Why Does Matter Outweigh Antimatter?

[Prasun-rick]

Why is matter more than antimatter ?? Just a mere curiosity ! Thanks in advance

 

[Simon Bridge]

You mean how come there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe?
Matter seems to dominate over antimatter ... this is the subject of a lot of written work which you can find easily What we can do here is help you understand it. So what is the problem? How have you attempted to address your curiosity? What have you discovered so far?

 

[Drakkith]

We have no idea. That's one of the great unsolved mysteries in science.

See this article for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry

 

[Prasun-rick]

You mean how come there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe?
Matter seems to dominate over antimatter ... this is the subject of a lot of written work which you can find easily What we can do here is help you understand it. So what is the problem? How have you attempted to address your curiosity? What have you discovered so far?

This whole anti-matter thing is seeming difficult for me to understand . I mean how can anti-matter be

We have no idea. That's one of the great unsolved mysteries in science.

See this article for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry

You mean how come there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe?
Matter seems to dominate over antimatter ... this is the subject of a lot of written work which you can find easily What we can do here is help you understand it. So what is the problem? How have you attempted to address your curiosity? What have you discovered so far?

My physics teacher said that anti -matter is less than matter but the cause behind it he said would be out of my scope ..so I posted my curiosity here..now I realized it might be well above my scope..as basically I have zero idea in particle physics .

 

[kolleamm]

It probably has to do with the behavior of elementary particles and their tendencies towards certain assemblies. The way the universe plays out it just turns out anti-matter does not get a chance to form very often. In a way you could think of anti-matter as an intelligent civilization, rare, or so I'd think.

 

[Simon Bridge]

This whole anti-matter thing is seeming difficult for me to understand . I mean how can anti-matter be...

Antimatter can exist the same way that anything can exist.

My physics teacher said that anti -matter is less than matter but the cause behind it he said would be out of my scope ..so I posted my curiosity here..now I realized it might be well above my scope..as basically I have zero idea in particle physics .

It may be possible to get you a good idea without being too confusing - what is the level of your education?

Clearly there was some sort of asymmetry in the early Universe which lead to one type of matter dominating over the other one. The one that ended up making us and what we can see is, therefore, what we think of as "normal" matter and the other one is "anti-". But that may just be an accident of history. We don't know for sure what process lead to the matter-dominant Universe we see, but there are some ideas about what sort of thing may have happened. It's the sort of topic that occupies whole textbooks at the top end of college level but a good picture may be obtained without all that study. Probably what would work best would be for you to start reading about the subject and see what you find. If you have trouble understanding what you read, then you will have better focussed questions.

A problem with this field is there are a lot of uncertainties and unanswered questions and there are lots of people who try to use this scientific uncertainty as justification for some sort of unfounded speculation(s). So when you do more searching online, it is best practice to read everything through the lens of scientific skepticism.
Science must stick to ideas that can be supported by some sort of evidence.
If there is no good evidence that something is true then it is not evidently true. If it is not evidently true, then there is no good reason to believe it may be true and anything that can be asserted without evidence may be safely discarded without evidence.

 

[sophiecentaur]

I think it's a shame that the term "antimatter" was coined for the set of particles that it applies to. The name has a strong implication of negative mass when all masses, so far, have been shown to be positive (same sign). That is a confusion and a disappointment for everyone as they are trying to grasp the subject of the particles that make up our World.

 

[Simon Bridge]

I think it's more subtle than that since the sense of "anti-" being "against" can take on quite broad implications in a student's mind as if antimatter is somehow not real or not part of the proper universe or something like it isn't really matter as mass-energy. But that feeling wanes with familiarity like with all the other odd stuff where common understandings don't quite mesh with the scientific uses of words. You know, like with "theory".

There's also a possible issue when we talk, like above, of the "matter dominated" universe. In the discussion above we have meant matter dominating over antimatter (being vastly more commonly encountered), however, in cosmology, the term refers to regular matter dominating over dark matter. In that useage we do not currently live in a matter dominated universe. This could lead to confusion if someone googled the term after reading this thread.