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from the witty-comment-about-Illudium-PU-36-goes-here dept.
New Finding of Particle Physics may Help to Explain the Absence of Antimatter:
In the Standard Model of particle physics, there is almost no difference between matter and antimatter. But there is an abundance of evidence that our observable universe is made up only of matter -- if there was any antimatter, it would annihilate with nearby matter to produce very high intensity gamma radiation, which has not been observed. Therefore, figuring out how we ended up with an abundance of only matter is one of the biggest open questions in particle physics.
[...] About ten picoseconds after the Big Bang -- right about the time the Higgs boson was turning on -- the universe was a hot plasma of particles.
"The technique of dimensional reduction lets us replace the theory which describes this hot plasma with a simpler quantum theory with a set of rules that all the particles must follow," explains Dr. David Weir, the corresponding author of the article.
"It turns out that the heavier, slower-moving particles don't matter very much when these new rules are imposed, so we end up with a much less complicated theory."
This theory can then be studied with computer simulations, which provide a clear picture of what happened. In particular, they can tell us how violently out of equilibrium the universe was when the Higgs boson turned on. This is important for determining whether there was scope for producing the matter-antimatter asymmetry at this time in the history of the universe using the Two Higgs Doublet Model.
"Our results showed that it is indeed possible to explain the absence of antimatter and remain in agreement with existing observations," Dr. Weir remarks. Importantly, by making use of dimensional reduction, the new approach was completely independent of any previous work in this model.
Journal Reference:
Jens O. Andersen, Tyler Gorda, Andreas Helset, Lauri Niemi, Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen, Anders Tranberg, Aleksi Vuorinen, David J. Weir. Nonperturbative Analysis of the Electroweak Phase Transition in the Two Higgs Doublet Model. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 121 (19) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.191802
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:17AM (2 children)
The big bang theory is a religion. Something from nothing. That's magic.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:15AM
It's the most plausible beginning we get by extrapolating the laws of physics backwards as far as they'll go. Same laws of physics that make everything we see today function, so they have a pretty good track record. Though there are still some really big mysteries unsolved, and once we solve them the revised laws of physics might extrapolate backwards to different starting conditions.
That said, there's two big answers to your "magic"
1) Who said it was created from nothing? The big bang is just as far back as we can extrapolate - the point at which the laws of physics themselves break down. And it still presumes that all the energy of the universe already existed, just in one incredibly dense and uniform point. Nothing was "created", the energy just kept spreading out and cooling off until it could condense into matter. In fact, the original theory was that the universe was cyclical, and that eventually the current universe would collapse back in on itself under its own gravitational self-attraction until it condensed into a insanely dense and uniform ball of energy, and exploded back outward again. The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe caused that idea to lose popularity, but it's still possible - it just depends on the current "dark energy" expansion being a transient phenomena that may cease to function at some point, potentially long after the heat-death of the universe.
2) Who said there's anything now? There's a credible argument to be made that the net sum of everything in the universe right now may be zero, since all potential energy is negative: Take two planets unaffected by each other's gravity - they have zero potential energy with respect to each other, and must be infinitely far apart for that to be true. Bring them closer together, so that they begin to feel each other's gravitational pull, and now they have potential energy - NEGATIVE potential energy, because it's less than they had when they couldn't feel each other at all, and you'd have to spend energy to pull them back apart again. Do the same thing for every charged particle, magnetic field, electro-nuclear attraction, inter-quark color-charge, etc. and you have a truly mind-bogglingly amount of negative potential energy in the universe. Possibly enough to cancel out all the mass-energy currently existing. In essence, something unknown happened that separated the nothing from the nothing in such a way created stable structure that could maintain the separation, at least for a few trillion years.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:26AM
No that's quantum. Seems that space is full of particles popping out of nothing and returning to nothing. The universe is stranger then we can imagine.