Hmmmm... Perhaps I have misunderstood my Cosmology professor, but a number of different experiments have observed CP-violations. None that exactly fit the bill to explain the total discrepency between matter and anti-matter in the observable Universe, but these experiments still point to the fact that the standard model's baryon/lepton number symmetry is not quite so sacrosanct as previously believed.
Someone said: "This isn't physics. It's math and programming, with someone interpreting it as a physical possibility."
Someone replied: "That's what theoretical physics is. It's the experimentalists and observationalists who confirm or refute the theorists' predictions."
The replier here is absolutely correct. Many kinds of stellar objects were first predicted by Theoretical Physicists before being observed. Why? Well, predictions like this can tell an observerational astronomer what to look for. In fact, black holes were predicted to exist in the 18th Century(!) but were largely ignored until the Einstein's theory of General Relativity proposed a radically different idea about what gravity is which also predicted a method by which light (then thought to be a massless wave and therefore totally unaffeted by gravity) could be "trapped" or bent around a black hole. Einstein predicted a gravitational lensing effect around masses of sufficient size, later confirmed during an eclipse of our own sun. Still later, Stephen Hawking predicted the existence of Hawking Radiation that should be detectable as well coming from near the event horizon of black holes. They were both right, but observational astronomers would not have known what the f#ck they were looking at once a black hole was first observed without the theortical groundwork that was laid first.
Slashdot Mirror
So was this the Nobel Prize you were talking about?
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1980/index.html
http://math.about.com/od/mathhelpandtutorials/Math_Help_and_Tutorials_by_Subject_and_or_Topic.htm
Check it out!
Hmmmm... Perhaps I have misunderstood my Cosmology professor, but a number of different experiments have observed CP-violations. None that exactly fit the bill to explain the total discrepency between matter and anti-matter in the observable Universe, but these experiments still point to the fact that the standard model's baryon/lepton number symmetry is not quite so sacrosanct as previously believed.
You can read about some of the observational experiments here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP-violation
If it interests you, you may also read about baryogenesis and leptogenesis.
Someone said: "This isn't physics. It's math and programming, with someone interpreting it as a physical possibility."
Someone replied: "That's what theoretical physics is. It's the experimentalists and observationalists who confirm or refute the theorists' predictions."
The replier here is absolutely correct. Many kinds of stellar objects were first predicted by Theoretical Physicists before being observed. Why? Well, predictions like this can tell an observerational astronomer what to look for. In fact, black holes were predicted to exist in the 18th Century(!) but were largely ignored until the Einstein's theory of General Relativity proposed a radically different idea about what gravity is which also predicted a method by which light (then thought to be a massless wave and therefore totally unaffeted by gravity) could be "trapped" or bent around a black hole. Einstein predicted a gravitational lensing effect around masses of sufficient size, later confirmed during an eclipse of our own sun. Still later, Stephen Hawking predicted the existence of Hawking Radiation that should be detectable as well coming from near the event horizon of black holes. They were both right, but observational astronomers would not have known what the f#ck they were looking at once a black hole was first observed without the theortical groundwork that was laid first.