Why is our universe asymmetrical instead of symmetrical

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Alan McDougall, Jul 9, 2012.

  1. Alan McDougall Alan McDougall Registered Senior Member

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    Why is our universe asymmetrical instead of symmetrical of which it should be due to the fact that equal amounts of antimatter and matter were created in the Big Bang. These two opposites’ states of matter should have annihilated each other in an explosion of unimaginable proportions leaving a dead universe seething with gamma ray energy.

    But luckily for us somehow this did not happen and we now live to pose this enigma one to the other.

    What are your thoughts?

    Alan
     
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  3. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    Kind of a goofy thread title but ok. The answer is that the Standard Model of particle physics is innacurate in modeling the "Big Bang". What that innacuracy is is unknown, but our universe clearly has more matter than anti-matter.

    What *might* be the reason for the greater amount of matter are B-Meson's. Specificially anti-B-Mesons decay faster than B-Meson's. When you slam matter together with less antimatter, you get matter left over. In the first few moments of the "Big Bang", if B-Meson's slammed into decayed anti-B-Meson's then you would have matter left over.
     
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  5. mathman Valued Senior Member

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    The question being asked (excess of matter) is one of the open problems of current physics.
     
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  7. Alan McDougall Alan McDougall Registered Senior Member

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    But we little mere mortals on the forum can try and address it, nevertheless.

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    Maybe is has been solved by these guys?
    STOCKHOLM - Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping explain why the universe is asymmetrical and thus fit for life, the prize committee said on Tuesday.

    The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known as broken symmetries.

    "The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level," the committee said. This broken symmetry allowed particles of matter to outnumber particles of anti-matter.

    This is lucky for all living things - because if the universe were symmetrical, anti-matter would be constantly meeting matter, and exploding.

    The work, done in the 1960s and 1970s, predicted the behavior of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force, leaving out gravity.

    "Professor Nambu laid a really theoretical foundation for modern particle physics," Sakue Yamada, emeritus professor of the University of Tokyo, told Kyodo news.

    Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, which describes some interactions between protons and neutrons, which make up atoms, and the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons.
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2012
  8. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

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    Either the initial symmetry was not perfect, such as with the b-mesonx, as pure perfection would have to be to the nth degree, and perhaps all things leak, or symmetry requires equilibrium, which inflation wouldn't have.

    The asymmetry was slight, as it took only one excess particle of matter to be left over from 10 billion matter/anti-matter annihilations for all to end up as matter, which we know since there are 10 billion photons for every matter particle.
     
  9. arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    7,832
    Look up CPT symmetry. CP symmetry being broken (independently of T-symmetry, so to speak) is thought to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance:

    CP violation and the matter–antimatter imbalance
    Main article: Baryogenesis
    Unsolved problems in physics Why does the universe have so much more matter than antimatter?

    One of the unsolved theoretical questions in physics is why the universe is made chiefly of matter, rather than consisting of equal parts of matter and antimatter. It can be demonstrated that, to create an imbalance in matter and antimatter from an initial condition of balance, the Sakharov conditions must be satisfied, one of which is the existence of CP violation during the extreme conditions of the first seconds after the Big Bang. Explanations which do not involve CP violation are less plausible, since they rely on the assumption that the matter–antimatter imbalance was present at the beginning, or on other admittedly exotic assumptions.

    The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter if CP-symmetry was preserved; as such, there should have been total cancellation of both—protons should have cancelled with antiprotons, electrons with positrons, neutrons with antineutrons, and so on. This would have resulted in a sea of radiation in the universe with no matter. Since this is not the case, after the Big Bang, physical laws must have acted differently for matter and antimatter, i.e. violating CP-symmetry.

    The Standard Model contains only two ways to break CP-symmetry. The first of these, discussed above, is in the QCD Lagrangian, and has not been found experimentally; but one would expect this to lead to either no CP violation or a CP violation that is many, many orders of magnitude too large. The second of these, involving the weak force, has been experimentally verified, but can account for only a small portion of CP violation. It is predicted to be sufficient for a net mass of normal matter equivalent to only a single galaxy in the known universe.

    Since the Standard Model does not accurately predict this discrepancy, it would seem that the current Standard Model has gaps (other than the obvious one of gravity and related matters) or physics is otherwise in error. Moreover, experiments to probe these CP-related gaps may require the practically impossible-to-obtain energies that may be necessary to probe the gravity-related gaps (see Planck mass).
    --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
     

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