One Of The Universe's Secrets Has Fallen

actiondan writes: "The BBC has a story about scientists uncovering one of "natures best kept secrets" Apparently, they have discovered the "secret of matter" which allows the universe to exist." Yes, you can go home now -- because "the tiny difference in the decay rates of neutral K mesons and their antiparticles has been determined with a precision of one part in a million."

Patent

[AntiNorm]

Quick! Somebody patent it before RAMBUS does! (Just imagine the royalties they could make off of this)

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huh?

[holzp]

and this doesnt even make the front page!?

Do you have stairs in your house?

[Steve S]

Would this be the Terrible Secret of Space?

BBC article explains it a bit better.

[quiller]

The headline is fine, but the text made it seem a lot less important than it is.

Quick synopsis for people: Observation and models had shown that there is an equal chance for matter and anti-matter to be created from energy. The question therefore was why is the universe composed almost exclusively of matter, and not anti-matter? This experiment shows that for the particle studied, there was a measurable difference in the decay rate of anti-matter versus matter. So some matter would stick around longer than the equivalent anti-matter, and multiplied by the nigh-infinite amounts we are dealing with, creates the universe we are in. (The rest gets converted back to energy which will split up into matter and anti-matter again, and continue the process of creating just a bit more matter)

Antimatter is dumb

[Squiffy]

Antimatter is dumb, and so is God. What kind of a stupid God would make antimatter that's not the exact opposite of matter? God should have made them exactly the same so that no one would be around to go to Hell, argue about creationism, or make bad software laws.

Or better, He should have made a universe where antimatter could never exist in the first place. That way we would have scientific simplicity and war. The best of both worlds!

Instead, God made the universe all complicated, with stupid antimatter and an umpteen-dimensional space-time that isn't even flat. Noooo, He couldn't just make it easy, could He? He had to make some of the dimensions really small and wadded up. What a spaz.

Re:Patent

[pagsz]

Yeah, but what if its Microsoft that ends up patenting it?

Now if only scientits could figure out why there wasn't enough anti-Microsoft back in the 80's to prevent the evil empire from being formed.

chhh...Yes Emperor Gates, the rebel software company has been sued for copyright violation...chhhh...our lawyers [tie litigators] are moving in at this very moment.

Exploring the deep secrets of cherry pie,

Bad science reporting

[SIGFPE]

It explains why we are here at all

Is it any wonder that the average person has little faith in the work of particle physicists when research like this is presented in such a ridiculously exaggerated manner? This is a cool research result but it has as much to do with explaining why we are here as knowing the chemical properties of silicon tells you how to program.
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Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[SIGFPE]

But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer. This is an interesting result for physicists but it really does nothing to answer the deep questions posed by either the Slashdot article or the BBC article.
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According to the article, this fell in 1964.

[Christopher Thomas]

This article discusses a measurement of CP symmetry violation, which is a difference in behavior between matter and antimatter. CP-violating decay modes have been used as an explanation for the dominance of matter for many years.

The article mentions that CP violation was first detected in 1964.

The article is written in a nice, calm tone, properly painting this as a much nicer measurement of a known effect.

Where did the sensationalistic article blurb come from? Is there *any* justification for it at *all*?

Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[ComaVN]

In memory of Douglas Adams, I would think that the difference in the decay rate, measured in some universal time measure (ie not based on the rotational speed of some utterly insignificant planet circling an unregarded yellow star in the unfashionable western spiral arm of this galaxy) is 42.

That would make The Question something like....

ow damn, now the universe has been replaced by something even more bizarre, and we'll have to start measuring everything all over again!

Sorry, couldn't help myself there.

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Secret of the Universe?? Old News..

[Yazeran]

Well we all knows what the Ultimate answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is - 42.

Sadly Mr. Adams passed away this weekend.. He will me missed..

Yazeran

Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer.

Easy there

[p3d0]

There are a thousand things--from CP violations to the inverse-square law of gravity to the valency of carbon--any of which, if different, could have prevented life from forming.

When theories predict that one link in the chain is missing, and therefore we shouldn't exist, then finding that missing link does explain why we are here.

Nobody claimed that CP violation makes life inevitable; merely, that it makes life possible.
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Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[pubudu]

But when people ask why there is more matter than anti-matter and the respose is that anti-matter decays faster it's practically a circular answer like explaining that morphine works because it contains soporific agents. Almost everyone's immediate question is "Well why does it decay faster?" and to that there is as yet no reasonable answer.

That's not really a fair criticism, since it applies to all science. To take your morphine analogy, a circular answer would be "there is more matter than antimatter because of the CP-Breaking Agent." On the other hand, explaining how soporific agents affect the body such that they explain the observed result is a useful step, for it provides new questions which must be answered in order to understand morphine's effects; without this explanation, we would not know which questions to ask, and so couldn't advance our knowledge.

Similarly with this story. We now "know" that the CP-breaking is a result of unequal decay rates, rather than, say, unequal production rates. Thus, we now know to look at why the fundamental forces appear to work differently on antimatter than on matter, producing the observed result, rather than at why these forces, working equally on some other thing, produce more matter than antimatter in the first place (which would also produce the observed result of more matter than antimatter).

Science is judged by its ability to explain the observed phenomenon, but it advances by knowing which phenomena need to be explained in order to explain that phenomenon.

Re:BBC article explains it a bit better.

[cavemanf16]

Quick synopsis for people: Observation and models had shown that there is an equal chance for matter and anti-matter to be created from energy.

So where did the energy to create matter or anti-matter come from? -- This is the next logical step in reasoning. So why are we really trying to prove how the universe came into existance? Let's do something useful with this data, like try to determine how to harness the power of this observation to better our scientific endeavours. Science fails in trying to prove 'the meaning of life and how it came about', but it does do a great job at improving our knowledge of physical life, the cosmos, and the forces involved in the present. Let's use it for those purposes, and not in trying to create yet another theory for how life came to be in the past.

Re:Easy there

[HorsePunchKid]

True enough, but I think you missed his point. We "well-informed" people all understand that scientists (in many fields, not just physics) are working very hard to answer various fundamental questions, and that the scientific method often leads us to questions something we took for granted. The general populace, though, doesn't necessarily look at it this way. They don't see how unstable science is (look how bizarre the picture of "reality" has gotten from the point of view of a physicist, or the frequent startling discoveries in the biological history of our planet). All a lot of people will see is "It explains why we're here", they'll read the article, decide it's just a bunch of nerds playing with very large, expensive toys, then *wham*, no more Superconducting Supercollider, decreased public opinion of NASA, etc... a big snowball effect. There've been far too many misleading headlines like this recently, and all it does is disappoint people.

Re:Antimatter is dumb

[IdahoEv]

No way, man, god was one smart cookie.

Without antimatter, we'll never be able to build the Enterprise's warp drive. ;)

Re:According to the article, this fell in 1964.

[ericmargel]

Indeed, the extent of CP violation has been known to a within fairly good approximation since '64. Fitch and Cronin won the Nobel in physics in 1980 for the same neutrao kaon experiment. I guess the only "news" to this current story is that the precision went up after the latest CERN expts.

Re:Secret of the Universe?? Old News..

[Eryq]

No no no.... the answer is +42. It's only -42 if you're from a Universe which is predominantly antimatter.

One Of The Universe's Secrets Has Fallen...

[genejockey]

And It Can't Get Up!!

That's the answer, what was the question?

[budgenator]

I find it emotionaly distressing that symmetry in the universe is broken so throughly. Perhaps the real question is, what is the universe. It's comforting to think that beyond our observation is an Universe where symmetry is also broken in correponding but oposite ways; where people are pondering why matter dominates over anti-matter in the Universe.

No, that can't be it.

[ScottBob]

Everybody knows that the instant someone figures out how the universe works, it will cease to exist and be replaced with something even more unexplainable. (Of course, some theorize that this has already happened before at least once.)