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October 07, 2009 11:27 PM
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Maybe.
Others think that there was a teeny tiny imbalance in favour of postive matter, such that what we see in the universe of positive matter today is just that little bit of extra.
But I have a personal theory. I think that matter was popping into existence from chaos all the time, in equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and then going back into chaos because it was perfectly balanced and cancelled out, but that for some reason, on one of those chaotic events, there popped into existence an asymetry, where the charge was not equally distributed between the mass, which is why there's so little mass that's negatively charge, but so much mass that's positively charge, and because the masses distributed between the charges was not symetrical, it couldn't cancel out and go back into chaos, such that it had to stay, and boom... we've got the universe.
But I'm not sure. I asked a theoretical particle physicists about it back in the early 90's, and all he did was give me a dirty look and huff away, so I don't know.
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Of course there may still be anti-galaxies so far away that we cannot see them well enough to detect their anti-matter nature, in which case there may still be a universal balance.
As for cancellation, that requires matter and anti-matter to be very closely co-located since the interaction you refer to is very very short-ranged.
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Were there equal amounts of matter and anti-matter at the point of the big bang?
Since there is more matter than anti-matter, does this violate symmetry?
Should the matter and anti-matter canceled each other out in a blast of energy?
Should the matter and anti-matter canceled each other out in a blast of energy?
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| October 08, 2009 12:39 AM |
Others think that there was a teeny tiny imbalance in favour of postive matter, such that what we see in the universe of positive matter today is just that little bit of extra.
But I have a personal theory. I think that matter was popping into existence from chaos all the time, in equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and then going back into chaos because it was perfectly balanced and cancelled out, but that for some reason, on one of those chaotic events, there popped into existence an asymetry, where the charge was not equally distributed between the mass, which is why there's so little mass that's negatively charge, but so much mass that's positively charge, and because the masses distributed between the charges was not symetrical, it couldn't cancel out and go back into chaos, such that it had to stay, and boom... we've got the universe.
But I'm not sure. I asked a theoretical particle physicists about it back in the early 90's, and all he did was give me a dirty look and huff away, so I don't know.
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October 08, 2009 01:29 AM
Current theories hold that in the beginning (most likely Big Bang, but not necessarily) matter and anti-matter were perfectly balanced. However, there is a slight CP symmetry breaking in nature, as a result of which there is a slight preference to decays into matter than anti-matter. Over the 14 plus billion years since the beginning, that was apparently enough to bring us to the point where most of what we see around us is matter. Of course there may still be anti-galaxies so far away that we cannot see them well enough to detect their anti-matter nature, in which case there may still be a universal balance.
As for cancellation, that requires matter and anti-matter to be very closely co-located since the interaction you refer to is very very short-ranged.
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October 08, 2009 03:48 AM
How likely is the theory to be true? CPT is the great mystery of physics but does it explain matter and anti-matter imbalances?
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October 08, 2009 12:24 PM
As far as we know at this time, symmetries have not changed since the Big Bang. However, there are some processes (e.g. weak decays) that do not adhere strictly to CP-invariance. Weak decays of hadrons (i.e. composite particles made up of quarks and/or anti-quarks) that have strange quarks and/or anti-quarks have a small but measurable component that does not conserve CP-invariance. This symmetry-breaking slightly favors matter over anti-matter. Thus, as time progresses, there is a tendency to increase the mater-antimatter imbalance in favor of matter. Before you ask why it favors matter specifically, recall that what we refer to as matter is simply what we see more of around us. Had the symmetry-breaking leaned the other way, we would have called 'matter' what we currently call 'anti-matter' and vice versa. As to why there is any symmetry-breaking, we don't know. That may well be a question extending beyond physics and into meta-physics.
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That basic notion tagged along with me my whole life, and one day I was listening to some of my bosses taking about CPT symetry, and how in vacumes there a constant bubbling of matter out of nothing into something, and that they pop out in exact but offsetting pairs, like an electron with a positron, or a quark with an anti quark, and they hang around for as long as the window of time allowed for by Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principal allows, which is determined by the amount of mass of the particles, ie, the less the mass, the longer it can hang around before going back into nothing, and so I took another bite out of my tuna sandwitch and thought about the Big Bang, and how before the Big Bang there might have been a state that I thought to call Chaos, which was neither "something" nor "nothing", and that out of chaos would come definite moments of equal and offsetting pairs of "something" that would hang around within the window of time allowed by the Uncertainty Principal before slamming together again to go back into chaos, and maybe the reaosn the universe happed was that for some meta-chaotic reason, two lumps of stuff popped into existence where they were equal and offsetting in charge and spin, but not mass, such that they couldn't slam back together and go back into chaos, and so boom, the universe full of "something" stayed around.
That's when I turned around and leaned over to the guy I knew who whas a theoretical physicist (mostly I worked for the experimental physicists, but I still knew who the theoretical physicists were) and I asked him if that could have happened, and that's when i got the sneer and he huffed off...
But I wasn't too suprised by that. The lab ran with a strict heirarchy, where the Theoretical Physicists were at the top, followed by the Experimental Physicists, and (way) below them was the grunts like me who would build and maintained their machines, so it was out of line for me to just lean over and ask the guy a quesiton like that, so I don't blame him for huffing off like that... that was out of line and I'd forgotten my place.
But it *does* sort of sound like what you're talking bout... what I was thinking of as Chaos would be the "foam", or what you're calling a C field.
But... later on, I did learn that there *is* some sort of asymetry going on... and it's seen in the behavior of two quark hadrons where one of the quarks is a strange quark. With those, depending upon their spin, when they decay, if they've got left handed spin they'll decay into two particle, but if they've got right handed spin they decay into three particles, so there's something definitly amuck with CPT conservation when it comes to do with the strange quark, and if I were a particle physicist, I'd want to focus all my research on anything to do with hardrons containing the strange quark, like... kaons, for example.