Antimatter mysteries 1: Where is all the antimatter?
- 27 April 2009 by Amanda Gefter
- Magazine issue 2705
Read more: The five greatest mysteries of antimatter
If you were to list the imperfections of the standard model - physicists' remarkably successful description of matter and its interactions - pretty high up would have to be its prediction that we don't exist.
According to the theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the big bang. By rights, they should have annihilated each other totally in the first second or so of the universe's existence. The cosmos should be full of light and little else.
And yet here we are. So too are planets, stars and galaxies; all, as far as we can see, made exclusively out of matter. Reality 1, theory 0.
There are two plausible solutions to this existential mystery. First, there might be some subtle difference in the physics of matter and antimatter that left the early universe with a surplus of ...
