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Curiosity

@MAstronomers

Aug 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X

🚨: Physicists say there’s a mirror universe where time runs in reverse

What if the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything – but the middle?

Physicist Neil Turok, former director of the Perimeter Institute and now Chair at the University of Edinburgh, has proposed a bold new theory with his colleague Latham Boyle: the universe may have a mirror twin – one that existed before the Big Bang, where time runs backward and matter is made of antimatter.

This isn’t just speculation. Their idea is rooted in a well-known principle called CPT symmetry – the notion that the laws of physics remain unchanged if you flip charge, space, and time. While our universe appears to violate this symmetry, Turok and Boyle suggest that a mirror universe on the other side of the Big Bang would restore it. In this view, the Big Bang isn’t the start of time, but a dividing line between two time-reflected realities.

The theory also offers real solutions to some of cosmology’s biggest mysteries. Unlike string theory or cosmic inflation – both of which remain hard to test – the mirror universe model is based on known physics and makes testable predictions. One of the most promising: dark matter could be made of stable, right-handed neutrinos, created naturally in the mirror universe in exactly the right quantities to match what we observe.

Even more striking, the theory is already being tested. It predicts that one of the three known neutrino types must be massless – and large-scale galaxy surveys are now checking to see if that's true.

The model also explains why the universe is so smooth, flat, and expanding – features inflation was invented to explain – but does so with fewer assumptions and no need for exotic physics.

Learn more:
Turok, Neil. "‘Cosmic inflation’: did the early cosmos balloon in size? A mirror universe going backwards in time may be a simpler explanation." 24 October 2024, The Conversation.

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