Physicists Propose a Mirror Universe Where Time Moves in the Opposite Direction
The theory could solve certain stubborn physics questions such as, where’s all the antimatter.
Philip Perry 23 June, 2017
Imagine waking up after death and living out your old age, until you grew young enough to have a career, and hoped someday to go to college. This is what life might be like in the “mirror” universe, the exact opposite of ours. According to two teams of physicists, our universe may have a twin where time moves backward.
Of course, this is all just theoretical. But the theory answers some fundamental questions physics has been wrestling with for quite some time. One is, if the universe during the Big Bang was made of equal parts matter and antimatter, where’s all the antimatter?
Paul Dirac first proposed antimatter in 1928. Since then, physicists have found a wide range of antiparticles. These are present during high energy collisions in other places in the universe and also within particle accelerators, such as the large hadron collider at CERN.
In a 1964 experiment, which won them the Nobel Prize 16 years later, James Cronin and Val Fitch proved that you cannot have an antimatter universe for the simple reason that the weak nuclear force violates this model. For a while that was that.
Then in 2004, two scientists at Caltech, Professor Sean Carroll and his graduate student Jennifer Chen, revived the mirror universe theory, by trying to address another fundamental physics question, why does time only move in one direction?
More
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/physi ... -direction
The theory could solve certain stubborn physics questions such as, where’s all the antimatter.
Philip Perry 23 June, 2017
Imagine waking up after death and living out your old age, until you grew young enough to have a career, and hoped someday to go to college. This is what life might be like in the “mirror” universe, the exact opposite of ours. According to two teams of physicists, our universe may have a twin where time moves backward.
Of course, this is all just theoretical. But the theory answers some fundamental questions physics has been wrestling with for quite some time. One is, if the universe during the Big Bang was made of equal parts matter and antimatter, where’s all the antimatter?
Paul Dirac first proposed antimatter in 1928. Since then, physicists have found a wide range of antiparticles. These are present during high energy collisions in other places in the universe and also within particle accelerators, such as the large hadron collider at CERN.
In a 1964 experiment, which won them the Nobel Prize 16 years later, James Cronin and Val Fitch proved that you cannot have an antimatter universe for the simple reason that the weak nuclear force violates this model. For a while that was that.
Then in 2004, two scientists at Caltech, Professor Sean Carroll and his graduate student Jennifer Chen, revived the mirror universe theory, by trying to address another fundamental physics question, why does time only move in one direction?
More
https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/physi ... -direction