Universe Shouldn’t Exist, CERN Physicists Conclude


One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time. To explain it, physicists suppose there must be some difference between matter and antimatter – apart from electric charge. Whatever that difference is, it’s not in their magnetism, it seems.

Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign. The work is described in Nature.

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”

Antimatter is notoriously unstable – any contact with regular matter and it annihilates in a burst of pure energy that is the most efficient reaction known to physics. That’s why it was chosen as the fuel to power the starship Enterprise in Star Trek.

The standard model predicts the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but that’s a combustive mixture that would have annihilated itself, leaving nothing behind to make galaxies or planets or people.

To explain the mystery, physicists have been playing spot the difference between matter and antimatter – searching for some discrepancy that might explain why matter came to dominate.

Read the complete article here.

10 Comments

  1. "whether antimatter might fall ‘up’"
    I would really doubt that...

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    1. It is doubtful, but everything has to be checked.

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    2. A kind of "anti-gravity" repulsion would explain the acceleration of the expanding universe.

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    3. Who said there is an up or down, isn't that from our perspective ?

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  2. Maybe the the split between matter and anti-matter during the Big Bang happened at the precise moment that space itself went through the initial expansion, therefore separating the matter and anti-matter enough that they couldn't interact.

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  3. I think "up" or "down" is not validly labeled just from our perspective. Apples keep falling when no one is watching, and happy deer keep finding them on the ground, closest to the source of gravity, not up in the sky.

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    1. So OK 28105wsking, That was exactly my question. Although you say the apple falls to the ground and the deer loves them, that's fine. I was just making a statement who in the world defined up from down or sideways. I'm waiting on your explanation!

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. Observation point, a stable or predictable viewing platform to gain perspective of an event or action....it does not matter if their is an up or down, it is a point of reference to meter or discern an affect

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  6. Up is away from the earth. Down is in the earth. All matter has the same relationship with up and down.

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