“We know empirically that there is about one-billion times more matter than antimatter in the Universe and with the current physics we know, the Standard Model, this imbalance can’t be explained,” wrote MIT physicist Silviu-Marian Udrescu in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “To explain it,” he continues, “a violation of certain fundamental symmetries is required, but we have not observed the required violations yet. We don’t know the sources of this violation. We just know that these violations are required to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.
“The universe resembles a Swiss cheese – but one with huge holes: Large areas in space are absolutely empty. In between, thousands of galaxies crowd in a comparatively small space. These clusters are connected by highways of thin matter gas, like the gossamer filaments of a spider’s web,” reports The University of Bonn about gargantuan filaments in the universe that fueled the formation of clusters of galaxies and galaxies at places where the filaments crossed, creating dense regions of matter –the cheese.
“The Standard Model as it stands cannot possibly be right because it cannot predict why the universe exists,” said Gerald Gabrielse, the Board of Trustees Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, about the theory that describes the seventeen known fundamental particles and their interactions and provides us with a detailed set of predictions for how each of them should behave and interact. The model is a mathematical picture of reality, and no laboratory experiments yet performed have contradicted it. “We should be very careful about making assumptions that we’re getting closer to solving the mystery, but I do have considerable hope that we’re getting closer at this level of precision,” Gabrielse added.
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