Our Parallel Universe Running In Reverse Time

There’s a parallel universe running in reverse time! Seriously?

In early 2020, as we were just learning about a virus called Covid-19, other media headlines were buzzing about ground-breaking experiments in Antarctica and reprinting information from an article New Scientist had published titled “We May Have Spotted a Parallel Universe Going Backwards in Time” which declared, “Explaining the signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right, and time runs backwards.” The news sounded like something out of Through The Looking-Glass or the “Mirror Universe” episodes of Star Trek. What was this sorcery, and how could it possibly be real? Could the implications mean our ancient gods of lore may have actually been visitors from this twin universe?

The scientific studies New Scientist cited for this article were taken from the ANITA project in Antarctica. The ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna) is a stratospheric balloon-based experiment which points a radio antenna back at Earth to try to detect radio waves that are emitted by high-energy neutrinos if they happen to strike an atom in the ice. Back in 2016, ANITA detected evidence of these high-energy neutrinos that were supposed to be arriving from space actually coming up out of the Earth’s surface without a source. When these findings were published a few years later, New Scientist may have taken a bit of an initial leap in proposing a parallel mirror world running in reverse time. Or, perhaps, they knew what was coming down the road since, ultimately, the idea is not without merit and has recently been re-proposed by other sources.

At the time the article was published in 2020, traditional media and academia were quick to dismiss the claims, such as a Forbes article which stated, “It’s all way overblown and misrepresents what the research in question is about.” Since this interpretation of the data was being reprinted in tabloid-esque media outlets like the New York Post, Daily Star, and Express, traditionalists wanted to sweep it under the rug. That same Forbes article went on to state, “To be clear, there is zero evidence of what the Daily Star says is ‘a parallel universe, right next to ours, where all the rules of physics seem to be operating in reverse.’” Perhaps, they shouldn't have been so quick to be dismissive. Two years later, it appears we may have the evidence they didn’t believe existed.

In March 2022, popular media sources such as Live Science and Space.com started printing familiar headlines: “Our Universe May Have a Twin That Runs Backward in Time.” It was déjà vu of the 2020 articles, but this time they cited a new peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Annals of Physics which expanded on the neutrino research and supported a universal symmetry. Titled “The Big Bang, CPT, and Neutrino Dark Matter,” this paper states, “We investigate the idea that the universe before the Big Bang is the CPT reflection of the universe after the bang, both classically and quantum mechanically … The universe before the bang and the universe after the bang may be viewed as a universe/anti-universe pair, emerging directly into the hot, radiation-dominated era we observe in our past.”

Within nature, physicists have defined a set of symmetries, three of the most important of which (CPT) are referenced in this paper:

Charge: If you flip the charges of all the particles involved in an interaction to their opposite charge, you'll get the same interaction.

Parity: If you look at the mirror image of an interaction, you get the same result.

Time: If you run an interaction backward in time, it looks the same.

The idea here is that in order to preserve the CPT symmetry throughout the cosmos, there must be a mirror-image cosmos that balances out our own. This cosmos would have all opposite charges than we have, be flipped in the mirror, and run backward in time.

If this concept of symmetry and balance sounds familiar, it ought to. One needs to look no further than the yin yang symbol and the belief that there can be no positive without negative, no light without shadow, and there’s a delicate balance of two sides throughout the universe. There is also an interconnectedness represented in the symbol in the way the curves flow together and how there is a little of each in the other. If our universe and this mirror universe came from the same Big Bang then that means we originate from the same source material and were connected at birth, so we forever have a relationship with it. We see similar symbolism of duality and balance in the Andean Yanantin, the Norse rune Dagaz, the Celtic double spiral, and many more. It seems science may finally be catching up to what the ancients were telling us long ago.Furthermore, if our universe is operating from a beginning to an end then the other universe would be operating from end to beginning, meeting with us again and starting the cycle over. Again, we see this type of symbolism play out in the ancient world with the ouroboros, the symbol of constant recycle and renewal. The oldest allegorical symbol in alchemy with roots in ancient Egypt, the ouroboros represents mystical time flowing back into itself for eternity.

Taking this type of universal symmetry a step further, if this mirror universe is running in reverse time from us then its most sophisticated civilizations would have been thriving at a time when ours were at their most primitive. They may have started off as space-faring races across the cosmos and are now a society that has been slowly been devolving for millennia. Is it possible in a time long ago they had the ingenuity and technology to traverse the universes and visit our world, possibly appearing as gods to our most ancient cultures? Have these beings tried to impart knowledge upon us because they’ve already seen what happens to humanity? In our future, will we be doing the same for them when they reach a more primitive state as their time continues to run backwards? 

It’s a lot to consider from experiments in one of the most remote areas of our planet on subatomic particles we can’t see with our own eyes. But if it’s true that this mirror universe is out there, then we may be getting reintroduced to something our ancient ancestors had been telling us about long, long ago.

For more information, including the role of dark matter in this mirror universe, watch our Connecting The Universe interactive class "Anti-Universe and Mirror Worlds" within the Connected Universe Portal member area at: