Physicists Have No Idea What They Have Measured

In 2006 and 2014, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) detected two mysterious bursts of particles rushing upwards into space from Earth’s surface. Physicists initially brushed this off with a plausible but boring explanation, but that reasoning has now been thrown out the window. So it’s back to the drawing board, and we might be looking at new physics. Let’s take a look at how this happened and what it means for physics.