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Why Are We Made of Matter?
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "The Universe began with equal amounts of matter and antimatter after the Big Bang, and yet when we look out at today's Universe, we find that, even on the largest scales, it's made of at least 99.999%+ matter and not antimatter. The problem of how we went from a matter-antimatter-symmetric Universe to the matter-dominated one we have today is known as baryogenesis, and is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. Where are we on the quest to understand it as of April, 2014? A wonderful and comprehensive recap is here."
God hid it.
God is made of it.
Okay, that's the god excuses out of the way... now on with the physics!
What does it matter that we're made of matter? Were we made of anti-matter, would it anti-matter to anyone? Don't lose any energy on this matter, because it doesn't fucking matter.
By mass, I'm currently ~70% water, ~29.5% matter, and 0.5% cookie dough
Disclaimer: Do not eat raw cookie dough made with unpasteurized eggs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually, the big bang theory simply says that the universe started in a hot, dense state and expanded into a cold, sparse state. It doesn't even try to explain how the universe came to be in that hot, dense state. It is similar to how evolution does not even try to explain how life started, just how species evolve once they exist.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
In spite of my better judgement I'm about to attempt an analogy, so bear with me here. The lowest number of moves to unscramble a maximally scrambled rubik's cube (a 3x3x3 one) is 20. That is, for every configuration of a rubik's cube, there is a sequence of 20 moves or less that will unscramble it. However, there is no algorithm to generate those solutions. They are unstructured; they're simply lists of moves. The algorithms used by human (and computer) rubik's cube solvers are far from move-optimal, but benefit from being executable by non-omniscient beings. They pick out some pattern that is applicable to the rubik's cube, and then direct you in manipulating it according to that pattern until it's solved.
The way science understands the world is by comparing new data to what we already know. For example, we know penicillin kills bacteria; if we discover a new disease, and then discover that it is caused by bacteria, we can safely draw the conclusion that we'll probably be able to treat it with penicillin. We've used science to discover a pattern in the world ('penicillin kills bacteria'), then use deduction to determine where it is and isn't applicable, and form new categories based on what happens when we encounter new data (like bacteria not killed by penicillin being classified as anti-biotic resistant). Science is basically a collection of patterns like this, and because they're patterns (structures, structured rules, whatever you want to call them) we can understand them.
Now, what I wonder about is this. What if the fact that we live in a matter universe now (rather than an anti-matter one) is like the set of move-optimal solutions to a rubik's cube? They both describe a certain state of affairs, but they also both completely lack (could lack) any kind of structure. And because they lack this structure, there is nothing for us to latch onto, nothing for us to understand, no pattern to detect. It is simply the case, and there is no further reason. There is no reason why there is no structure in the move-optimal solutions to a rubik's cube. There might not be a reason why there is a massive matter/anti-matter imbalance either.
This is something I've been trying to work out for a while, so please excuse me if my explanation is unclear. I just think it would be a really interesting possibility, something which isn't often discussed, maybe because it simply gets overlooked.
I wonder if it is possible that the Universe has some regions of matter and some of antimatter. In between there would be mixed regions and the resulting explosions could tend to keep the different regions separate. Initially asymmetry in the distribution would leave some small regions of each type. The m-am explosions could force separation and a certain portion of the matter regions would merge with other matter regions and the same for antimatter. This seems like a fairly obvious thought, so I assume that it has been considered and ruled out. Why or why not?
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
tell me something in terms an idiot would understand
Richard Feynman answered that question with something like:
"I can't explain it in terms that you would understand, because I can't understand it, in terms that you would understand."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Because we travel the way we do through time.
Antimatter travels through it in the other direction.
And we when we and the antimatter get all the way from one end of Time to the other--BOOM! It's the end.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Uh, where do YOU think it came from? If you say "God," then you have to explain why God can pop up from nowhere, or why he can be eternal, but nothing else can.
Actually they don't have to explain it. That's why it's called faith.
I'm not a particularly religious sort, more agnostic than anything, and faith doesn't really enter into my daily life. That said, there's plenty of things about the universe we just can't explain, so I would think there's room left for faith if that's what a particular person finds to be fulfilling. It doesn't do much for me, but to each their own, and I certainly don't derive a sense of smug superiority from mocking the religious people among us.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That the universe started out with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter is an interesting hypothesis.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Why do people think these simple questions are hard???
I agree. It's almost as if they don't read past the headline.
Well....there is your problem....asking (pure) astronomy grads a question about physics is like asking a (pure) physics grads questions about math. Sure, they know the stuff they need to know to do their work but they can't answer the deeper "why" questions related to the field.
How do we know that there was a 50/50 distribution of matter and antimatter? Perhaps antimatter is rare, or more common in the anti universe in a parallel dimension?
If it didn't, then we would simply change the question to "why did it start with unequal amounts". Since that question would involve forces outside our universe or before the big-bang, it would be much harder to answer. So, scientists try to answer the this question first. If they disprove all of the theories that come up, they will start to consider that there may not be an in-universe explanation. But, it's much better to not jump to the unanswerable question prematurely, or science will become religion.
As soon as physicists solve the problem of antimatter the antimatter bomb will be created.
It will be the size of a coin and could literally destroy literally a quoter of a planet. This is how civilizations end in the Universe.
You vastly overstate the yield of an antimatter weapon.
antimatter weapon yield calculator
The way I have understood what's been said so far is this. The universe started with equal amounts matter and antimatter. Matter and anti-matter can only be produced and annihilated in equal amounts. Today we have reached a state, where there is much more matter than antimatter.
This is obviously inconsistent. So one of those three statements has to be wrong. I for one don't know which one of them is wrong. And I also haven't come across a physicist who had solid evidence for which of them is wrong.
One possibility I have been wondering about is that of antimatter galaxies. Seen from a distance, wouldn't an antimatter galaxy look exactly like one made of matter? I have been told this is not a possibility either, since that would imply that somewhere there would have to be a boundary between matter and antimatter, where a lot of annihilation would be going on and producing gamma-radiation, which we have not observed. I am wondering if the reason we are not observing this boundary is because those regions of space are by now so empty that there is no significant amount of annihilation going on anymore. Or could it possibly be the case that those boundaries are actually so far apart, that there just isn't any such boundary within our event-horizon. That would imply that the antimatter is out there somewhere beyond the event horizon and maybe 10^12 years from now it will be visible.
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Is there any difference between a Black Hole/Singularity formed from Matter vs. Antimatter?
Did galactic-sized magnetic fields push the antimatter into the supermassive black holes in their centers?
If you're looking for something missing of the cosmic scale, black holes seem like a good place to look; although I suppose it'll also be the last place you look...
I should have linked to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I remember asking Dr. Forward that at LACon II, back in '84. He pointed out that a sphere of antimatter could only react to normal matter on its surface, limiting the speed of the reaction. He said that it wouldn't explode, it would evaporate and that it would look something like a drop of water on a hot griddle.
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You vastly overestimate the importance of a comment made by someone who cannot spell "quarter".... ...or posts on slashdot for that matter. (haw haw)
"Hearts full of joy, hearts full of truth. Six parts gin to one part vermouth!"
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But, IIRC, matter and anti-matter particles can only be created in balanced pairs. You may only capture the antimatter, but you still had to create the corresponding amount of matter as a side effect.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We wouldn't be calling it anti-matter, we would just call it "matter" and would be still asking the same question.
So there are really only 2 scenarios.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I've always been suspicious of the Standard Model's insistence that the big bang consisted of nearly equal parts matter and antimatter. The assumptions made by observation of certain particle collisions need to be reevaluated. Much of this seems to because of a belief that time is single dimensional and that mass has no effect on the flow of time, although if you really look at relativity and quantum phenomenon it is obvious that neither of these is the case. Instead we invent the artifacts of dark matter and dark energy to explain away inconsistencies that these assumptions make.