Cosmology; Why there is matter (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 14:08 (3573 days ago) @ David Turell

Matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other in the early universe, but matter survived because of a difference in meson decay:-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/us/val-fitch-who-discovered-universe-to-be-out-of-balance-is-dead-at-91.html?emc=edit_th_20150211&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60788861&_r=0-"In a couple of years they had their answer, and the results shook physics. In about 50 cases, the mesons decayed in a way that was forbidden if nature did not discriminate between matter and antimatter. As Dr. Cronin later explained it in an email, the mesons decayed about 0.3 percent faster into a configuration that included the antiparticle of an electron, called a positron, than they did into one that included an electron.-"But as Dr. Smith pointed out, there was no consensus about the universe at that time. It was only a year later, when radio astronomers discovered incontrovertible evidence that the universe had begun in a Big Bang, that the issue of how matter and antimatter survived mutual suicide became a burning issue.-"In 1967, Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, put all the pieces together — including the kind of discrepancy that Dr. Fitch and Dr. Cronin had discovered — in a list of conditions that would allow matter to survive the Big Bang.-"Dr. Fitch spent the next decade following up on his famous experiment, and experiments at accelerators in California and Japan have documented the effect to high precision. To the disappointment of scientists, however, the amount of discrepancy so far discovered is not enough, by a factor of more than a billion, to explain the preponderance of matter in the universe today.-
"Following Dr. Fitch and Dr. Cronin's lead, physicists and cosmologists are still searching for the right ingredient to put into Dr. Sakharov's formula.-“There has to be some really ingenious proposal for cosmic data,” Dr. Smith said."