Matter vs. Antimatter or Good vs. Evil
There is a natural explanation for good and evil. Good, in the traditional human sense, is that which creates, gives life, allows individual entities to thrive. Evil, in the traditional human sense, is that which destroys, manes, and enslaves. This line is blurred in nature, where I take no solace in its peace. The amount of death and destruction that takes place in nature is overwhelmingly depressing. It has taken the minds of humanity to be aware of this natural tendency to conquer and destroy and turn it in to an effort to overrule our animal behavior.
But I digress. In a larger sense, good can be tied to matter and evil can be tied to antimatter. Everything that exists as we know it is a result of the appearance and our observation of matter. However, it could have been the other way around. Antimatter could have won the day following the eruption of energy commonly called the Big Bang from roughly 13.7 billion years ago.
It turns out that good/matter just barely wins, by a miniscule one percent. All of life as we know it is because of that one percent. How do we know this? We know this because ‘Fermilab Finds New Mechanism for Matter’s Dominance over Antimatter.’
Physicists and cosmologists seek such mechanisms to help explain why matter prevailed over antimatter in the early universe, when both should have been created in equal parts, yielding a storm of mutual annihilation and not the stable material structures—galaxies and the like—that fill the universe.
Some properties of high-energy physics have been shown to be fundamentally asymmetrical, producing matter more often than antimatter, but in quantities too small to explain the relative dearth of antimatter in the universe. The new mechanism observed at the Tevatron’s DZero detector appears to work on a much larger scale, says Fermilab staff scientist Dmitri Denisov, co-spokesperson for the DZero collaboration, but whether it can explain the preponderance of matter today remains to be seen. In any event, the asymmetry does not fit with the long-reigning Standard Model of particle physics, suggesting that some hitherto unknown particle or interaction may be at play.
“While colliding protons and antiprotons, which creates neutral B mesons, we would expect that when they decay we will see equal amounts of matter and antimatter,” Denisov says. “For whatever reason, there are more negative muons, which are matter, than positive muons, which are antimatter.” According to DZero member Gustaaf Brooijmans, a physicist at Columbia University, “We observe an asymmetry that is close to 1 percent.”
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