Big Bang by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718187859
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Looking up at the 15-metre tall, 14,000-tonne Compact Muon Solenoid, a detector at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, used for studying the fundamental building blocks of matter.

What’s the matter with antimatter?

In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, when the temperature was enormously high, we have no idea what exotic subatomic particles were around. But, after a while, it became cool enough that the fireball consisted of familiar particles like protons and electrons, the constituents of present-day atoms from which all matter is made. Only there is a puzzle. It concerns antimatter.

Particles and antiparticles have opposite properties, such as electric charge. For instance, the antiparticle of the negative electron is the positive positron. Every physics processes we know of creates equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is the universe made of matter, and not equal amounts of matter and antimatter?

A clue comes from the fact that the afterglow of the Big Bang contains 10 billion photons for every particle of matter in the universe. Now, when a particle meets its antiparticle, it ‘annihilates’, ultimately into photons. The 10-billion-to-1 ratio can therefore be explained if the early universe contained 10 billion plus 1 particles of matter for every 10 billion of antimatter. After an orgy of annihilation, one particle of matter was left for every 10 billion photons.

But why did the laws of physics create a Big Bang with an ever-so-slight excess of matter over antimatter? That’s one of the biggest puzzles in science.

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