CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist (ign.com) 456
Scientists at CERN are bemused as to why the universe exists, according to a new study. From a report, shared by a reader: Recent discoveries suggest that there's a perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter - meaning it's not clear why they didn't annihilate each other upon the birth of the universe. CERN's latest study sought to find out whether different magnetic properties accounted for matter's seeming victory after the Big Bang, but found another point of symmetry. Essentially, going by our findings so far, there simply shouldn't be a universe. Further reading: Universe shouldn't exist, CERN physicists conclude - Cosmos Magazine.
News flash: (Score:3, Funny)
...it doesnâ(TM)t.
whew! so all that dumb crap I did... wasn't. (Score:3, Funny)
that's a relief.
Re:News flash: (Score:5, Funny)
Re: News flash: (Score:2)
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.
Re: News flash: (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that means that at the moment there's insufficient data for meaningful answer.
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"In the beginning..." (Score:5, Funny)
"...the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
- Douglas Adams
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I get conniptions when I see people intimate that there are two and only two possible theories to existence and the nature of reality: Big Bang or Creator God. Why not the Tao?
Propaganda (Score:3, Informative)
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The phrasing here is just terrible. They confirmed the universe is harder to explain. Phrasing like this is for pushing intelligent design arguments.
Intelligent Design tends to get awkward when you combine questions like "Is God irreducibly complex?" with the same reasoning accepted as applicable to theories about evolution (or anything else for that matter).
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How about if we lower the bar from to Sentient Influence ?
Meaning a self-aware or thinking entity's influence caused the universe to come into existence.
That allows for the possibility that some or many aspects of it were intelligently designed, and other
aspects were emergent characteristics or occured due to probability (Which might or might not have
been the primary goal of the Sentient Influencer).
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It's not clear to me how that's any different that the argument that we're living in a simulation. Interesting idea, but what novel, testable predictions does it make?
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Why not just say "God" and be done with it. And then you can tell us all your verifiable, falsifiable theory of God with some predictions on what we should be able to see if the claim "God did it" is true, and how we could go about falsifying the claim (ie. evidence incompatible with "God did it").
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Why not just say "God" and be done with it.
Because a quarter to half the population already has their own preconceived idea about what "God" is.
So we can let them have their idea that the influencer is "God", and others could attribute different characteristics
to the apparently-sentient influencer; like the concept that our universe is someone's petri dish, and a mad scientist
from a different universe made some minor adjustments causing our big bang and physics to work out.
On positing the Creatrix (Score:2)
How about replacing "In the beginning God said 'Let there be light'"
With "In the beginning She said, 'I just had a thought...'"
This aligns contemporary neopagan mythology with information theory, which is a useful early step in building a new bridge from Here to Somewhere Else that avoids reliance on any of the shopworn and unsafe postulates of the old way of thinking about things.
(There. I think that's vague enough to seem plausibly metaphysical.)
News Flash: Quantum Theory Confirmed. Again. (Score:3)
The phrasing here is very much hyperbole.
Standard quantum mechanics (well, relativistic quantum mechanics) states that particles and antiparticles must have exactly the same magnetic properties. Exactly.
If CERN tests didn't verify this, there would be a big, big problem with parts of physics that we thought we knew pretty well. That's a pretty exciting experiment to try, since if there was a big big problem with quantum mechanics, it would be groundbreaking to find this out. But it's not particularly hea
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No. The phrasing is great. You shouldn't be too full of yourself.
The WTF moments that scientific hubris leads to are far more likely to drive people to "intelligent design" then being honest with our limitations.
Re: Propaganda (Score:2)
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How many of these do you need before you start wondering if there is something worth considering in the Intelligent Design theory
Unless you can quantify the "intelligent designer" and use its properties to make further predictions, it is inherently unscientific and therefore irrelevant.
Science is about establishing explanations for the world around us that are increasingly well-tested, accurate, and precise. Intelligent Design is intellectual masturbation that accomplishes neither of those goals.
You're free to believe whatever you want, but your pseudo-philosophical meanderings add nothing to discussions of science.
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Well, while there are many mothers who are very intelligent, there are also a number that are... um... not so much so. There are also a goodly number of mothers who start out kind of dumb about the whole thing, but over time get increasingly intelligent and sophisticated in their child rearing practice.
So for the devout neopagan the question is what kind of mother is the Mother Of All?
Assuming that She is of at least average intelligence, I think that we should expect that She has been becoming increasing
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We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exi (Score:5, Interesting)
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones? You ask how it came into existence in the first place, and I say what if it DIDN'T and it's simply always been there?
Everything our current models tell us about reality, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the observable universe could very well be nothing more than a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence.
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The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one.
What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones? You ask how it came into existence in the first place, and I say what if it DIDN'T and it's simply always been there?
Everything our current models tell us about reality, from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the observable universe could very well be nothing more than a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence.
If Einstein was right, and space and time are the same thing, it seems reasonable that if the Universe has infinite space it should have infinite time.
The universe is not infinitely old (Score:5, Insightful)
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one. What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones?
Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
What we do know absolutely for sure is that the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form. Stars don't last forever. Entropy tends toward maximum. If the universe was infinitely old, it would have slid down the curve of entropy to be a featureless mess.
The nature of that event at the beginning (of the universe as we know it), however, is still somewhat unclear. We do see the universe expanding, and that's a clue. We can track it backwards to very small and very dense. But we can't track it backwards to the "beginning," because it gets to realms of energy and density for which we don't know the laws of physics.
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>Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
You have mistakenly interpreted my comment on the existence of the universe being infinite as a claim that the universe is steady-state.
You probably should have paid more attention to my final statement in that post which would have disabused you of that notion.
Fluctuations in a random universe (Score:2)
What we know for sure is that the universe hasn't existed forever in its current form. If it has existed forever, it has been in a different form.
If you are arguing for the possibillity that the universe is a temporary fluctuation in a thermal equilibrium state, you do realize that large fluctuations are exponentially unlikely, and the probability of any fluctuation being long-lasting is even more exponentially unlikely. So, if what we see as the universe is a fluctuation, it is almost certainly very very
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No, he's recognized that "a finite and insignificant perturbation in the infinity of existence" is simple hand waving nonsense, and doesn't say or answer anything.
Antimatter has positive mass (Score:3)
There are people trying to prove that antimatter has negative mass. That would explain the 'missing' part as well as the accelerated expansion of the universe [antimatter has somehow become Dark Energy].
There may be people trying to prove this, but if antimatter has negative mass, you have even worse problems. But it doesn't: if it did, then it would take zero energy to create particle/antiparticle pairs (mc^2 + (-m)c^2 = 0). And positronium (which has been made) would have net zero mass, and thus would accelerate to arbitrary velocity under the pressure of photons of trivial energy, and we'd never see it.
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Among other things, if the universe always existed, where is the fresh matter coming from that's fueling all our stars? Everything should have burned out already in an infinitely old universe. You'd have to invent some source of matter generation or non-energy-conservation, and that's far more problematic than the current big bang theory..
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> Everything should have burned out already in an infinitely old universe.
You have mistakenly interpreted my comment on the existence of the universe being infinite as a claim that the universe is steady-state.
You probably should have paid more attention to my final statement in that post which would have disabused you of that notion.
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Yeah, it didn't look like you were going in that direction, and I glossed over the last sentence. I'm still not really sure that the idea of being a pocket in an infinitely old universe really changes things much compared to the idea that the Big Bang created the entirety of the universe. Either option is in the realm of unknown and probably unknowable.
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> What if the universe always existed, and always will?
Considering that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics [wikipedia.org] says that:
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
I would tend to agree with you.
Either
a) The universe has always existed, or
b) God has always existed.
Either way you end up with the atheist's F word: Faith.
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Always (Score:2)
There has just always been a universe. Problem solved :)
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There has just always been a universe. Problem solved :)
Problem not solved, but replaced by a different problem: where are the infinite number of infinitely old burned-out stars?
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Because the negative energy balances out the equation.
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Gravity wells are negative energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
More complicated than that (Score:2)
Remember that the conservation laws are reflections of the presence of operations which leave physical laws unchanged (symmetries & transformations), which results in the usual conservation of energy in flat-spacetime.
And next---if there were some state prior to BIg Bang---what makes you think it had to be 'zero'?
Antiparticles have positive mass-energy (Score:2)
And gravitation of anti-particles appears to be identical to their normal counterparts.
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I just want to know if they wear cowboy hats or if they wear goatees, so I know what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
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what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
It will be a universe with a you-shaped hole in it. Because you will annihilate everything you touch. Kind of like Symantec.
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It's even possible at small scale given enough time. Lots and lots of time. An example being the Loschmidt paradox and the Fluctuation Theorem [wikipedia.org].
Sentient life is incredibly improbable, therefore sentient life ends up observing an incredibly improbable universe around it, because in all the other possible outcomes, there's nobody there to observe it. So maybe it's just that we are in the matter corner of a universe that just lucked out, and the corresponding antimatter part is somewhere outside the observab
Re:We Already Knew That the Universe Shouldn't Exi (Score:5, Interesting)
People talk about it like that's when "the universe began", but it's really just "when the universe AS WE KNOW IT began". It says nothing about what was happening before that time because the answer is that we have no idea. Maybe it was always here. It's possible new universes are formed inside of black holes and that our universe was formed in just such a manner.
I rather like Penrose's ideas about this. When the energy density is high enough, effectively everything becomes massless and moves at the speed of light. In such a case, the universe ceases to have time and distance scales - when nothing in the universe experiences time or distance, the concepts become meaningless. General relativity still works just fine in such conditions, as it's fundamentally scale-invariant, so this doesn't break established physics.
Under that interpretation, the big bang isn't when the universe began, but when time (and space) began. What was there "before" was all the same stuff, just in a state where time and distance don't happen.
And the universe goes.... (Score:5, Funny)
poof in a flash of logic?
(Yes, from the joke {Rene Descartes walks into a bar and orders a drink. When he finishes his drink, the bartender asks him if he would like another. Descartes replies, “No, I think not,” and disappears in a puff of logic.})
Re:And the universe goes.... (Score:5, Funny)
The bartender says "we don’t serve time travellers in here." A time traveller walks into a bar.
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That's what I was thinking.
Like when Wiley E. Coyote realizes he's run off the edge of a cliff, but gravity doesn't take effect until he realizes it.
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Re:And the universe goes.... (Score:4, Funny)
And this is the time to follow up with the one about the horse that walks into the bar and the bartender asks "Why the long face?"
The reason to do it in this order is to put Descartes before the horse. I'll show myself out.
And then.. (Score:2)
"CERN Scientists confirm God" (Score:2)
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Oh, it's coming I'm sure.
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Probably. I personally have stopped trying to use science to justify my faith or lack of.
Faith in a supernatural entity is outside the realm of science. Because Supernatural is something that cannot be measured or directly observed. It doesn't mean that it cannot be true, but it doesn't prove that it is.
But saying because of God, is a wonderful way of cutting off the exploration of the topic. This Dichotomy of facts that we exist, however mathematically we shouldn't is an interesting aspect that needs to b
It does not. (Score:2)
[The Truth provided above is released under MIT GPL. Please make sure you provide a copy of original Truth, if you redistribute. Any enhancemen
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Baryon Asymmetry = Old News (Score:2)
This is an old and well understood mystery in physics. We've known about baryon asymmetry [wikipedia.org] since shortly after we understood E=mc^2 (more properly E^2 = m^2*c^4 + p^2*c^2). We just don't have a model or data that fully explains why we see lots of matter but not much anti-matter. We have some ideas about how it might have happened but nothing that really answers the question adequately.
It's just one problem (Score:2)
Obligatory Douglas Adams (Score:2)
The Universe
Some information to help you live in it.
1. Area: infinite.
2. Imports: none.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things from.
3. Exports: none.
See Imports.
4. Population: none.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite numbe
This just proves the scientists failure to underst (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mod AC parent up. This is known, I believe Kaon decay is one of the proprosed mechanisms to explain the imbalance.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a particle physicist, nor am I an astrophysicist. I am just a dilettante.
obDeteriorata (Score:2)
So after all this time and study, it turns out we really are a fluke of the universe and we really do have no right to be here.
I suppose it's just a matter of time that we discover that the Cosmic Microwave Background is really just the sound of the universe laughing behind our backs.
Rounding Error (Score:2)
I like to think that there was originally a whole shitload more matter/antimatter and what we're seeing now is just a rounding error.
Well, clearly. (Score:2)
You sir. You do not exist. My computer says so. -Therefore I shall ignore you from this moment forward.
My condolences to your non-existent offspring.
Here's another stupid hypothesis (Score:2, Interesting)
And the good news is... (Score:2)
"Whew! Thank goodness we're not living in that universe!"
So? (Score:2)
Hiding in plain sight (Score:2)
Evidence that anti-matter would not preferentially annihilate is also evidence that it is still lurking about somewhere. It's worth noting that we have never performed an experiment outside our solar system, and our reasons for inferring what other regions of the universe are made out of are indirect and largely spectroscopic. What if, e.g., anti-matter has repulsive gravitational effect? Would it wind up as a diffused gas of ostensibly normal hydrogen in interstellar space, helping to compact the normal
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Re:Today's silly joke (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it is, and that's the point they're making.
"The Universe should not exist" is the press simplification of "the observable physics shows no reason why matter and anti-matter should be in an imbalance, however, clearly they are in an imbalance, so... WTF!"
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Here is a simple answer; because we are wrong with something. We have known that we are wrong for a while with the X number of unsolved physical problems.
Another study confirms that the Standard Model is incomplete when it was already known. News at 10.
Re:Today's silly joke (Score:5, Insightful)
- Isaac Asimov
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Just thinking about what if the universe actually holds equal amounts of matter and antimatter can lead to some interesting ideas. Are all galaxies of matter or are some of anti-matter?
Or what if Big Bang actually created two mirror universes, one with matter, the other with anti-matter?
But then we must realize that a "perfect" explosion don't exist.
Re:Today's silly joke (Score:5, Informative)
How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter? [scientificamerican.com]
It's an example of poor communication. (Score:4, Informative)
Read the scientific article, A parts-per-billion measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment [nature.com]. There is nothing dishonest.
It would have been far better to explain the conflict being observed and acknowledge that not much is known in that area of interest. It is FAR too early to draw conclusions.
What the CERN scientists may have discovered is that the "basic assumptions of the standard model of particle physics" are incorrect.
More clickbait dishonesty:
CERN Antimatter Experiment Suggest the Universe Shouldn't Exist [extremetech.com]
CERN Research Finds "The Universe Should Not Actually Exist" [futurism.com]
The Universe Should Not Actually Exist, CERN Scientists Discover [newsweek.com]
CERN Scientists Find Further Evidence That the Universe 'Should Not Exist' [inverse.com]
The universe shouldn't exist, scientists say after finding bizarre behaviour of anti-matter [independent.co.uk]. Quote: "We don't know why the universe isn't destroying itself." That is at least in the direction of being honest; we don't know why.
I'm guessing that media writers didn't want to try to understand the actual issues, so they all adopted one writer's wild exaggeration.
I see NO evidence that anyone at CERN is dishonest. The dishonesty seems to be only in media reports.
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No. We're simply not as smart as we think we are. We engage in far too much scientific hubris and are full of ourselves.
We don't understand the universe nearly as well as we think we do.
Science is an iterative process and ultimately the current best guess.
Some of us "anti-intellectuals" recognize this for what it is and are less impressed by pronouncements from the scientific clergy.
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Re:It's an example of poor communication. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the physicists from CERN actually said the words, "the universe should not actually exist", which is why so many of the headlines say exactly the same thing. I don't see anything dishonest about either what CERN or the media said.
Completely offtopic -- I was actually on-site at CERN last week and took a picture of myself outside the "Antimatter Factory" building, where they do the kind of research described in the article. Cool stuff.
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A very unfortunate thing to say by that scientist. As a particle physicist, he should know we already have CP violation in the Standard Model that explains the matter-antimatter asymmetry partly; we just don't observe enough of it.
Re:It's an example of poor communication. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a direct quote from the author of the study, not "dishonest clickbait media".
From one of your own links (that you clearly didn't actually read in your rush to denounce this):
http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk]
Statistical variation (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably due to statistical variation in the early expansion of the universe.
Here's an analogy:
Suppose you throw 1 million coins and tally the results. You might expect to get 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails, but it's *more* probable that you would get a different ratio. The probability of being 1-off in either direction is higher: even though both individual probabilities are smaller there's two possible outcomes (one more head, or one more tail).
(In 8 tosses of the coin, there's 70 ways to make 4H/4T, 56 ways to make 3H/5T, and 56 ways to make 5H/3T. Even split has 70 ways, while 1-off has 112 ways.)
What you actually get is a bell curve of probability. Take a single sample and you expect to get "somewhere near" the mean value, but it's highly unlikely that you'll get exactly the mean.
So in the early universe, suppose position is quantized and there is exactly 1 place to be. Lots and lots of energy sitting on that one spot, some of it splitting into matter and antimatter and then annihilating back to energy.
The universe expands and there are now 2 positions. The energy and matter/antimatter distributes randomly.
Even though you'd expect equal amounts of matter and antimatter to go to both positions, it's statistically unlikely. Referring to the coin analogy, you might get 210,000 matter and 290,000 antimatter on one position, and 290,000 antimatter and 210,000 matter in the other. Both sides have 500,000 "coins", but with slightly different proportions, according to statistical chance.
Now suppose the universe continues to grow at a rate faster than the matter can keep up. There are suddenly 4 positions instead of 2, then 8, 16, and so on. The matter/anti-matter ratio in each side is now 210,000/290.000, which annihilates, leaving 80,000 matter particles and 420,000*MC^2 of energy. On each side.
This would only happen if the universe expands faster than the particles can travel across the available positions to annihilate.
As it happens, there's evidence that the early universe *did* expand faster than the speed of light, which is why the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but looks to be at least 93 billion years in diameter. This is the early inflation model.
So even if all known processes generate equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, it makes statistical sense that there might be an excess of one or another in different parts of the universe.
Re:Statistical variation (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with that theory is that it assumes we're in a "special" region of the universe, and some other area is different.So far, that hasn't shown to be the case.
To use your example, let's say that the first distribution was wildly uneven, with about 75% of the antimatter in one half of the newly-developing space. For simplicity's sake, we'll say that our observable universe is perfectly equal to the matter-dominant side of that split. Now, we should be able to observe every particle, and find that it's matter-to-antimatter ratio is 3:1. That's fine. We should also be able to look at old (distant) regions, and see back to when the universe was still undergoing those distributions, and we should see the results of other uneven distributions. We should see some antimatter-heavy regions and some matter-heavy regions, though we'd still expect to see that general 3:1 ratio.
We don't see that, though. Instead, we've seen no sign of any antimatter-heavy regions anywhere in observable space, regardless of age. This would imply that if such an uneven distribution happened, it happened only before any of our observable universe formed, and all expansion afterward has been perfectly homogenous matter. That's where the probability becomes very unlikely. It's not unlikely to have randomly-bad distributions. It's unlikely that there would be no further sign of such events, if they were prevalent enough to cause our whole observable universe to be so biased.
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That's the point, though...
If we assume that there is a pocket of antimatter a few trillion light years away, there are more questions raised:
Why is our matter-favoring pocket so big?
There are lots of examples of region discrepancies discovered throughout history. Land meets ocean, atmosphere meets fades into vacuum, and the sola
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It's not a press simplification. It's a direct quote from the author of the study.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk]
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By "press simplification" I meant "the author simplified things for the press"
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So does Kelsier punching Preservation speed that up or what??
Re:Today's silly joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance - if dark matter somehow interacts with anti-matter somewhat less weakly, for some reason. Black holes don't work, since there don't seem to have been any in the early universe, and there's no reason to think they'd prefer anti-matter.
This news is exiting to me, since one way or another it suggests new physics is needed to understand the imbalance.
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But "WTF" is where the best science comes from. Hmmm, the precession of Mercury isn't explained by Newtonian mechanics. WTF? Why here comes Mr. Einstein with an explanation...
As others have pointed out, we know there are issues with the Standard Model, we even have some possible expansions on the Standard Model like supersymmetry, and CERN is doing its darndest to crank up to energy to try to catch a glimpse of the superpartners to the known elementary particles.
Looking for a large stone (Score:2)
and I will be able to refute this claim by kicking it
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Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
If that were the case, there would be a very easily recognizable signature from the annihilation. We do not see large-scale annihilation like this anywhere.
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Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
We can make antimatter in a lab, and it does not annihilate slowly when released. If there were significant antimatter around, there needs to be some explanation of how it behaves differently. Because there is a lot of energy, and it would have to be so much slower than what we've observed.
When a very small amount of matter annihilates, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons annihilate only a tiny fraction of its material.
E.g., a back of the envelope calculation fo
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Admit it, you watched it only for Penny Hofstadter.
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