“Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off Titelbild

“Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off

“Probability Amplitudes”: Picking up where we left off

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Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Nearly half the matter in the universe is missingThe ledger of particle physics doesn’t balance.Physics tells us the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts—which should have mutually annihilated on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but radiation. Yet, here we are, asking why.Here’s what really happened. For approximately every billion matter-antimatter annihilations, one particle of matter survived. This matter made the stars, planets, nebulae, and us.Physicists call this the “baryon asymmetry problem,” and it’s one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. The ratio of surviving matter particles to photons is about six in ten billion—but we can’t explain why.Science fiction has been playing with antimatter for nearly a century, but mostly as fuel and firepower. Jack Williamson's "Seetee" series puts antimatter asteroids in the Belt and sets engineers to taming them as fuel for spacecraft and power plants. E. E. Smith weaponizes antimatter as the "negasphere," a bomb of “negative matter,” in Gray Lensman. While some authors have written stories skirting the central mystery of baryon asymmetry, none seem to have tackled it directly.One quick reminder—Cloudessy, my consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services, is now a sponsor of this newsletter. If you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business, check out the ad at the end of this post. Thank you!Maybe the antimatter is just hidingThe simplest solution to the baryon asymmetry problem is to deny it exists. Perhaps the universe is balanced—the antimatter is simply somewhere else. This was a respectable scientific position for much of the twentieth century. Antimatter atoms would form antimatter planets, stars, and galaxies. From a distance, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Light emitted by an antimatter atom is identical to light emitted by a matter atom.Larry Niven’s 1967 story “Flatlander” is an sf treatment of this idea. Beowulf Shaeffer investigates a rogue planet inbound from intergalactic space—an object so strange and lethal the mystery of its true nature drives the plot. Of course, it’s made of antimatter. This planet is a relic from the universe’s missing half, preserved for billions of years only because it stayed in the void between galaxies, where there was nothing to touch.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The “hiding” hypothesis hasn’t aged well. If any substantial region of the universe were made of antimatter, gamma radiation from the annihilation of gas particles would light up its boundary with neighboring matter regions. Astronomers have looked. The sky shows no such signs, out to distances comparable to the entire observable universe. Experiments like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station have hunted—so far without confirmed success—for even a single heavy anti-nucleus (such as one atom of antihelium) that could only have come from an antimatter star.Sakharov’s recipeSomething, very early on, treated matter and antimatter differently.In 1967, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov worked out exactly what that “something” would require. To cook a matter surplus from balanced ingredients, the universe must satisfy three conditions.* A way for baryon number to change: Some process must be able to create matter without creating an equal amount of antimatter.* Violations of two symmetries called C and CP: the laws of physics must, at some level, distinguish between particles and their mirror-image antiparticles.* A departure from thermal equilibrium: a moment of rapid, one-way change—such as the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang—when reactions couldn’t run backward and erase the surplus as fast as it accumulated.It turns out our universe does satisfy these conditions—just not enough. The second condition made headlines when CP violation showed up in the laboratory. Physicists first caught nature favoring matter over antimatter in the decays of kaons in 1964, then in B mesons at the turn of the century. In 2025, the LHCb experiment at CERN added a long-sought piece: the first observation of CP violation in baryons—the family of particles that includes the protons and neutrons we’re made of—measuring a small but unmistakable difference in how a particle called the beauty-lambda and its antiparticle decay.But when we add up all the CP...
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