MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS PART IV

MATTER OVER ANTIMATTER
We find beauty in symmetry, but without a key piece of asymmetry, we wouldn't be around to appreciate the finer things. In the realm of particle collisions and quantum processes, antimatter is produced as often as ordinary matter. In fact, the big bang should have produced equal amounts of both—not a good thing, because each piece of antimatter would destroy an equal amount of matter. The big bang should thus have created universe of only light and energy, free of any solids, liquids or gases.

It's possible that the big bang did indeed create enough antimatter to create anti-suns, anti-planets, anti-galaxies and the like, and that they exist somewhere in separate pockets of the universe. But decades of observations of deep space make that possibility seem unlikely.

So, some sort of asymmetry occurred that skewed the universe's evolution toward matter. It would not have taken much—just one extra matter particle for every billion particle-antiparticle pairs. Researchers have discovered an asymmetry between the behavior of matter and of antimatter, called charge–parity violation, which could have skewed things to our side of the material world. But for this subtle bias to translate into an excess of matter, the primordial universe would have had to go through a wrenching period of imbalanced conditions, and so far no one knows how that might have happened.