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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.
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.
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
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