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Physicists Investigate Why Matter and Antimatter Are Not Mirror Images (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: As mismatches go, it's a big one. When physicists bring the Standard Model of particle physics and Einstein's general theory of relativity together they get a clear prediction. In the very early universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have come into being. Since the one famously annihilates the other, the result should be a universe full of radiation, but without the stars, planets and nebulae that make up galaxies. Yet stars, planets and nebulae do exist. The inference is that matter and antimatter are not quite as equal and opposite as the models predict.
This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century, but it may now be approaching resolution. At CERN, a particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, three teams of researchers are applying different methods to answer the same question: does antimatter fall down, or up? Relativity predicts "down", just like matter. If it falls up, that could hint at a difference between the two that allowed a matter-dominated universe to form.
This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century, but it may now be approaching resolution. At CERN, a particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, three teams of researchers are applying different methods to answer the same question: does antimatter fall down, or up? Relativity predicts "down", just like matter. If it falls up, that could hint at a difference between the two that allowed a matter-dominated universe to form.
That was effectively my point, there's no question that you can mathematically predict what will happen, most of the time. But this thread is about one of the examples where it doesn't appear to work, along with the various other examples mystery coefficients or mystery energy or mass being kludged in to patch things up.
I think that this apparently "statistical" nature is a function of something very fundamental that we don't yet understand, and some day, somebody will find the reality with a slap to the forehead and a loud "D'OH!"
Note that this has *always* been the case in physics and science in general. Phlogiston theory predicted a lot of things correctly for a long time, for a lot of people who were not morons. Then the edges started fraying, people tried various fixes to try to patch it back together, until someone came along with a conceptual advance, then the old way seems ridiculous and obviously wrong. We are in the "fraying edges" point of the cycle (like the late 1800s).