Current Events > Scientists say there could be an 'anti-universe' going backwards in time

(+) Yeah! (+)

paywall, can you copy and paste the entire article so we can read it? looks interesting.

Scientists believe there could be an anti-universe somewhere out there that looks like the mirror image of our own universe, reciprocating almost everything we do. If this theory holds true, it could explain the presence of dark matter.

First, some background: the Big Bang is a collective term that includes a variety of theories studied by cosmologists, the scientists who try to rewind the clock as close to the very beginning of the universe as possible. Most agree that matter exploded forth, but there are different opinions on, for example, whether the temperature was extremely hot or absolute-zero cold at that initial moment.

There are also disagreements about what may have happened prior to the bang itself. Could it be that what we call the Big Bang was the inflection point of an even bigger bounce in progress? Think of the point when you bounce on the trampoline and your feet almost touch the ground beneaththen imagine only seeing the subsequent bounce upward; its meaningless without the first, downward half of the bounce!
Dark matter is, if such a thing exists, maybe even more perplexing to scientists than the Big Bang. Thats because dark matter is a key piece that helps to complete an unclear puzzle the question of what forms the universe around us today, not billions of years ago. Dark matter forms the bulk of the matter in the universe, but weve never been able to see it anywhere.

How is dark matter hidden in plain sight, and what are its qualities? These are huge mysteries upon which a ton of other ideas must rest. For the time being, one way to describe dark matter is very literal: by dark, we mean that it is not luminous, which is the technical term for matter that doesnt reflect or emit any photons in a way we can identify. But we can measure the physical (not visual) effects of dark matter in things like gravitational waves.
Now we arrive back at the new theory. Could it be that a newly discovered anti-universe might run parallel to our own universe, but backward in time? If so, it would essentially spread out backward in time, prior to the Big Bang, in the same way our universe progressed forward in time. In a new paper, published last month in the journal Annals of Physics, researchers from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, suggest that the Big Bang might have been smaller and more symmetrical than we think.
Among other things, we shall describe in detail a remarkable consequence of this hypothesis, namely a highly economical new explanation for the cosmological dark matter, the researchers write.
One cool thing about this model of the Big Bang is that it removes the need for what scientists call inflation, a period of time in which the universe massively expanded in order to account for its size soon after birth. Instead, the matter could have naturally expanded over time in a less forceful way, which could simplify our explanation for what happened.

And in order for these two before-and-after universes to be truly symmetrical, we would need to add a particle to our existing understanding of the universe around us. Today, we know about neutrinos, extra-tiny mysterious particles involved in gravity and weak interaction only. If our universe is mirrored by a similar universe running backward in time from the Big Bang, then what we call dark matter could actually be a version of a neutrino that is right-handed, a term that refers to the direction of motion in the neutrino. It would be the natural opposite of the left-handed neutrinos in the other universe.
<p class="body-text" style="outline: 0px; margin-right: 38.2381px; margin-bottom: 1.25rem; margin-left: 38.2381px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Charter, Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 19px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">If this sounds like wild and heady stuff, youre absolutely right. But iteration using this kind of new theory is a critical part of cosmology, because scientists must have existing, published theories in order to study them and decide what their next theoretical step is. Its so much easier to do that by responding publicly using your own observations and measurements, and that leaves a beautiful trail of ideas over time as we refine our understanding and develop more sophisticated ways to observe the universe.

Can't read that and scientists don't know shit about the universe. They just see pretty lights in the sky and guess like modern cavemen

Maybe when we die, we flip into the anti-verse and being born is what we try to avoid but everybody gets born and enters this universe again

Interesting read, but the "big bang" never happened.

• The Flatness Problem:
• WMAP has determined the geometry of the universe to be nearly flat. However, under Big Bang cosmology, curvature grows with time. A universe as flat as we see it today would require an extreme fine-tuning of conditions in the past, which would be an unbelievable coincidence.
• The Horizon Problem:
• Distant regions of space in opposite directions of the sky are so far apart that, assuming standard Big Bang expansion, they could never have been in causal contact with each other. This is because the light travel time between them exceeds the age of the universe. Yet the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background temperature tells us that these regions must have been in contact with each other in the past.
• The Monopole Problem:
• Big Bang cosmology predicts that a very large number of heavy, stable "magnetic monopoles" should have been produced in the early universe. However, magnetic monopoles have never been observed, so if they exist at all, they are much more rare than the Big Bang theory predicts.

• The Flatness Problem:
• Imagine living on the surface of a soccer ball (a 2-dimensional world). It might be obvious to you that this surface was curved and that you were living in a closed universe. However, if that ball expanded to the size of the Earth, it would appear flat to you, even though it is still a sphere on larger scales. Now imagine increasing the size of that ball to astronomical scales. To you, it would appear to be flat as far as you could see, even though it might have been very curved to start with. Inflation stretches any initial curvature of the 3-dimensional universe to near flatness.
• The Horizon Problem:
• Since Inflation supposes a burst of exponential expansion in the early universe, it follows that distant regions were actually much closer together prior to Inflation than they would have been with only standard Big Bang expansion. Thus, such regions could have been in causal contact prior to Inflation and could have attained a uniform temperature.
• The Monopole Problem:
• Inflation allows for magnetic monopoles to exist as long as they were produced prior to the period of inflation. During inflation, the density of monopoles drops exponentially, so their abundance drops to undetectable levels.

• Alan H. Guth & Paul J.Steinhardt, "The Inflationary Universe", Scientific American, May 1984.
• Andrei Linde, "The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe", Scientific American, November 1994.
• Scott Watson, "An Exposition on Inflationary Cosmology", WWWarticle, 2000.
• Alan H. Guth, "The Inflationary Universe : The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins", 1998.

edit: @DuranOfForcena

big bang is an old theory that was replaced with cosmic inflation theory

It's subtle semantics. "Big Bang" says there was an infinite point of matter and energy.

Inflation theory says, no, it was very hot and dense but it wasn't infinite.

It's similar to how they use to say there was an infinite singularity at the center of a black hole, but of course nothing is infinite so that doesn't exist. There is no singularity, the inside of a black hole is actually more like a fuzzy ball of yarn.

You can read about it on NASA's website (had to break up URL):

https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_infl.html#:~:text=
The%20Inflation%20Theory%20proposes%20a,relatively%20
gradually%20throughout%20its%20history.

I'll copy some:

LIMITATIONS OF THE BIG BANG THEORY
While the Big Bang theory successfully explains the "blackbody spectrum" of the cosmic microwave background radiation and the origin of the light elements, it has three significant problems:
* The Flatness Problem:
* WMAP has determined the geometry of the universe to be nearly flat. However, under Big Bang cosmology, curvature grows with time. A universe as flat as we see it today would require an extreme fine-tuning of conditions in the past, which would be an unbelievable coincidence.
* The Horizon Problem:
* Distant regions of space in opposite directions of the sky are so far apart that, assuming standard Big Bang expansion, they could never have been in causal contact with each other. This is because the light travel time between them exceeds the age of the universe. Yet the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background temperature tells us that these regions must have been in contact with each other in the past.
* The Monopole Problem:
* Big Bang cosmology predicts that a very large number of heavy, stable "magnetic monopoles" should have been produced in the early universe. However, magnetic monopoles have never been observed, so if they exist at all, they are much more rare than the Big Bang theory predicts.
THE INFLATION THEORY
The Inflation Theory, developed by Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, and Andy Albrecht, offers solutions to these problems and several other open questions in cosmology.

Man that's so trippy. What if we could access it and time travel?

So everyone there has Benjamin Button disease?

science has gone too far

That's the entire fucking point of science.

I want to meet Anti-Me and punch him in the face.

I don't know why.

that could cause both universes to implode. Or maybe it will make you into a god

Parallel Universes:
Universes are believed to be born as mixed-state entangled pairs from a single Big Bang event. Unlike the entangled virtual particle pairs that are products of quantum vacuum fluctuations, these universes do not appear as matter and antimatter pairs. Instead, they have derived integer time values that are opposite to each other. This does not mean that time flows in opposing directions. Observers within both universes will experience their own time similarly in that there will be a distinct past, present, and future. Also, unlike matter and antimatter, these universes will not annihilate each other should they interact.
<img src="http://scpsandbox2.wdfiles.com/local--files/bbmofo/cosmic-coldspot.jpg">
Figure 2 The Southern Great Cold Spot found in the Cosmic Microwave Background. A bruise that was left by our twin universe bumping into us just after the Big Bang event that spawned us both. Many Foundation scientists now believe SCP-093 opens a traversable wormhole to this parallel universe.

Our own universe has a parallel universe that was first discovered through the Cosmic Microwave Background. Many Foundation scientists now believe that SCP-093 is related to this universe. (Please review the files related to SCP-093 for further details.)