We should not exist. With this statement I do not endorse the perspective of those doomsayers and past backs who circulate on the internet and who say that the human race is the worst. No, I'm speaking from the physical point of view: our existence was very improbable. But let them take away the dance. The Big Bang theory, with its greatest hits explaining why the Universe is the way it is, does not tell us why what we see around us exists. Let me explain.
The universe likes the Zen mode, the balance between yin and yang, that everything is preserved even if it is transformed in one way or another. In a way, it cannot be otherwise: what exists, exists, and will always exist in the universe, even if it does not always look the same.
We can see it from a point of view of what is called thermodynamics, a branch of physics, which has as one of its postulates that when two systems at different temperatures interact, their thermal states tend to equalize, to reach an equilibrium in which a physical property, temperature, is homogenized. Take the test by opening the window one of these spring days (in the northern hemisphere).
Read more: How did our atoms get here?
The balance in the universe can be seen in other ways, although we have not always been as we are today, so we live in a variable equilibrium. Open the freezer and look at an ice cube. In this icy environment, water molecules live in an equilibrium in which they are linked together forming a crystalline lattice (we actually know eighteen different forms of ice according to the structure of those crystals). Outside the freezer, at a higher room temperature, another equilibrium is passed, with the molecules forming a liquid, a change of state occurs. Something similar has happened to the universe several times, changing state and changing its properties ostensibly, depending on the ambient temperature.
Let's leave the physics of walking around the house and move on to more complex environments. And let's keep warming our heads and, incidentally, the universe. If some like to pick up ice-cold beers from the fridge, physicists are passionate about pulling superhot particles out of labs like Fermilab or CERN. Temperature is motion, and in those laboratories particles are accelerated to incredible speeds, giving them literally extraordinary energies for our time. For example, Fermilab accelerates particles through magnetic systems whose power is equivalent to about one million light bulbs at home, or what a city like Nerja consumes. That power is used, for example, to accelerate protons to speeds that differ from that of light by only a few ten-millionths, to make them collide with fairly dense atoms (such as iridium) and end up producing antiprotons.
Antimatter
Antiprotons are a form of what is known as antimatter, which is just like the matter we know, but with reverse electric charge (in addition to other properties that are also reversed). All particles have their antiparticle, and if they collide they self-annihilate, giving rise to photons (and some more particles in certain cases), releasing an energy given by the famous equation E = mc².
All particles have their antiparticle, and if they collide they self-annihilate
The fact is that we have only managed to create on the order of one billionth of a gram of antimatter in our entire history. And although there is antimatter that occurs naturally in cosmic ray impacts, it does not last at all, it quickly annihilates colliding with the matter that surrounds us everywhere.
And here we come to the key point: matter surrounds us. There is no antimatter in significant amounts anywhere we have explored. Neither near nor far, we have never seen a galaxy of matter collide with one of antimatter, the spectacle of light and color would be tremendous. But there is no such thing.
However, in a very, very hot and dense early universe, at only about 2 trillion degrees Celsius, according to the Big Bang theory (for reference, the core of the Sun is at 15 million degrees), the collisions between particles, and between particles and antiparticles, should be continuous, with typical energies of the order of a trillion times those we have achieved at CERN. And so the system (the system is the whole universe) maintained equilibrium, an equal number of particles as antiparticles, all appearing and annihilating continuously (and giving rise to other particles, such as photons).
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Uly Martin
Today, however, we live in a universe of matter. Why? In a universe in equilibrium with the same amount of matter as antimatter, everything should have self-annihilated and only photons would remain. But no, thanks to the heavens, or the universes, not everything was annihilated. How was that possible? There had to be, for some reason, an excess of matter that survived (or antimatter, but today we call it matter, it doesn't matter), and here we are to prove it. So tells us the Big Bang theory, which very successfully describes many things we observe in the universe, but not why only matter exists and, by extension, why we exist.
The implications of the universe being full of matter and antimatter not appearing anywhere are extraordinary. We can think that, by some quantum fluctuation, an area of the universe (as large as everything we know) was found with an excess of matter. This may have happened at a time when everything that makes up the universe was in a determined state with matter and antimatter coexisting, a state analogous to the ice in our fridge. But the quantum fluctuation occurred just at the exact instant when the universe passed into another state, in which the properties were very different, a change of state analogous to the passage from ice to water. Something, surely rare and tremendously opportune for our interests, passed along the way. It may also be that part of the essence of that change of state, perhaps something called inflation, caused that area where a quantum fluctuation occurred to be isolated from the rest of the universe.
The implication is that we would live in that "small" primordial bubble and the universe itself should be much larger than what we see, with areas of it totally inaccessible to us, which would be dominated by antimatter, with its galaxies, stars, planets and life?!, of antimatter. But we must consider that we do not see the borders of those bubbles, since we do not detect massive matter/antimatter annihilation anywhere. So the thing can not be so simple.
We concluded then that we should not exist; Matter and antimatter should have self-annihilated in the early universe. But in a lottery where the probability was one in a billion (that's another story) we got the prize: the cosmic void was filled with matter. And here we are.
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