Did NASA discover a parallel Universe?

Published Jul 7, 2020, 4:00 AM

The amazing ANITA experiment and the bizarre neutrinos they discovered

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Hey Daniel, do you read science articles in the popular press?

You know, I can't help myself because I love hearing about new science discoveries, but I always read them with a big grain of salt.

You don't trust him?

Well, you know, sometimes I read an article where I actually know the science really well, and often I strongly disagree with how it's presented.

And by often you mean always. No.

There are some great science journalists out there.

But I guess I mean in general, you don't have a lot of confidence in science journalists.

I mean, sometimes you read these popular science articles that are just.

Totally bonkers, like the headline scientists discover the universe is filled with invisible dark matter.

Okay, that one's actually pretty good.

Or physics discovers a new force tearing the universe apart.

All right, it sounds like clickbait but also true.

Oh man, then how do I tell the difference?

I guess you have to email us and we'll break it down for you on the podcast.

Like they I am more. Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'll admit to gritting my teeth while reading popular science.

Article out of excitement. You just read it and you're so excited you clench your draw.

No, not always out of excitement. Sometimes I see a headline and I think, oh my gosh, how could they even write that?

What if it something you don't know, are not familiar with?

Well, then you know, I have to extrapolate, and I say, well, if I know that it's bonkers half the time, then there's a good chance that this is a bonker's article. And so I have to write to a friend of mine who's an expert in that area and say, how bonkers is this?

I see it's bonkers until proven otherwise.

That's my general philosophy.

And that's our general podcast. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe A production of iHeartRadio.

In which we explore the bonker's nature of the universe, some of it true, some of it clickbait, and we break it down for you. We want you to understand the truth about our crazy, amazing, wonderful, beautiful universe without resorting to silly science journalism.

Well, I guess it's tricky because you know, sometimes the universe is kind of bonkers, right, So I guess the question is more about, you know, telling the difference between things that are maybe overblown and what scientists actually discovered.

Yeah, and as a la person, how can you tell the difference? Because there really are things that science have discovered that are hard to understand, that are hard to take seriously. I mean, the universe is billions of years old and began it with a huge explosion. I mean it's ridiculous. There are pockets of space out there that light cannot even escape and can eat any kind of matter. I mean it sounds absurd and made up, but some of it is true.

Yeah, sometimes we pay people to sit around and drink coffee and smash particles together. That's bonkers as well.

Now you're being ridiculous.

Come on, I heard it happens in Geneva.

That's not a job.

Come on, I guess it's like podcasting. It's a myth.

No.

I feel very fortunate to be able to smash particles together to try to reveal the secrets of the universe. And we take our responsibility very seriously on this podcast to explain the science to you in a way that actually makes sense and doesn't overhype the already amazing discoveries of science.

Yeah, so today on the program, we'll be discussing a recent article in the popular press that has some apparently pretty bonkers results from none other than NASA.

That's right. And this is an article that went all around the Internet, and readers from all over the world asked us, what is this real? IMiD a lot of noise on Twitter and on the rest of the internets, And so we thought it'd be useful to break it down for you, to tell you what actually happened, why it really is fascinating scientifically, but why the clickbait headlines may have gone a step too far.

What does a lot of noise on Twitter sound like? Is it like click click click click click, click, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, to chirp, chirp, unlike unlike like like retweet retweet.

There's not a hate button is there on Twitter?

There's I think there's enough hate on Twitter already. I don't think you need the uh, the extra buttons there. But yes, today we'll be talking about an article that came out in several outlets. For example, in New Scientist magazine, there was a headline we may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time. Boom, wow, that's a lot of that's a lot of words in one sentence that make you think.

What, Yeah, yeah, I know, wow, ap parallel universe could exist? What it goes backwards in time?

Backwards?

What we spotted it? Oh my gosh, there's so much there, right, it's incredible.

Yeah. And the Daily Star, the newspaper, says, a parallel universe right next to ours, where all the rules of physics seemed to be operating in reverse, and now it's next to us, apparently right.

Next to ours. It could be like in your pocket or you know, sitting at that next table in a cafe or something. It's adjacent, it's.

Nearby, it's right beyond your reach.

Yeah, and I don't know what happened on the internets that day, but this just really took off. It got zillions of likes, It was retweeted by everybody, and then newspaper after newspaper reported this claim, and so it's spread everywhere. A lot of people heard about it.

Yeah, and so a lot of readers asked us to break this down, and so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question, did NASA discover a parallel universe? Maybe in a parallel universe they did. Maybe a parallel universe discovered us? Maybe, Yeah, there you go. Maybe we're the evil twins. Daniel, how's your goatee? Growing up?

I guess it's sort of like the alien question, like would you rather a parallel universe discover us, which means they're probably better at science than we are, or that we discover them?

What do you think You're the one trying to discover these parallel universes?

Well, I'd love they discovered us, because we're not capable of discovering them. On the other hand, that people getting discovered don't usually fare very well in these scenarios, So I'd love to be discovered by an intelligent, benevolent parallel universe.

You'd rather be the conquista or physicist than the confiscated.

No, I do not want to be officially aligned with conky stidors on this program. No, thank you.

Well. So a lot of people wrote to us asking us to break this down and talk about it and see what's real and not real about it.

So before we dug into it, I went out into the Internet and asked random people if they had heard about this article and what they thought about it.

So, before you listen to these answers, think about it for a second. Have you heard of NASA discovering a parallel universe? Here's what people had to say.

I have been stuck inside due to the coronavirse, so I have been reading that much news. So honestly, I don't know the answer to that one. I have not heard if if they did, that would be amazing.

I'm going to say no, because I think this would be all over the news if it happened. And I also don't.

Think we have any way to probe another universe. I have no idea what that's reference to.

I have no I I sort of doubt it.

I have not heard that.

Well, No, how would you discover a parallel universe. No, I don't think so. Really, I really don't think they did. But I hope that they did, because I would really love it.

From my understanding of multiverse theories, there's nothing preventing there from being other universes. It might even be probable. However, we don't have a way currently to do an experiment to prove it.

All right, it seems that not a lot of people are on Twitter. Maybe a lot of these people were not on Twitter or the Internet, or.

Maybe our listeners just read better sources of science news than the New Scientists in the Daily Star.

Yeah, aren't those like the tabloids of science writing.

You know, we talked about the New Scientists in the past. They have an article promoting the em draw the Impossible Drive, which also in that case hyped up the claims of some scientists associated with NASA, and I think probably created a lot of misunderstanding. So we've been a little hard on them in the past. They have some great articles. We've even been to their show. Remember we did ns live in the UK a couple of years ago. They do a lot of great work promoting science, but sometimes, you know, they need to rein it in a little bit.

Well, so there's this currently this experiment that is organized and run by NASA that apparently did discover some interesting things or at least saw some promising things that are related to Neutrino's That's right.

There really is a super fascinating discovery by an experiment on the South Pole that we cannot currently explain. And so that's a wonderful opportunity in physics to learn something new, and it makes some big discovery and so it's totally worth digging into and understanding how it works, what they saw, and what it really could mean for physics, whether or not you believe in parallel universes.

All right, so let's break it down, Daniel. So this is a real experiment that's happening in the South Pole in an Antarctica, and it's called Anita, or at least the acronym for it is Anita.

Yeah, it's called Anita. And the awesome thing is that it's not actually happening in the South Pole, is happening above the South Pole. It's a balloon experiment.

What you can't be above the South Pole, you can only be below the South Pole, Daniel.

Okay, right, right, that's your northern hemisphere bias speaking right.

There, man, Yeah, I'm an uprightist. Yeah, but what does it stand for? ANITA A N I T A. I'm gonna guess amazing nutrino interferometer.

Transporting anions that that's not terrible. Actually it stands for Antarctic Impulsive transient Antennae.

Oh no, did they really cheat on the acronym? And again, is actually part of Antarctic.

Yeah.

I would have gone for Ada too. That's a pretty good name.

That sounds like an opera.

Yeah, well, this is sort of a science opera here going on here because they did discover something because they were looking for neutrinos.

Yeah, and it's an amazing experiment because it hovers above the South Pole. It's not something they built like in a facility at the South Pole. It flies on a balloon like forty kilometers above the South Pole. Like imagine you're a graduate student. You developed this complicated, expensive, delicate piece of electronics, and then you attach it to a balloon and just send it up into the sky.

Well, again I should correct, it's floating below the South Pole.

Thank you for keeping me honest. I really appreciate the fact checking.

It keeps the straight here and also signs on a balloon. I mean, how fun is that?

It's pretty cool? Yeah, but you know, if you're a graduate student and you spend years building this thing and then it just crashes, like you're out of luck. So it's pretty risky. But it's an awesome experiment. And this is an experiment that's trying to understand one of the big mysteries of astro particle physics, which is basically like who is shooting crazy high energy particles at us from space?

Right? We've covered this before in our podcast. The Earth is getting pelted by super high energy cosmic grayce and we don't know where they're coming from. They're too high energy to be coming from the Sun.

That's right, they're definitely not coming from the Sun. We don't see any point source in the sky. We can look around to see where they're coming from, and we don't see them coming from just one spot. And they're ridiculously high energy. Nothing we know of in the universe is capable of making particles of this high energy, and yet we see them. So it's already a great opportunity to learn something new. And the interesting thing is, like, where are they coming from. And these particles can be protons, they can be iron, nucleical, they be all sorts of crazy things. But one really cool idea is to look for really high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos are these really weird, little wispy particles that have no electric charge and hardly interact. And they're really good for doing this kind of physics because it means they point right back to what made them. They don't bend at all in magnetic fields, and.

So neutrinos are part of the cosmic rays that are hitting us. It's not just like the protons and coarse and stuff being sent to Is whatever is making these is also sending neutrinos.

Well that's the question is are we seeing also super high energy neutrinos. If so, that might give us another clue to tell us, like what could be out there creating these things? Is there an alien particle physics factory pumping out high energy particles? Are they only making proton.

Kind of gives us a sunburn or something? What yeah be their motivation?

Well? Who knows? I do understand the aliens? I certainly don't. But every time you look at the sky, you want to look at it in lots of different spectrum. You want to see what are the X ray, what is the visible light, what is the infrared? So this is in the same category. It says, let's look at the cosmic ray sky using neutrinos because they don't bend, and it's like another way to look at it.

But I guess we're also getting showered by neutrinos from the Sun. Like the Sun produces a lot of neutrinos, and we're getting hit by a ton of them here. We're looking for them coming from a different direction or something that's right.

The Sun pumps out huge numbers of neutrinos, like you're hit with one hundred bills neutrinos per square centimeter per second all the time, so it's an incredible number. But those come from the Sun, and we can tell the direction of these particles, so we're looking like out into space to see if they're coming from anywhere else. And the ones from the Sun are not nearly as high energy as the one that we're looking for. We're looking for super duper high energy neutrinos, not just the ones coming from the Sun.

Oh I see. So that is that if something is making high energy particles and shooting them at us. They're maybe probably also shooting neutrinos along the way, and if so, they would have the same sort of high energy and also maybe would preserve the direction.

That's right, And that's the question. Whatever is this mysterious source of cosmic rays? Is it also making super high energy neutrinos? Let's look and you never.

Know, right, Wow, that's a big question.

It is a big question.

Yeah, it seems like a small question for which you would need a lot of the questions to measure.

And you know, there's a history of discovery there, Like when people first looked at the sky in the X ray, they found all sorts of things that were really bright in X rays but dark invisible light, Like the first black hole was spotted that way. We should do a whole podcast episode on that. So you might see in the sky in neutrinos really bright sources that don't line up with anything else, and that could be a clue. So like, oh, there's a new thing in the universe. So it's always exciting to look out in the universe using a new set of eyeballs.

All right, So then this they set up this experiment in Antarctica. That uses a balloon, and it uses the ice from Antarctica, right, that's why you need the balloon to sort of look at all the eyes.

That's right, because neutrinos are really hard to spot, right, They fly through a lot of material and don't interact, and so essentially we use the whole Earth and the ice in Antarctica as our detector. And one thing that's really important to understand is you may have heard of neutrinos flying through like a light year of lead and not interacting. That's true for neutrinos from the Sun at a certain energy, but as neutrinos get the higher and higher energy, they tend to interact more. And we can dig in to why that is a little bit later. But what these things are looking for is neutrino's flying through the Earth, so upwards through the Earth, I guess downwards, right, since we're on the North Bolt.

Yeah, I am so upset down here. But they're coming from the Sun through the Earth and they're popping out of Antarctica.

They're not coming from the Sun. They're coming from somewhere else, somewhere up in space. They go through the Earth and they go through the ice and Antarctica. And when they go through the ice, which is like one or two kilometers thick, they make a chirp in radiofrequency electromagnetic waves.

Because they hit something and then they split up.

That's right, they hit something, they interact with a nucleus, and then it causes this cascade of electrons and positrons which make this little brief, essentially chirp in the radiofrequency spectrum. And the reason that ice is important is that ice is transparent. Like, if you make this chirp in the ice, it will propagate through the ice and then you can see it above the ice. If it makes this chirp like in deep rock, then it just gets absorbed. So you need a big slab of something which will make it chirp and also propagate those chirps.

Mmmm.

So you thought Antarctica, there's a lot of ice there, better use it before it goes away.

Yeah, exactly, Like where else can you get a one mile thick sheet of ice. It's pretty incredible. And so then they look for these chirps. But you know, if you just put a detector on the surface and look down, you can only see a tiny little bit of ice. So the higher you are, the more ice you can visualize. So that's why they put this thing on a balloon and fly like forty kilometers above the ice looking for these signals coming out of the ice from neutrinos that are flying through the Earth and coming out through the ice.

Okay, so then really what's on the balloon is just kind of a camera. So it's just taking pictures of the ice looking for these neutrino collisions.

That's right, And it's a special kind of camera. You know, there really are radio frequency antennas, and that's why the experiment is called transient antenna. Transient because it's not up there all the time, and they're looking also transient because the signals are transient, and because they're using an antenna as a form of a camera, you know, they have a bunch of these antennas, so they can essentially take a picture of the ice in this radio frequency spectrum.

Cool, all right, Well let's get a little bit into what the experiment is actually looking for and how it's looking for it, and whether or not they discovered a parallel universe. But first, let's take a quick break.

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All right, Daniel, we're talking about whether NASA discovered a parallel universes. Headlines recently seemed to say out loud and so it just has to do with the experiment called Anita. That's a balloon floating above the Antarctic taking pictures of the ice looking for neutrinos, Neutrino's high energy neutrina.

That's right. And they've been running this thing for almost a couple of decades now. Like they build it, they launch it, it flies up there for like thirty to forty days essentially until it runs out of helium and then it comes back down.

Really, it's been going for several decades.

Yeah, well they have that, you know, they need to rebuild it every time. So they had a run in two thousand and six, and then had another run in two thousand and nine, and they did run in twenty fourteen.

Oh, what do you mean the balloon doesn't last?

No, you can't have a balloon up there forever. Eventually the helium leaks out and the thing comes back down to Earth. But eventually the balloon comes down and it runs for a long time. It runs on solar power. It hangs up there for like thirty forty days collecting data. Mmmm.

All right, they're up there. They're taking pictures of the ice and they're looking for high energy neutrino collisions. So I guess let's maybe dig a little bit into the science. And so why are neutrinos more likely to hit things if they're going faster. It seems like it should be the opposite.

Yeah, So what they're looking for are really high energy neutrinos, right, And they saw something really weird is that they saw neutrinos that are super duper high energy. And these are fascinating because, as you say, they're actually more likely to stop and bang into something than slower neutrinos. And the reason is special relativity. Like remember that when you move quickly, things in your view tend to look shorter. Like if you're running past your house at nearly the speed of light, there's length contraction. Your house seems to get shorter.

What wait, So to the neutrino, the universe sort of contracts. Everything feels smaller, yes, or like closer. That's right because for a very fast moving neutrino, the universe is rushing by at a fast speed, so the universe contracts and effectively gets denser. So it's like the neutrino sees more of the universe or more of the material it's passing through at any given moment, which means has like more chances to interact with someone. Oh man, that makes no sense, Daniel. To us, the neutrino is just moving fast, do you know what I mean? Like, it's not actually going through more stuff.

That's right, But we're talking about the range of its potential interaction. Remember going through stuff and banging into it. Really, we're not talking about like physically stuff connecting and hitting. We're talking about things interacting. It's all about the power of your forces. Are you being influenced by the gravity of the Sun. Yes, Are you being influenced by the gravity of Alpha Centauri? Probably not a little bit. But if you were moving really really fast, then you would be influenced by things even further away because they'd be effectively contracted to be closer to you.

What if I was moving towards the Sun, I would feel its gravity more.

Yes, absolutely, because space would be contracted between you and the Sun. What all, right, don't I don't recommend it.

I kind of have to take your word for it, Daniel. It seems kind of bonkers. But it's going really fast. It see more of the universe. The universe seems denser, and so it's interacting more. It's more likely to interact.

That's right. And so a slow moving neutrino like one that comes from the Sun will pass through the Earth and have almost no chance of interacting. But a faster moving neutrino, like a really really high energy neutrino, is very unlikely to make it all the way through the Earth. So if neutrino comes to the Earth and hits the North Pole then starts traveling through the very very high energies, it's unlikely to make it all the way through. It's going to bang into something in the core of the Earth and get absorbed and stop.

Oh, I see. So most of them will probably get absorbed by the Earth, but some of them will make it through and hit the ice in Antarctica.

That's right. And so what this experiment was designed to look for is actually not neutrino's going all the way through the Earth, but just sort of skin it a little bit. They knew that they couldn't see neutrinos at very high energy that go all the way through the Earth because they shouldn't make it through the Earth. So they're expecting to sort of skim the horizon and see neutrinos that just sort of like dip into the Earth a little bit and then come up through the ice. That was their goal.

They're just kind of hit the edge of the earth at the north.

Pole, yeah, precisely at the south pole, and.

That makes the ice, I mean thicker, right, because it's like if you hit the sheet of ice sideways, it's a lot thicker.

Yeah, you've got a longer view of the ice. So that's what they were expecting to see. That's what they were hoping to see. That's what they were designed to see. And weirdly they don't see any of those. Like they've been running for a long time, they've never seen a single high energy neutrino passing near the horizon there, like just coming up through the Earth and the way they would expect to see them if there were these very high energy neutrinos flying through space.

Wait, so I'm trying to picture it. Then the trino's coming kind of at an angle. It's skimming the Earth. It hits the ice, it create makes an interaction, and it sprays some other stuff.

It makes an interaction and it sprays radio frequency light. Essentially, it sprays a little burst of radio frequency noise out through the ice, which is then picked up in the air by the ANITA antenna.

Like it creates photons.

Yeah, radio waves are photons, that's right.

M And then it explodes like they come off in all directions.

No, because the neutrino is moving really fast, it's actually collimated, so it's a very narrow tube. And so you can tell the direction of the neutrino by seeing where this arrived and exactly when. And ANITA has like lots of different antennas and so by the different arrival times on different parts of anita. They can tell the direction that this pulse of radio waves from the neutrino came from.

Okay, so then that's how you would see them. But they didn't see them for years and years and years.

Yeah, that's right. They look at the horizon, they look for these neutrinos skimming the horizon, and they see nothing, not a zilch in all of their runs. Who but they did see something really weird that they didn't expect to see.

Okay, recently or was this way back in its early runs.

So in two thousand and six and then again in twenty fourteen, So now twice in the total runs of this experiment, they saw neutrinos or what looks like neutrino's coming straight up through the earth. So something that shouldn't happen because neutrinos shouldn't make it all the way through the Earth. But they see these pulses that look like very very fast moving neutrino, ridiculously high energy neutrino, but coming straight up out of the ice.

Wow.

So it's sort of coming from the earth or through the Earth.

Well, we don't know right if it's a neutrino it's hard to understand how it could be coming through the Earth, right, like, because neutrino's at that high energy and we're talking about energies much much higher than like the particles at the Large Hadron Collider. We're talking about seventy or one hundred thousand times more energy. So these are really really high energy particles. But they shouldn't make it through the Earth. So maybe they're created inside the Earth, or maybe there's something else, some other weird kind of part of that turns into neutrinos, and we can dig into all that.

But I guess maybe couldn't it just be a neutrino that got lucky, you know, Like, couldn't it just be one that did somehow make it through the Earth.

Yeah, it could certainly be. Like one explanation is there's some source of very high energy neutrinos and it's shooting it right in that direction, and you have a lot of them, and so even if the chances are low, maybe one of them leaked through or two of them.

Leaked through and then hit to ice right.

And then hit the ice. And so we have other detectors out the South Pole that do similar things like this one called ice cube, which actually seriously, like.

The wrapper did did he sign off on this?

I have not been in touch with these people, but ice cube, I think is general phrase. And they drilled into the ice and they drop cameras into the ice. They've like instrumented the ice itself to look for particles coming through the ice, so they have sort of similar capabilities. And they didn't see these things. So you would expect if there was like a really high energy source of neutrinos pointed at the Earth that happened to be going all the way through that this other experiment, ice cube, would have seen them. But it doesn't.

Really well, I mean, I mean two over like twenty years. It seems like these are pretty rare, so it could still it could maybe still be that it is just super rare and the other ones haven't seen it.

It could still be. I mean, cosmic ray physics is all about small numbers. Like these things are very rare and very weird, but that's what makes them fascinating. And if you'd only ever seen one, you'd be pretty skeptical. But seeing two, I mean that tells you that something real there.

You know.

It's like seeing two Bigfoot or big Feet. I guess lets you believe it a lot more easily than just seeing one.

All right, it's like two people. It's like seeing Bigfoot twice or taking two photographs of her over like twenty years.

Yeah, except you know, you were out there looking for something else. You were trying to take pictures of chimpanzees, and you saw Bigfoot twice, so you're like, what what's going on here? This isn't even what it could be something?

All right, Well that's what they found. They found these twos. So it's just two neutrinos that they found.

It's just these two chirps from the ice that they think are neutrinos. They look like neutrinos and they're coming up straight up from the ice. And that's the data. That's what they've seen, and they can't explain it using current physics.

Captured by a balloon.

Captured by a balloon.

That seems like the was a bonker's part of it.

It's sort of Victorian, right, I imagine, like you know, steam pumping and you know, mechanical knobs and valves and stuff.

Yeah, some woman with a big hat and a guy with a big mustache up there taking neutrino measurements.

I hope they packed a picnic.

Yeah all right, Well let's get into whether or not they actually discovered a parallel universe and what makes them think that they did. But first, let's take another quick break.

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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career are exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Daniel, we're talking about the Anita experiment which found two over twenty years, they found two neutrinos, and so help me make the connection here. How do these two neutrinos tell me there's a whole parallel universe out there?

All right? Well, it's a very long walk from two neutrinos to there's a parallel universe right next to you.

All right, yeah, I know, so how much time do we have? Ten minutes?

All right, go it's complicated. But the short version of it is, if there's a parallel universe, then there might be some heavy kind of neutrino gathered collected in the center of the Earth, which is decaying and producing these neutrinos and shooting them out from the center of the Earth. What that's the short version.

Wait, what's the center? Neutrinos are hanging out in the center of the Earth.

Yeah. The idea is we have neutrinos, and there's lots of mysteries about neutrinos, like we don't know if neutrinos have their own antiparticle, if there are other really heavy neutrinos we've never seen. And we had a whole episode about that kind of mystery. And they're connected to other really deep mysteries in physics, like why do we have matter and not anti matter? Why does time flow forward and not backwards? You know, every time in physics we see something which isn't balanced, which isn't symmetric, we ask why, you know, the way seems like, well, it's just so easy. You know, they're just so easy to.

Play in them. They're so neutral, they don't care they're.

Being they're being sneaky about something. Now, those neutrinos are hiding something. I can smell it.

Never trust someone without an opinion. Isn't that what I just said?

But you know, it's like wondering why are humans more right handed than left handed? There's something going on there. There's a clue to brain physiology or something. So we wonder why is there more matter? Why is time flow forwards? And one simple way to sort of get rid of that question is to say, well, maybe it's not actually an asymmetry. Maybe there's another universe where time flows backwards and it's filled with anti party.

Like somehow we started together but then we got split off.

Yeah, at the Big Bang, two universes were created, one made of matter where time flows forwards, and one made of anti matter where time flows backwards.

But then but and we're right on top of each other or right next to each other, neither.

I mean that doesn't really make any sense. It's like, you know, time is flowing backwards, it's a different part of space. I mean, it's parallel in a sense that it's like not here. It's not there, it's not right next to you, it's not anywhere in our space. It's like where is yesterday? I don't know. It's not to my left or to my right.

You know, it's backwards and behind me. It's behind me, just like the South Pole is below.

Yeah, but if time is flowing backwards, then it be ahead of you. Right. So this is like the South Pole universe. It started at the Big Bang going the other way and is dominated by anti matter.

Oh okay, So the theory is then that these two neutrinos came from this other universe.

No, it's the idea is the scenario. If there's this parallelise, that means that there's a symmetry to the universe that you know, matter has anti matter, and that suggests that there are other kinds of neutrinos in our universe, that the neutrino has some really heavy partner because they make the other universe work. You need these heavy neutrinos in our universe.

That's what the equations would suggest. Like if you invert the equations, then you get a heavy neutrino.

That's right, because there has to be some other neutrino for that universe to have, and so it has to be possible in our universe, just like our universe is mostly matter, not antimatter. The other one is mostly antimatter, but we can still have antimatter in our universe, and so their version of neutrinos could also exist in our universe, and those neutrinos would be super duper heavy. They'd be like really really massive, unlike our neutrinos.

How massive are we talking about.

Well, you know, we talked about this on that episode, Like these neutrinos could be ridiculously massive, like thousands or millions of times heavier than anything we've seen, or even more, you know, up to like you could have a single particle that has like the mass of a whole city. These things could what could be really really heavy wow, just in its resting mass, just in its resting mass. Yeah, because remember a particle's mass is not like how much stuff is there in it. It's just some weird interaction with the Higgs field. And so in a sense, it could be anything. We have no clue why particles have this mass or that mass or the other mass. It's all a mystery. So you can set them to be anything. There's very few rules I see.

So this parallel universe that we're imagining is just kind of the same, but it has a different preference, right.

Yeah, when the universe started, it's not like the universe decided I'm gonna have matter instead of antimatter. It did both. It's like, we'll do matter and we'll do antimatter. We'll cover both of our basis.

We'll have two universes.

Yeah, we are in this.

Why why buy one when you can buy two for the same physics, That's right.

You know, if you're gonna go universe shopping, go to Costco and buying blood, right, yeah, yeah, you save shipping.

Well, we just said that in parallel Daniel.

So if the a parallel universe, then it suggests the existence of these really heavy neutrinos and they could be the Dark Mount. No, like, they could be Yeah, there's a lot of steps here. They could be the Dark Mount.

Huh.

And if so, then they're really heavy. They interact gravitationally. They can be collecting at the center of the Earth what.

Like, Like they're hanging out at the center of the Earth. They're coming along with us as we go around the Sun.

Yeah, because that's where things do gravitationally, is they clump together, and the Earth is a big gravitational blob, and these neutrinos don't feel the Earth in any way. They just sort of pass through. The only thing they feel is it's gravity. And so the Sun and also the Earth and all the other planets might have collected these very heavy dark matter neutrinos at the center.

What wait, you just called it in the same name. They're dark matter neutrinos, meaning neutrinos that maybe explain dark matter.

Yes, because we know that there's a lot of missing stuff in the universe. We know there's a lot of mass out there we cannot see. We don't know what it is. We're looking for it. We think maybe it's this, maybe it's that, Maybe it's primordial black holes. One idea is maybe it's some weird new kind of very heavy neutrino we've never seen.

And these neutrinos are pretty suspicious.

There's a lot of ifs here, right, If this is a parallel universe.

They are explaining matter and antimatter time and also dark matter. Are they also in well in dark energy?

They kill JFK that's what I think.

And the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs anyway, these things hanging out the center of the Earth, they have a lot of energy, They have a lot of mass just sort of stored up inside them. They're like very tightly coiled springs. So what happens when they decay? Like some particles, they eventually decay. Very heavy particles often decay. They can decay into normal neutrinos. But normal neutrinos have very low mass, and so they would have to decay into very high energy, very fast moving nutrinios. So the mass of these mysterious dark matter neutrinos gets turned into the energy, the kinetic energy, the motion of these very light normal neutrinos.

What okay, I guess maybe first of all, these neutrinos, why don't they decay more? I thought the universe didn't like like big massive things hanging out.

Yeah, that's a great question. The universe doesn't like big massive things hanging out. But big massive things hanging out can only turn into lighter things if they have a way to do it, if there's some interaction, some process. They use a photon, they use a w or z So you can keep something that's very heavy. You can keep it stable if you turn off all of its ways of decaying. So we don't know anything about these things. They could have like a very hard time decaying into these neutrinos, but also we don't know like it could be that it happens all the time. There just aren't that many of them in the center of the Earth. Maybe there's only forty of them and the decay once a year.

And can the universe be making these or can these only be made in the Big Bang?

The universe probably wouldn't be making these anymore. They would be primordial. They would have been made in the early universe and then still existing. So that means that if it is dark matter, then that means that dark matter would be disappearing. Yes, dark matter would be disappearing, but very slowly. Right like we know dark matter, if it exists, is cosmologically stable, like it was made very early on in the universe, and not much of it or if any has disappeared, And so these neutrinos, if they do decay, it can't happen very often. So actually, if we saw two of them in the last twenty years, that suggests there must be a lot of them. If they exist in the center of the Earth.

I see, all right, So then that's how you connect the dots, is that we saw these two neutrino pings and we're like, where did they come from? They couldn't have come from anywhere that we know of, So maybe they said they came from the center of the Earth and they were made by these two heavy neutrinos that are hanging out there.

That's right. And if those two heavy neutrinos do exist, there are a clue that maybe the universe has this symmetry after all, that maybe there is another universe out there that started at the Big Bang going the other way. But you know, that's also a reach.

Yeah, I'm having trouble with that one because just means that these heavy neutrinos exist. It's like saying that because we can see antimatter, that means there's another universe. But that's not really the case, is it.

That's right, you cannot conclude that there's a parallel universe, even if you proved that there are super heavy neutrinos at the center of the Earth decaying into normal neutrinos, because there are other explanations that are not as bonkers and crazy as a parallel universe a see.

So that the parallel universe is just one maybe possible explanation for why our universe has the light neutrinos and not the heavy nutrinos. But we do have the new heavy neutrinos, so I guess I'm comfortable.

So we have the light neutrinos, we don't know if we have the heavy neutrinos in our universe. Like, that's one idea it could be, and one reason to explain it is like, maybe there's a parallel universe and that requires us to have heavy neutrinos. But there are other theories that have heavy neutrinos in them also. I mean, what happened is Anita saw these weird neutrinos. A bunch of very well meaning theorists who've been working on this idea of a parallel universe said, hey, wait a second, I like that that could be explained by our theory. Here's a fun, crazy theory that could explain it that we've been working on for ten years and involves a cool parallel universe. They wrote this paper. Then science journalism was like, now is to discover the parallel universe.

So you know these screams like that, like like very excited kids.

Yeah, exactly, there's a lot of journalistic jumping up and down.

All right, Well, it seems like a reach. It seems like you're extrapolating two signals to the whole existence over this new particle, to the whole existence of a parallel universe.

That's right, every step there is a reach. Right. Just because you see these two new particles doesn't mean that there's anything new. It could be experimental error, it could just be luck. Or it could be some heavy new particle in the center of the Earth, which could be maybe a neutrino, which could maybe potentially give credence to this crazy, fun silly theory about a parallel universe.

But I guess maybe why does it have to come from the center of the earth. Is that the only explanation?

Well, because we only see them coming up from the earth, Like we don't see them skimming the earth, We don't see them coming in any other direction. We only see them coming straight up from underground.

Because that's the only place where we have the camera, isn't it now.

The camera can see these things coming even straight down or sideways or coming up from the ice and just skimming it, like just along the horizon. But they don't see anything in those directions. They see only these very high energy nutrinos coming straight up from the earth.

Mmmmm, all right, well what else could they be? One thing is they could be experimental error. I mean, the two out in twenty years does seem sort of like a blip.

Yeah, it does seem like a blip. And so you have to ask, like, well, how well do we know these things? Sometimes it's something rare, but when you spot it, you're pretty sure. Like if you discover a unicorn. Yeah, they're hard to find, but when you get one in your lab, you can pretty well tell us in uniforn.

You seem to speak from experience.

That's my dream, you know, to one day discover unicorn. And so what do we actually know about these things? We really the measurements we have come from these antennas and they're pretty good, but they can get spoofed. Like one scenario is these things didn't come from the center of the Earth. They came from straight down, like maybe a high energenic trino came straight down and hit the ice and the signals sort of reflected in the ice. And then came back up and then was captured by the balloon. So it looked like it came out of the ice, but actually the original particle was coming straight down.

Oh, so that can happen. They can bounce.

That totally happens. They can bounce, But this experiment can usually tell because there's a polarity to this signal. The signals effectively spin in a certain way because of the Earth's magnetic field, and if they hit the ice and bounce, that polarity flips. It's like when light bounces off of water, it changes its polarity. I see, And so they can see this, and so they see this. Actually all the time, they see cosmic rays coming from space that bounce off the ice up to the experiment and then they remove them. But for these two weird neutrinos, they don't see that, so it doesn't look like they bounced. But you know, how well do we really understand the detail tales of Antarctic ice? Could there be something weird going on? Occasionally it gets double reflected or something, right, there's always a possibility.

I think they came from a parallel universe, danda with a different polarity. I'll call New Scientists magazine.

Okay, a parallel universe where everybody likes bananas and DC makes better movies than Mardel impossible.

That just braiks the laws of physics. All right, Well, it sounds like pretty tantalizing, I guess, but it's sort of built upon two measurements, and it's kind of extrapolating a lot from two measurements to new particles to the whole different universe. It's like a lot of ifs there and a lot of like maybes built on top of each other.

And a lot of people doing very careful work, Like the experiment lists have been building this thing and running it for twenty years, and their papers are totally solid. They very carefully understood the source of these things. And in their papers, you know, they say exactly how well they know things and how well they don't know things. And then the theorists also pretty well behaved if they were just like suggesting an idea. They're not claiming the discovery the parallel universe. They just say here's a possible fun explanation, and then you know, it trickled out in the mainstream press and they're hitting the parallel universe button a little too hard, all.

Right, But I guess what's interesting is that it might be possible, right, this could be how we discovered a parallel universe.

It's definitely something interesting. At the most boring end of the spectrum, we've learned something interesting about antarctic ice, you know. More interesting is like, hey, maybe there is some weird new kind of particle, or maybe there is some new source of really high energy to trinos out there we've never seen before, or maybe it's something crazy in bonkers. Right, we can't rule out the parallel universe scenario. It is one explanation for these particles I see.

And so this parallel universe is one where time flows backwards too. It's not just like a copy of ours, it's also running backwards.

Yeah, time flows backwards and anti matter dominates. Oh wow, And that provides a nice symmetry, you know. It's like it answers the question of why does time flow forwards? And why do we have matter or not antimatter? And it doesn't tell you why did the universe split, but it tells you at least it covered both of its bases. It doesn't have like a preference for forward flowing time or for matter over antimatter, and that just feels somehow more natural.

Yeah, maybe Twitter in that universe is like full of positivity and well meaning people.

Yeah, then maybe I prefer that universe.

Yeah, let's move to that one.

I think there's a portal at the center of the Earth.

Oh, there you go. You just got to get past those heavy neutrinos and step through.

That's right. Effectively, there are bouncers to the parallel universe.

Or maybe we can take a balloon, or like an anti balloon. We take an anti balloon to the center of the Earth and then you step through.

Well would you call a balloon that floats below the south pole and an anti balloon anyway, because it's going down?

Oh you're right, you're right. You just turn it on me. Yeah, all right. So I guess the very dick is interesting result, well, solid science, interesting results. But maybe the science journalism there got a little too excited.

A little too excited. I love the enthusiasm of science journalism, but please let's keep it realisten all right.

Well, they did say in the headline we may have spotted a parallel universe. They did add the maid Yeah, may it may covers everything right now, I might have an unicorn right here next to me.

I may be totally lying to you.

Yeah, all right. Hopefully that covered the questions that our readers had about these headlines and maybe got you to think a little bit about what could be out there and not out there.

And if you see something in the science headlines that you don't understand and you'd like to hear about, please send it to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We'll break it down for you.

Thanks for joining us, See you next time.

Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production at by Heart Radio. For more podcasts from art Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.

Our iHeartRadio Music Festival for a sentate Bike Capital One coming back to Las Vegas September twenty first, a weekend full of superstar performances a Sap, Rocky Bays, Shun, Camila Cave To, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Boozy, Black Crows, The Weekend, Thomas Red, Victoria Monett, Coldplays, Chris Martin, hand More, stream Live Holy on Hulu, and get a tickets to be there at Axs dot Com.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life.

Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, bet or we can steer our lives.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe

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