Many people have heard of antimatter, an opposite to matter which destroys all the matter it touches. The energy released from this destruction was even used to power the Enterprise in Star Trek. Such a source of energy would indeed be impressive, as just 40 pounds of antimatter combined with matter could power King County for a month. As beneficial as antimatter could potentially be, it also had the potential to destroy the entire universe, and the reason we are still alive to ponder antimatter is still a mystery to scientists worldwide.
In the first days of our universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang. The vast majority of these matter-antimatter pairs collided, however, for reasons still largely unknown, an extremely small amount of matter survived this particulate armageddon (estimates range from one-millionth to one-billionth of the original matter in the universe), which forms everything we know today.
The European Council for Nuclear Research has been working to explain our existence for quite some time, and various scientists have developed partial theories on the issue. Despite their best efforts, however, we have yet to attain an incontrovertible answer to how any matter survived.
Scientists agree that if matter and antimatter follow exactly the same rules, then every atom in the universe would have met its anti-atom, thus resulting in a high energy universe with nothing in it. The fact that we exist is proof that this did not happen, and this has led scientists to believe that something, however minor, must be different between the two. Unfortunately, years of searching and tens of billions of dollars have failed to located a concrete difference between the two. Part of the problem may be that scientists don’t know what to look for, and this is where the various theories come in.
Some scientists think that certain small particles have a very slight chance to produce matter without antimatter. Beginning experiments seem to support this idea. However, out of over 70 trillion collisions, only 1,000 of these particles were produced, and only a few lacked antimatter. Given that these observations are very difficult, the apparent lack of antimatter may simply have been human error. Even if such a particle does exist, the theory is far from complete. This particle is so rare that almost no matter contains it, therefore, even if this theory is correct, it would only explain about two percent of the universe’s matter.
Another theory suggests that matter may have more energy than antimatter. When matter and antimatter is subjected to gravity, it has been noted that regular matter can resist gravity’s effects with its momentum better than antimatter. If this is true, large sources of gravity such as black holes may have allowed a small amount of matter to escape. While this would provide a rational explanation to the problem, and would explain the presence of black holes in the center of every galaxy, there hasn’t been enough evidence to support this claim.
It may be some time before a complete and credible answer comes our way, but, until then, we can be grateful for whatever imperceptible difference allowed us to consider how we are here at all.
Alexander Link is a junior at Tahoma High school and a self described math nerd. He is taking two AP math courses this year and this will be his third year participating in Bear Metal, Tahoma’s robotics club.
