Can't keep this from you. It is from today's New York Times. Dennis Overbye, a great science and astronomy writer, has written this article:
A New Clue to Explain Existence I'll quote parts of the article for you:
In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.
There you have it: Matter and antimatter annihilate each other. They cancel each other, pure and simple. We know that nature creates antimatter as easily as it creates antimatter, because the big particle accelerators that have existed in the world for many years have kept producing as many particles of antimatter as they have cooked up particles of matter. When nature creates an energetic event (or when humans create an energetic event in their particle accelerators), nature responds by creating pairs of particles, one particle of matter and one particle of antimatter. But a fraction of a second after these pairs of particles have been created, they annihilate each other. It happens that way every time.
So why do
we exist? Why haven't we been annihilated by antimatter twins of ourselves? Why hasn't the Earth been blown to smithereens by an antimattter Earth? Why hasn't the Sun super-exploded by encountering an antimatter Sun? Indeed, why is there any matter at all in the universe, when it should all have been just "cancelled" by the same amount of antimatter?
Well, scientists may have discovered something:
Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons.
Okay.. and that means...?
So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.
Wow! 100% of the antimatter annihilated 99% of the matter, and 1% of the matter remained!!!
And that's where we come from! (Maybe!
)
I love how Dennis Overbye puts this:
The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds.
Okay, the fact that they can't make up their minds mean, in this case, that they oscillate between their matter state and their antimatter state. Now they are particles of matter, but now they have turned into antimatter particles instead!
As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
Okay... this means that when the B-mesons are in their antimatter state, they are slightly more uncomfortable than when they are in their matter state! When they are in their antimatter frame of mind, so to speak, they are slightly more prone to getting headaches, so they try to change back to their matter state a bit more quickly than when they change from matter to antimatter!
And all of it, again, means that there is 1% more matter than antimatter in the universe! But wait a minute. Surely there isn't that much antimatter in the universe? Surely the universe isn't made of 50½ per cent matter and 49½ per cent antimatter?
No! Absolutely not! The universe is about 99.9999999999999% matter. The antimatter that exists is there in the form of particles that "pop up out of nothing" close to energetic events such as supernovae. But those antimatter aprticles always appear along with a matter particle "twin", and then the two always meet and annihilate one another!
No, the universe
isn't 50½ per cent matter and 49½ per cent antimatter. The universe is all but 100% matter, thanks to the fact that 1% of all matter survived as 99% of all matter annihilated 100% of all antimatter!
I don't know if you got all of that, but for myself, I found it fascinating!
Ann
