[mta] NYT: From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?

[Premise Checker]

From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/science/space/18cosmos.html (read)

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are
reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help
unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe
is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If
confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new
Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible
explanation for our own existence.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we
would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of
Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of
matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and
then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy,
leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and
us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly
like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at
Fermilab's Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful
particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero
collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the
particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly
more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature
universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being
about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

"This result may provide an important input for explaining the
matter dominance in our universe," Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of
the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk
Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread
quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California
Institute of Technology called the results "very impressive and
inexplicable."

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to
the Physical Review.

It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who
first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter
in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a
slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles
known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and
spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly
differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few
examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic
particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but
"not enough to explain our existence," in the words of Gustaaf
Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange
particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being
able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions
of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter
state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton
collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter
state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an
eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent,
when they decay to muons.

Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that
cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior
of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who
called the situation "fairly encouraging."

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by
the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle
physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the
B-meson to act this way is "new physics" that physicists have been
yearning for almost as long.

Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new
particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of
interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, "this is something
we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider."

Neal Weiner of New York University said, "If this holds up, the
L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results."

Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the
results are confirmed by other experiments.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, "So I would not say that
this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but
it might turn out to be the toe of God."

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[Carl Youngblood]

Cool stuff. Wonder if these collider experiments are inadvertently
creating new universes. What if God created us without being fully
aware of it?