Neil Turok on the case for a parallel universe going backwards in time

To explicate the cosmos without invoking cosmic inflation, physicist Neil Turok has projected the beingness of a mirror-image beingness going backwards successful clip from the large bang. He tells america wherefore the thought is truthful compelling

Physics 25 January 2023

By Thomas Lewton

Nibali Nezzar

COSMOLOGICAL inflation is the thought that, successful its archetypal moments, the beingness underwent a sudden, utmost expansion. This is wide accepted due to the fact that it explains wherefore space-time is astir perfectly level and wherefore substance successful the cosmos appears truthful smoothly distributed connected the largest scales. Or does it? The occupation is that determination are galore versions of inflation, astir of which wouldn’t pb to the beingness we observe – and the request for specified “fine-tuning” of the mentation to lucifer observations makes immoderate physicists nervous.

Among them is Neil Turok, erstwhile manager of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics successful Waterloo, Canada, and present astatine the University of Edinburgh, UK. Turok, alongside Latham Boyle astatine the Perimeter Institute, has projected an alternate to ostentation that tin explicate the improvement of the aboriginal beingness without fine-tuning. In 2018, by taking earnestly 1 of the deepest symmetries of nature, they arrived astatine a mind-boggling hypothesis: a mirror beingness stretching backwards successful time from the large bang.

An unobservable anti-cosmos is hard to swallow. It didn’t assistance that the observations of unusual particles by the ANITA scope successful Antarctica, initially invoked arsenic imaginable grounds for the idea, turned retired to beryllium a mendacious alarm. But Turok and Boyle person developed their thinking. Now, pursuing a flurry of papers, they reason that the reflector beingness explains each the worldly that ostentation can, but besides respective different mysteries, including that of acheronian substance and acheronian energy. They person adjacent made testable predictions successful an effort to triumph implicit sceptics.

Thomas Lewton: Can you archetypal explicate however the thought of ostentation became dogma?

Neil Turok: Inflation was based …