This has made the rounds of the media today. Given how fabulously trustworthy the press is, filled with reporters who truly go to the bother to fundamentally understand what they report on and to report on it with full honesty, transparency and without hyperbole… I think it’s fair to suggest taking this with a pinch of salt.

NASA scientists detect parallel universe ‘next to ours’ where time runs backwards

The short form: ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna) is a NASA experiment conducted over Antarctica. Large balloons are used to lift a particle detector high up into the thin atmosphere. Since the Earth should block most of these, they should only be detected coming from above. But tau neutrinos were detected coming from *below.* Occams Razor would suggest that they are being emitted from something below (ahem ahem ELDER THINGS ahem ahem), but at least somebody is suggesting that rather than coming up from below, they’re actually coming down from above… but doing it backwards in time.

It’s an intriguing idea, but I gots me a question: I can buy the notion of a particle going backwards in time, and thus seeming to come up from below when it’s actually going down from above. But if you detect a particle, that means you have intercepted and diverted or fundamentally transformed it. So… this time-reversed particle would seem to be emerging not from some distant astrophysical event, but it’s emerging from the *detector,* ain’t it?