Slashdot Mirror
CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist (ign.com)
Scientists at CERN are bemused as to why the universe exists, according to a new study. From a report, shared by a reader: Recent discoveries suggest that there's a perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter - meaning it's not clear why they didn't annihilate each other upon the birth of the universe. CERN's latest study sought to find out whether different magnetic properties accounted for matter's seeming victory after the Big Bang, but found another point of symmetry. Essentially, going by our findings so far, there simply shouldn't be a universe. Further reading: Universe shouldn't exist, CERN physicists conclude - Cosmos Magazine.
The phrasing here is just terrible. They confirmed the universe is harder to explain. Phrasing like this is for pushing intelligent design arguments.
Sure it is, and that's the point they're making.
"The Universe should not exist" is the press simplification of "the observable physics shows no reason why matter and anti-matter should be in an imbalance, however, clearly they are in an imbalance, so... WTF!"
It seems to me that poor communication discourages people from being interested in Physics. "The Universe should not exist" is clickbait dishonesty by the media.
Read the scientific article, A parts-per-billion measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment. There is nothing dishonest.
It would have been far better to explain the conflict being observed and acknowledge that not much is known in that area of interest. It is FAR too early to draw conclusions.
What the CERN scientists may have discovered is that the "basic assumptions of the standard model of particle physics" are incorrect.
More clickbait dishonesty:
CERN Antimatter Experiment Suggest the Universe Shouldn't Exist
CERN Research Finds "The Universe Should Not Actually Exist"
The Universe Should Not Actually Exist, CERN Scientists Discover
CERN Scientists Find Further Evidence That the Universe 'Should Not Exist'
The universe shouldn't exist, scientists say after finding bizarre behaviour of anti-matter. Quote: "We don't know why the universe isn't destroying itself." That is at least in the direction of being honest; we don't know why.
I'm guessing that media writers didn't want to try to understand the actual issues, so they all adopted one writer's wild exaggeration.
I see NO evidence that anyone at CERN is dishonest. The dishonesty seems to be only in media reports.
The problem with that theory is that it assumes we're in a "special" region of the universe, and some other area is different.So far, that hasn't shown to be the case.
To use your example, let's say that the first distribution was wildly uneven, with about 75% of the antimatter in one half of the newly-developing space. For simplicity's sake, we'll say that our observable universe is perfectly equal to the matter-dominant side of that split. Now, we should be able to observe every particle, and find that it's matter-to-antimatter ratio is 3:1. That's fine. We should also be able to look at old (distant) regions, and see back to when the universe was still undergoing those distributions, and we should see the results of other uneven distributions. We should see some antimatter-heavy regions and some matter-heavy regions, though we'd still expect to see that general 3:1 ratio.
We don't see that, though. Instead, we've seen no sign of any antimatter-heavy regions anywhere in observable space, regardless of age. This would imply that if such an uneven distribution happened, it happened only before any of our observable universe formed, and all expansion afterward has been perfectly homogenous matter. That's where the probability becomes very unlikely. It's not unlikely to have randomly-bad distributions. It's unlikely that there would be no further sign of such events, if they were prevalent enough to cause our whole observable universe to be so biased.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter?