Like the reflection in the water of a mountain on the shore of a lake, our universe could one day have a perfect mirror image. This conclusion was made by scientists from Canada, extrapolating the laws of the universe for periods of time both after and before the Big Bang.
Physicists today have a fairly detailed understanding of the structure of the universe, from the first few seconds after the Big Bang to the present day. At the same time, the basic physical laws have remained unchanged from that time to the present day. However, experts have debated for many years about what happened in that very first moment - when a tiny, infinitely dense speck of matter expanded rapidly - and during these discussions, the possibility of violating basic physical principles is often mentioned.
In a new study, scientists led by Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, offered a different perspective on this problem, presenting a simple scenario in which our universe has always remained fundamentally symmetric. After performing the calculations, the researchers came to the conclusion that before the Big Bang, our Universe was something like a “mirror image” of the modern world, where time went in the opposite direction, and matter was built from particles of antimatter: for example, an atom of such matter was a nucleus of neutrons and negatively charged antiprotons, around which light positrons moved in orbits. All events in such an "anti-universe" developed in the opposite direction, for example, a broken egg in it turned into a whole,and then it ended up straight in the chicken from which it was received in our world.
According to the authors, this new hypothesis helps resolve a number of contradictions in modern cosmology, including the problem of dark matter.
Compiled from materials published on Live Science.