Lawrence Krauss: Why Do We Live in a Universe Full of Matter? | Big Think

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The question of antimatter is a specter haunting the field of physics: Why is there more matter in the universe than anti-matter? Lawrence Krauss supplies an answer that, besides explaining what antimatter is, sheds light on why the question is so puzzling in the first place. Antimatter, speaking from the perspective of physics, is not a terribly strange thing. In fact, we would expect to see more of it — to balance the amount of regular matter in the universe.
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LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS:
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist who is a professor of physics, and the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is an advocate of scientific skepticism, science education, and the science of morality. Krauss is one of the few living physicists referred to by Scientific American as a "public intellectual", and he is the only physicist to have received awards from all three major U.S. physics societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Lawrence Krauss: Most people don’t wake up in the morning and ask themselves the question, "Why do I live in a universe of matter?" But they should because if you think about it from the point of view of fundamental physics, matter and antimatter are almost exactly the same things. For every particle in nature there’s a particle that has equal mass and opposite charge. Antimatter only seems strange as I often like to say in the sense that Belgians seems strange. Namely Belgians aren’t intrinsically strange, but if you go into a large auditorium as I’ve often done and said how many Belgians are there? You rarely see them. Antimatter seems strange because we rarely see it. Why? Because hardly any of it exists in the universe. But if the universe were made of antimatter, it would look exactly the same. Antilovers could sit in anticars under an antimoon and make antilove and everything would seem exactly the same. So why do we live in a universe that has only matter and no antimatter? That’s one of the biggest mysteries in fact that’s been driving particle physics and cosmology over the last 40 years. If you started with a sensible universe it should have equal amounts of matter and antimatter. How would you end up with a universe in which for every particle of antimatter there may be more than 10 billion particles of matter? These are questions we have ideas about how to answer, but we don’t yet know exactly how to answer.

And that’s one of the reasons why we’re looking out in the universe to confirm, in fact, the processes that might create matter instead of antimatter and to look for sources of antimatter in the universe. It turns out that there are energetic processes involved. There’s black holes, including the black hole at the center of our galaxy, that are producing lots of antimatter. We don’t quite understand all of those processes. Some of them may be involved with exotic stuff like dark matter. Some of it may be involved with more pedestrian things like pulsars and energetic magnetic fields around stars. We don’t know all of the processes and that’s why we have to keep looking. And we have new tools, new windows on the universe like the Fermi telescope, which looks out in space at high-energy gamma rays and high-energy particles that are coming in that many of which don’t reach the Earth because of the atmosphere or magnetic fields around the Earth. Each new window we have on the universe surprises us and we may be surprised about the sources of antimatter are in nature. And some of those sources may help us understand that remarkable mystery of why we live in a universe full of matter.

The question of antimatter is a specter haunting the field of physics: Why is there more matter in the universe than anti-matter? Lawrence Krauss supplies an answer that, besides explaining what antimatter is, sheds light on why the question is so puzzling in the first place. Antimatter, speaking from the perspective of physics, is not a terribly strange thing. In fact, we would expect to see more of it — to balance the amount of regular matter in the universe.

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Science: Why does that happen? We have ideas, but we don't know yet, and we hope to find out.

Religion: Magical sky man did it. This book said so.

shirosenshiesq

i think krauss is a genius, i hope he makes a historic discovery someday

doodelay

Just don't make love to a Belgian in a normal car under the normal moon.

JustOneAsbesto

If there were equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, they would transform into high energy photons when they collide with each other. Hence, we would quickly move into a situation where most of the matter in the Universe was transformed into photons, which would not be good from the perspective of life being able to exist.

EugeneKhutoryansky

One of the greatest scientists in the world can get in front of a camera and say "We don't know", that's what i love about science!

OljeiKhan

He actually asked the _why_ questions. Thumbs up mr Kraus!

PetarStamenkovic

Imagine a love story between two lovers, one of matter and one of antimatter. Once they touch... and explosive outburst of energy...*Boom.* A Romeo and Juliet kinda thing.

DekuStickGamer

How do we know matter far away is not anti-matter? Since they emit light (not anti-light), we wouldn't know unless we made contact with our matter?

AdeonWriter

i'd like to see a collab of michio kaku, ray kurzweil, lawerence krauss and neil degrasse tyson in the future

warmaxxx

can someone clarify for me, at the start he says "for every particle in nature theres another particle with equal mass and opposite charge" but then he says "matter outnumbers anti matter by a billion atoms to 1" am i misunderstanding here or is it a contradiction?

markfisk

I so admire Krauss! I think he is the new Einstein of 21st century physics. I bet you he's going to win the Nobel prize with his latest popsci book.

spinvalve

Why no recent videos with the dude Machio Kaku?

Calquelater

So how do we know that everything we see is matter? Can we prove that distant, isolated galaxies are made of matter and not antimatter? Wouldn't light be emitted by it and interact with it the exact same way?

rouninpanda

We live in a universe of matter because if it were anti-matter we would have named it matter. But, real answer is that matter antimatter collisions create massive amounts of radiative energy which creates a pressure to separate the rest of the matter from the rest of the antimatter and therefore all of the antimatter got pushed away from the matter. There probably is around as much antimatter somewhere else in the whole universe but remember, the whole universe is bigger than the observable universe (possibly millions of orders of magnitude bigger) so it could even mostly just be outside the observable universe.

Eric_D_