Sep 4, 2024 06:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 4, 2024 06:45 PM by C C.)
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...-collider/
EXCERPT: Yet there’s one enormous question, of importance on cosmic scales as well as to those who study nature at an elementary level, that often gets overlooked: why is our Universe, and everything in it, predominantly composed of normal matter, and not of antimatter?
We’ve learned a whole slew of lessons about the Universe — what makes it up, what the nature of the various particles and antiparticles are, what rules they obey, etc. — and yet we’ve not once concocted a way to change the net number of baryons (things like protons and neutrons) or leptons (things like electrons) in the Universe. Yet, very clearly, the Universe did just this at some point in its distant past, otherwise there wouldn’t be the planets, stars, galaxies, and more that we observe all throughout the Universe.
This longstanding mystery has been unsolved for as long as it’s been noticed, but the best chance we have to make progress is one that most people wouldn’t expect: to build a new, more powerful, more precise particle collider. Here’s the science behind this mystery, and why a new collider is our best bet to try to solve it... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: Yet there’s one enormous question, of importance on cosmic scales as well as to those who study nature at an elementary level, that often gets overlooked: why is our Universe, and everything in it, predominantly composed of normal matter, and not of antimatter?
We’ve learned a whole slew of lessons about the Universe — what makes it up, what the nature of the various particles and antiparticles are, what rules they obey, etc. — and yet we’ve not once concocted a way to change the net number of baryons (things like protons and neutrons) or leptons (things like electrons) in the Universe. Yet, very clearly, the Universe did just this at some point in its distant past, otherwise there wouldn’t be the planets, stars, galaxies, and more that we observe all throughout the Universe.
This longstanding mystery has been unsolved for as long as it’s been noticed, but the best chance we have to make progress is one that most people wouldn’t expect: to build a new, more powerful, more precise particle collider. Here’s the science behind this mystery, and why a new collider is our best bet to try to solve it... (MORE - missing details)