One Of The Universe's Secrets Has Fallen

actiondan writes: "The BBC has a story about scientists uncovering one of "natures best kept secrets" Apparently, they have discovered the "secret of matter" which allows the universe to exist." Yes, you can go home now -- because "the tiny difference in the decay rates of neutral K mesons and their antiparticles has been determined with a precision of one part in a million."

Comments

Patent

[AntiNorm]

Quick! Somebody patent it before RAMBUS does! (Just imagine the royalties they could make off of this)

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BBC article explains it a bit better.

[quiller]

The headline is fine, but the text made it seem a lot less important than it is.

Quick synopsis for people: Observation and models had shown that there is an equal chance for matter and anti-matter to be created from energy. The question therefore was why is the universe composed almost exclusively of matter, and not anti-matter? This experiment shows that for the particle studied, there was a measurable difference in the decay rate of anti-matter versus matter. So some matter would stick around longer than the equivalent anti-matter, and multiplied by the nigh-infinite amounts we are dealing with, creates the universe we are in. (The rest gets converted back to energy which will split up into matter and anti-matter again, and continue the process of creating just a bit more matter)

Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[SIGFPE]

But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer. This is an interesting result for physicists but it really does nothing to answer the deep questions posed by either the Slashdot article or the BBC article.
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Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[pubudu]

But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer.

That's not really a fair criticism, since it applies to all science. To take your morphine analogy, a circular answer would be "there is more matter than antimatter because of the CP-Breaking Agent." On the other hand, explaining how soporific agents affect the body such that they explain the observed result is a useful step, for it provides new questions which must be answered in order to understand morphine's effects; without this explanation, we would not know which questions to ask, and so couldn't advance our knowledge.

Similarly with this story. We now "know" that the CP-breaking is a result of unequal decay rates, rather than, say, unequal production rates. Thus, we now know to look at why the fundamental forces appear to work differently on antimatter than on matter, producing the observed result, rather than at why these forces, working equally on some other thing, produce more matter than antimatter in the first place (which would also produce the observed result of more matter than antimatter).

Science is judged by its ability to explain the observed phenomenon, but it advances by knowing which phenomena need to be explained in order to explain that phenomenon.

Bad science reporting

[SIGFPE]

It explains why we are here at all

Is it any wonder that the average person has little faith in the work of particle physicists when research like this is presented in such a ridiculously exaggerated manner? This is a cool research result but it has as much to do with explaining why we are here as knowing the chemical properties of silicon tells you how to program.
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According to the article, this fell in 1964.

[Christopher Thomas]

This article discusses a measurement of CP symmetry violation, which is a difference in behavior between matter and antimatter. CP-violating decay modes have been used as an explanation for the dominance of matter for many years.

The article mentions that CP violation was first detected in 1964.

The article is written in a nice, calm tone, properly painting this as a much nicer measurement of a known effect.

Where did the sensationalistic article blurb come from? Is there *any* justification for it at *all*?

Easy there

[p3d0]

There are a thousand things--from CP violations to the inverse-square law of gravity to the valency of carbon--any of which, if different, could have prevented life from forming.

When theories predict that one link in the chain is missing, and therefore we shouldn't exist, then finding that missing link does explain why we are here.

Nobody claimed that CP violation makes life inevitable; merely, that it makes life possible.
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