Eli5: why is there a lot of matter but no antimatter if they both appear simultaneously?
In: Physics
This is a very good question, and one that physicists are still looking for an answer for. Based on the current theory, the big bang probably should have created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Matter and anti-matter don’t get along well, but scientists were expecting to seem clumps of anti-matter in the universe when looking through telescopes, along with occasional explosions when anti-matter drifted into matter. We haven’t observed any of this, which means that the entire universe appears to be made of matter.
Scientists are struggling to come up with an explanation. It could be that for some reason the big bang only created matter, but we don’t know why this would be the case. It is also possible that the anti-matter and matter created by the big bang reacted with each other in a second bang, and that second bang resulted in only matter forming. Or, it could be that our fundamental theory of physics is missing something. Given that we can’t account for 99% of the matter and energy in the universe, which we call dark matter or dark energy, I lean towards this last theory.
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