Why we matter

We matter because we are matter. In the cosmic - indeed, universal - struggle of matter against antimatter, matter wins every time.

SPACE.com – Tue May 18, 6:30 pm ET
The seemingly inescapable fact that matter and antimatter particles destroy each other on contact has long puzzled physicists wondering how life, the universe or anything else can exist at all. But new results from a particle accelerator experiment suggest that matter does seem to win in the end.

The experiment has shown a small — but significant — 1 percent difference between the amount of matter and antimatter produced, which could hint at how our matter-dominated existence came about.
The current theory, known as the Standard Model of particle physics, has predicted some violation of matter-antimatter symmetry, but not enough to explain how our universe arose consisting mostly of matter with barely a trace of antimatter.

But this latest experiment came up with an unbalanced ratio of matter to antimatter that goes beyond the imbalance predicted by the Standard Model. Specifically, physicists discovered a 1 percent difference between pairs of muons and antimuons that arise from the decay of particles known as B mesons.

Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.

But that one percent can really ad up. Suppose you went to Las Vegas with one dollar and at the end of the day had $1.01. And the next day you had $1.0201, then another day, another one percent up, etc. At the end of 10 days you'd have $1.10 (rounded). That's a 10 percent ROI in only as many days. At the end of a month you'd be up 35 percent. At the end of a year you'd have turned that dollar into $846.80, an ROI of 84,680 percent. On a cosmic scale, that kind of ROI (in energy, not money) results in a pretty big universe.

But the question is why, in that first quadrillionth of a second when the universe popped into being, there was one percent more matter than antimatter. Or maybe there wasn't, but that 99 percent of each destroyed each other and blew the other one percent far enough away to prevent their interaction. Whatever happened, it happened indescribably fast; scientists say that the universe underwent "inflation" in its first billion-billionth of a second, meaning the universe expanded from the  non-dimensional singularity (a scientific word that means, "we don't know what it is") to 99 percent of its present size. What this really means is that the universe, for all practical purposes, did not "big bang" into existence but simply appeared, all at once, instantaneously.

Does that mean there could be an antimatter universe out there somewhere (whatever "out there" means), beyond the extent of our universe? I would think that scientists are not ruling it out, but there is no evidence for it. What we seem to have now is that you and I and amoeba and giraffes and rocks and the sun and everything that we can detect are all simply beneficiaries of the cosmic one-percent solution.