) gravitational n-body problem, that if they let it run sufficiently long enough in either direction, they'd see periodic behavior (in that all the particles would eventually start moving back towards the center again and start going in the opposite direction if they're allowed to pass through each other). That's just the result of the (system of) second-order differential equations they're working with (like a spring with some kind of restoring force). This periodic behavior would nullify the interpretation of their simulation, as suddenly what's "forward" and what's "backward" suddenly reverse. Based on their results, it looks like they just chose to set t = 0 at a point where all the particles are at a minima (between when they swap from rushing inward to rushing outward, like when a spring is at its equilibrium point where it is no longer compressing or stretching).
 

ZCochran98

Joined Jul 24, 2018
303
"Jumping straight to "parallel universes" is a little over-the-top, and there are less mind-boggling theories that could explain what ANITA has detected."

https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-did-...-parallel-universe-where-time-runs-backwards/
Ah, I see you posted this between when I began typing my wall-o'-text and when I refreshed the page. My bad! The forum apparently doesn't notify you as you're typing that someone has posted a new comment. Or it does and I just missed that update.
 

Thread Starter

MrAl

Joined Jun 17, 2014
11,389
Indeed. There are several things the media typically get wrong about science/physics (and a lot of things, frankly), the most frequent of which are things related to time (especially time-reversal and the abominably-named "time crystal" - though blame the physicists for the bad naming conventions) and parallel universes. So lemme attempt clarify a few terms we physicists tend to casually throw around, for those who are curious or care (ignore the monologue if you aren't or don't)....

Time cannot be reversed - "time-reversal" in physics typically refers to a reverse of momentum or transfer of energy (an energy decay replaced with an energy gain, but NOT by passive means). It does not mean to "literally go backwards in time." That is impossible (requires superluminal speeds, imaginary mass, and some other mind-bending and physics-breaking things). The concept of "time reversal" is a subset of the study of CPT-symmetry - charge, parity, and time symmetry (for example: for every particle created from an equivalent amount of energy with a specific charge, spin/helicity, and direction of motion, there is an equivalent antiparticle created with opposite charge (charge reversal), spin/helicity (parity reversal), and momentum (time reversal). Likewise, a system of coupled oscillators, one with passive decay and the other with active energy gain (from some external source) is PT-symmetric (in that if you flip the position of the oscillators and reverse the behavior so gain becomes loss and vice-versa, the system should appear the same as the original - this is one area of my research, actually).

The "time crystal," which was a somewhat sensational topic a year or so back, is a real crystal structure that is periodic in space (per the definition of a crystal) and in time. What that means, for those who don't know, is the crystal's structure may vary over time, but ALWAYS returns to its previous form and starts over. They're very hard to create, apparently. They aren't, however, literal particles of crystallized time (that makes no sense, as time is largely perceived from motion and is not considered a "force," and thus has no particle representation/interaction, unlike the fundamental forces we do know if - it's just a property of the universe, particularly the "geometry" of it).

When it comes to "parallel universes," those are the results of PURELY MATHEMATICAL models of the universe that are, themselves, untestable (I'm looking at you, string theory, with your 11 dimensions). It has been shown (by people like the late Dr. Hawking) that if parallel universes do exist (for which there is no evidence), then we will NEVER be able to interact with them (i.e.: experimentally determine their existence). Basically, if we live in a multiverse, we'll never know it.

Now, as to the sources of these rogue neutrinos, we know they're from Earth (if I recall correctly), but where is another mystery. However, "new physics" doesn't need to be brought into it - any time an atom undergoes beta decay, a neutron becomes a proton and releases an electron and antielectron neutrino (called \beta^- decay). Another form that few people are aware of is if a proton somehow undergoes the same process, spitting out an antielectron and an electron neutrino (called \beta^+ decay). There's even a version called "electron capture beta decay" which has a proton somehow "absorbing" an electron and becoming a neutron and electron neutrino. So, basically, a possible source of these neutrinos is anything undergoing beta decay, especially isotopes of those nuclei that have an overabundance of neutrons or protons. Where these isotopes are? Who knows. THAT is what future research will need to determine.

Now, as a disclaimer, if these neutrinos are a more "exotic" type (i.e.: not electron or antielectron neutrinos, which are the most common kind), then more research (unrelated to radioactive decays) will need to be done. But again: we most likely don't need to bring "new physics" into it, and definitely not "parallel universes."

Tl;dr: To reiterate what other folks on this forum have said, don't rely on news media for any kind of accurate scientific reporting. Even be a little wary of Scientific American or Popular Science - they may be science journalists, but even they aren't "the experts," and can over-sensationalize stuff or misreport things (though they typically are more accurate than regular news for science stuff).
Just one thing...

It is believed that gravity is more universal in that other universes could have gravity also. What this means is that it would be able to interact with our universe and this idea has been proposed to explain some motion in deep space (way way out there in deep space).
 

Thread Starter

MrAl

Joined Jun 17, 2014
11,389
The end of the universe. So, that time is actually getting shorter and shorter every second.
Yes, we could have even been 'paused' for a million years 1 second ago then restarted.
Or, there could be a time change were we lose or gain 1 second per second. We'd never know it.
 

ci139

Joined Jul 11, 2016
1,898
With respect to what?
What it was first run ((((( the "first" however is not so certain ((and might have been artificial)) ))))) . . . it's not an answer - i'm just thinking
(we ought to be in the playback of time now ... a reverse playback ... with a little mod . . . much likely the perspective being inside the world now not the something else previously)

. . . somewhat related /// about a quantity = f(t) ~ \(e^t\)
https://www.symbolab.com/solver/derivative-calculator/\frac{d}{dx}\left(e^{x}\right)
https://www.symbolab.com/solver/indefinite-integral-calculator/\int e^{x}dx
versus
https://www.symbolab.com/solver/derivative-calculator/\frac{d}{dx}\left(ln x\right)
https://www.symbolab.com/solver/indefinite-integral-calculator/\int ln x dx
 
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