Was
working on finishing a potholder recently – on one of those
old-fashioned hand looms – and ran out of the colors I needed to
finish it in my preferred manner. I usually like to do symmetrical
color schemes where warp and woof mirror each other. But this time,
though I thought I planned it out properly, I came up short on a key
color. I thought of trying to hide the misalignment by using a near
match but that didn't seem right. I eventually decided to just break
the symmetry in a way that suggested a kind of purpose. It later
occurred to me that this might have been at work at the Big Bang as
well.
When
the energy released by the Big Bang cooled enough to allow the
appearance of charged particles, an equal
amount of matter and anti-matter should have been created.
But if that had been the case, the two would have combined in mutual
annihilation. This obviously didn't happen since we are here. For
some reason, the
symmetry broke. So far, every measurement
seems to confirm that particles of matter and
their anti-matter counterparts are identical except for charge. So
how did matter baryons come to outnumber anti-mater baryons and thus
survive annihilation to form the observable universe? Now maybe –
and here come the potholder point – there was simply not enough of
something. Perhaps the very singularity that expanded into the Big
Bang was already imprinted with some characteristic that meant less
of one flavor of charged particle than the other, just as it seems
different particles were imprinted with varying degrees of stickiness
in the
Higgs field?
The
search for the physics determining the basic constituents and
constants of the universe may simply have reached the point of having
to
think about these matters in a different way.
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