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.

Comments

"In the beginning..."

[Black.Shuck]

"...the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

- Douglas Adams

We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exist

[organgtool]

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?

And the universe goes....

[Rande]

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.})

Re:And the universe goes....

[DontBeAMoran]

The bartender says "we don’t serve time travellers in here." A time traveller walks into a bar.

Re:Today's silly joke

[beelsebob]

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!"

Re:We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exi

[Baron_Yam]

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.

Re:News flash:

[thegreatbob]

Neither does your apostrophe; it has been replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

This just proves the scientists failure to underst

[hcs_$reboot]

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.

Re:Today's silly joke

[Daetrin]

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'"
- Isaac Asimov

It's an example of poor communication.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:It's an example of poor communication.

[martyros]

From TFA:

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”

One of the physicists from CERN actually said the words, "the universe should not actually exist", which is why so many of the headlines say exactly the same thing. I don't see anything dishonest about either what CERN or the media said.

Completely offtopic -- I was actually on-site at CERN last week and took a picture of myself outside the "Antimatter Factory" building, where they do the kind of research described in the article. Cool stuff.

Re:It's an example of poor communication.

[Wraithlyn]

It's a direct quote from the author of the study, not "dishonest clickbait media".

From one of your own links (that you clearly didn't actually read in your rush to denounce this):

"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist," explained Christian Smorra, the author of a new study conducted at CERN.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

The universe is not infinitely old

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Statistical variation

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:Statistical variation

[Sarten-X]

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.

Re: News flash:

[fisted]

I guess that means that at the moment there's insufficient data for meaningful answer.

Re:Today's silly joke

[MobyDisk]

How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter?

Re:We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exi

[lgw]

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.