“Cosmic String” Gravitational Waves Could Solve Antimatter Mystery (opens in new tab)

Yeah, that's a valid idea; we considered that about 40 years ago and concluded it doesn't work. Yes, even if the amounts were perfectly equal, you would expect some regions with net matter or antimatter content. But when you run the numbers, you expect the sign to flip from place to place (which would produce matter-antimatter annihilations at the boundaries, which are not observed) and for the magnitude of the local imbalances to be far lower (by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude) versus what is observed.

If they're from the same building blocks, chance puts it at 50-50. What we see is way skewed obviously since we exist and can observe galaxies and galaxies worth of matter.

I've often wondered about this idea.

However, it seems that the most probable things come to pass in nature -- at least more frequently than less probable events. So, what makes matter more probable than antimatter (assuming this statement is even true)?

Good question. Why does it remind you of the aether and humors and not, say, the positron [1] and quarks? [2]

Sometimes experiment leads theory, but sometimes theory leads experiment. It's only when theory proceeds untethered to any possible experimental confirmation or rejection that it gets in trouble. In this case, they're making actual predictions that should be testable in the near future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

Almost every successful discovery ever was an example of us "inventing things that should exist". The Higgs boson, the W boson, the Z boson, the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau, each of the three neutrinos, the light quarks, the gluons...

You can never do anything without tentatively assuming something and computing the consequences. That opens the possibility that you may be wrong. That's not a condemnation of science, that's fundamental to how science works.

The neutrino itself was postulated in just this way, to balance mass-energy equations of beta decay. It looked like energy was being lost, but if some was being carried away by neutrinos, problem solved. The alternative was to reformulate the conservation laws.

Turns out it was neutrinos.

Yeah, but isn't that just a necessary step in learning? It takes knowledge off-course for a while, but then who knows at the time what the right course will be?

Personally, I'm happy to see more theories and results around gravity and gravitational waves. When I read about physics in school and later, it was all about particles and interactions. They were talking about the theoretical Grand Unified Theory, but they only had 2 then 3 forces in the model. Gravity was always this big outlier, yet it makes the world go round (quite literally).

This article talks about the ability to detect gravity waves from neutron stars (LIGO, which is quite recent), and that made me think they are like spark gap transmitters: huge bursts of energy across the spectrum. Think of the history of radio: at first they used spark gap transmitters for wireless telegraph, but in time, they refined the equipment and now we have 5G. There was another recent article about detecting the fainter gravity waves caused by earthquakes. Maybe we'll get there in our lifetimes.

The obvious counter point would be the neutrino.

Anyone who says that there was nothing before is spouting nonsense. Any honest scientist will tell you that we don't know what happened at the Big Bag, much less before it. The math of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces workout to a unified path as you reach Big Bang energies, but except for a split second after the event. That's because gravity has to be accounted for and we have zero idea what gravity is. Worse, we have two theories: one that says that gravity is transmitted by a particle (that we can never hope to test ) and one that says that it bends spacetime (that has no mechanism in the Standard Model). Until this is resolved, you can't make any statement about at or before the Big Bang.

On a side note: quantum physics seems to suggest that the universe abhors the idea of nothingness. Emptiness has a vacuum energy that generates particles from "nothing." It seems happy to let "something" happen as long as it happens in a way conserving opposite effects (spin, charge, etc). One idea is that a mirror anti-matter Big Bang "exploded in the opposite direction," which is the balance to this one. But, it will all be speculation until we can explain the Big Bang's behavior, itself.

I just read that in Kermit's voice. (Morgan Freeman was having a RDO.)