May 22, 2010

Why is there something instead of nothing? That question haunts the imaginations of philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, and other thinking humans. What we seem to know is that the matter and antimatter created in the Big Bang should have canceled each other out, leaving nothing instead of the something we call the universe. But that didn’t happen. A recent experiment in the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab, may have answered that question.  It demonstrated a very slight bias, an asymmetry, in the behavior of the subatomic particle, B-meson. As B-meson oscillates between its matter and antimatter states, it shows a slight predilection to become matter, a result predicted by Andrei Sakharov. That preference for one state over another, becoming matter more often than it becomes antimatter, is only about 1 percent. But that may be enough to explain the preponderance of matter. We are made of stardust, of elements formed in the Big Bang and in the subsequent creation and destruction of stars. The very existence of matter may depend on this only very slight bias in the frenetic variation of a particle we can only momentarily detect. How mysterious and cool is that?