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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.
...it doesnâ(TM)t.
"...the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
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The phrasing here is just terrible. They confirmed the universe is harder to explain. Phrasing like this is for pushing intelligent design arguments.
Since the law of conservation of mass and energy states that matter and energy can not be created then how did it ever come into existence in the first place?
poof in a flash of logic?
(Yes, from the joke {Rene Descartes walks into a bar and orders a drink. When he finishes his drink, the bartender asks him if he would like another. Descartes replies, “No, I think not,” and disappears in a puff of logic.})
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!"
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones? You ask how it came into existence in the first place, and I say what if it DIDN'T and it's simply always been there?
Everything our current models tell us about reality, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the observable universe could very well be nothing more than a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence.
that's a relief.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Probably. I personally have stopped trying to use science to justify my faith or lack of.
Faith in a supernatural entity is outside the realm of science. Because Supernatural is something that cannot be measured or directly observed. It doesn't mean that it cannot be true, but it doesn't prove that it is.
But saying because of God, is a wonderful way of cutting off the exploration of the topic. This Dichotomy of facts that we exist, however mathematically we shouldn't is an interesting aspect that needs to be studied objectively, there could be observations and measurements that we haven't figured out yet. Perhaps there is Matter+Antimatter isn't 100% cancellation but a number so small we are unable to measure it. We could just throw our hands in the air and say a conscious entity had to do this little hack to make the universe possible, or a glitch in the simulation. But that just stops us from digging further.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here is a simple answer; because we are wrong with something. We have known that we are wrong for a while with the X number of unsolved physical problems.
Another study confirms that the Standard Model is incomplete when it was already known. News at 10.
If you study something deeply to comprehend the rules that has the thing working, and you conclude based on these rules that the thing should not exist, then the rules are wrong, or you're missing deeper insights about that object.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The phrasing here is very much hyperbole.
Standard quantum mechanics (well, relativistic quantum mechanics) states that particles and antiparticles must have exactly the same magnetic properties. Exactly.
If CERN tests didn't verify this, there would be a big, big problem with parts of physics that we thought we knew pretty well. That's a pretty exciting experiment to try, since if there was a big big problem with quantum mechanics, it would be groundbreaking to find this out. But it's not particularly headline news to say "quantum mechanics is confirmed, yet again."
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"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'"
- Isaac Asimov
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's even possible at small scale given enough time. Lots and lots of time. An example being the Loschmidt paradox and the Fluctuation Theorem.
Sentient life is incredibly improbable, therefore sentient life ends up observing an incredibly improbable universe around it, because in all the other possible outcomes, there's nobody there to observe it. So maybe it's just that we are in the matter corner of a universe that just lucked out, and the corresponding antimatter part is somewhere outside the observable portion of the universe.
Someone had to do it.
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 human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one. What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones?
Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
What we do know absolutely for sure is that the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form. Stars don't last forever. Entropy tends toward maximum. If the universe was infinitely old, it would have slid down the curve of entropy to be a featureless mess.
The nature of that event at the beginning (of the universe as we know it), however, is still somewhat unclear. We do see the universe expanding, and that's a clue. We can track it backwards to very small and very dense. But we can't track it backwards to the "beginning," because it gets to realms of energy and density for which we don't know the laws of physics.
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what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
It will be a universe with a you-shaped hole in it. Because you will annihilate everything you touch. Kind of like Symantec.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance - if dark matter somehow interacts with anti-matter somewhat less weakly, for some reason. Black holes don't work, since there don't seem to have been any in the early universe, and there's no reason to think they'd prefer anti-matter.
This news is exiting to me, since one way or another it suggests new physics is needed to understand the imbalance.
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It's probably due to statistical variation in the early expansion of the universe.
Here's an analogy:
Suppose you throw 1 million coins and tally the results. You might expect to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails, but it's *more* probable that you would get a different ratio. The probability of being 1-off in either direction is higher: even though both individual probabilities are smaller there's two possible outcomes (one more head, or one more tail).
(In 8 tosses of the coin, there's 70 ways to make 4H/4T, 56 ways to make 3H/5T, and 56 ways to make 5H/3T. Even split has 70 ways, while 1-off has 112 ways.)
What you actually get is a bell curve of probability. Take a single sample and you expect to get "somewhere near" the mean value, but it's highly unlikely that you'll get exactly the mean.
So in the early universe, suppose position is quantized and there is exactly 1 place to be. Lots and lots of energy sitting on that one spot, some of it splitting into matter and antimatter and then annihilating back to energy.
The universe expands and there are now 2 positions. The energy and matter/antimatter distributes randomly.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
Now suppose the universe continues to grow at a rate faster than the matter can keep up. There are suddenly 4 positions instead of 2, then 8, 16, and so on. The matter/anti-matter ratio in each side is now 210,000/290.000, which annihilates, leaving 80,000 matter particles and 420,000*MC^2 of energy. On each side.
This would only happen if the universe expands faster than the particles can travel across the available positions to annihilate.
As it happens, there's evidence that the early universe *did* expand faster than the speed of light, which is why the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but looks to be at least 93 billion years in diameter. This is the early inflation model.
So even if all known processes generate equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it makes statistical sense that there might be an excess of one or another in different parts of the universe.
The big bang was symmetrical, expanding in both positive and negative time. Matter is weakly coupled to time, anti-matter is weakly coupled to negative time. We live in positive time, and thus see mostly matter.
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But "WTF" is where the best science comes from. Hmmm, the precession of Mercury isn't explained by Newtonian mechanics. WTF? Why here comes Mr. Einstein with an explanation...
As others have pointed out, we know there are issues with the Standard Model, we even have some possible expansions on the Standard Model like supersymmetry, and CERN is doing its darndest to crank up to energy to try to catch a glimpse of the superpartners to the known elementary particles.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
We can make antimatter in a lab, and it does not annihilate slowly when released. If there were significant antimatter around, there needs to be some explanation of how it behaves differently. Because there is a lot of energy, and it would have to be so much slower than what we've observed.
When a very small amount of matter annihilates, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons annihilate only a tiny fraction of its material.
E.g., a back of the envelope calculation for a 10-lb nuclear payload:
10 lb = 4.535 kg = 4.07 E22 joules if converted 100% into energy
cribbing from google, 1 Megaton TNT = 4.18 E15 joules
Simple division yields an energy release of ~97,000,000 MT from 10 lbs of matter. Compare that to a modern nuclear weapon in the range of 5-50 MT.
If you weighed 200 lbs, that would be 1,940,000,000 MT of energy. We're talking asteroid-extinction levels of energy. And there are billions of people on earth who weigh about this much. There is a lot of energy. The annihilation would have to be impossibly slow compared to what we've seen in the lab.
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> What if the universe always existed, and always will?
Considering that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says that:
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
I would tend to agree with you.
Either
a) The universe has always existed, or
b) God has always existed.
Either way you end up with the atheist's F word: Faith.
How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter?
People talk about it like that's when "the universe began", but it's really just "when the universe AS WE KNOW IT began". It says nothing about what was happening before that time because the answer is that we have no idea. Maybe it was always here. It's possible new universes are formed inside of black holes and that our universe was formed in just such a manner.
I rather like Penrose's ideas about this. When the energy density is high enough, effectively everything becomes massless and moves at the speed of light. In such a case, the universe ceases to have time and distance scales - when nothing in the universe experiences time or distance, the concepts become meaningless. General relativity still works just fine in such conditions, as it's fundamentally scale-invariant, so this doesn't break established physics.
Under that interpretation, the big bang isn't when the universe began, but when time (and space) began. What was there "before" was all the same stuff, just in a state where time and distance don't happen.
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There are people trying to prove that antimatter has negative mass. That would explain the 'missing' part as well as the accelerated expansion of the universe [antimatter has somehow become Dark Energy].
There may be people trying to prove this, but if antimatter has negative mass, you have even worse problems. But it doesn't: if it did, then it would take zero energy to create particle/antiparticle pairs (mc^2 + (-m)c^2 = 0). And positronium (which has been made) would have net zero mass, and thus would accelerate to arbitrary velocity under the pressure of photons of trivial energy, and we'd never see it.
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