- Note - It is always interesting how so
many important American science stories appear first in the British press
(if at all)...quite often written by superb writers such as BBC's Science
Editor David Whitehouse. The US media seems to have little or no interest
in its own scientific community and achievements. Here is yet another
example:
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- The reason we are all made of matter
and not anti-matter may have been discovered.
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- The latest results from a particle accelerator
near Chicago suggest that matter and anti-matter are not after all identical
"mirror images" of one another.
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- This could explain why all the anti-matter
that existed at the Big Bang has disappeared.
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- The scientists are said to be "shocked"
at the size of the effect they have seen.
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- "It's a most astonishing result,"
said Professor Val Fitch of Princeton University. "It is quite unexpected
and very, very interesting."
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- The new discovery made by scientists
in the United States and Japan has given them a glimpse of the fundamental
way in which the universe is made.
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- It shows that the Universe is a very
perplexing place when viewed at the sub-atomic scale. And it may explain
why we are here at all.
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- Mirror image
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- Scientists believe that, in many ways,
anti-matter is the mirror-image of ordinary matter only with opposite electrical
charges. But the puzzle is that there is almost no anti-matter in our Universe.
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- Across the length and breadth of the
cosmos, anti-matter only turns up in minute quantities in very special
circumstances.
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- At the beginning of the Universe, the
Big Bang, scientists believe that there were equal amounts of matter and
anti-matter. But in the Universe's earliest moments something happened
to cause most of the anti-matter to disappear.
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- Finding out if anti-matter is slightly
different to matter could explain why it disappeared. And that is what
the recent experiments seem to have done.
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- Tantalising results
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- They were carried out at Fermilab, a
sub-atomic particle accelerator facility near Chicago, US. The scientists
looked at the behaviour of sub-atomic particles called B-mesons and have
cautiously reported finding "tantalising" results that show that
matter and anti-matter do not obey the same laws of physics.
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- The phenomenon they think they spotted
is technically called direct Charge-Parity (CP) violation. It means that
particles behave differently if you swap matter for anti-matter and also
swap left and right.
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- Physicists say that this "asymmetry"
would have been important during the first moments of the Big Bang and
may have resulted in almost all anti-matter being destroyed.
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- The observation of direct CP violation
is an exciting one for physicists as it disagrees with all the currently
held theories about the nature of matter.
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- "It's just sensational," said
Professor James Cronin who received a Nobel prize for a related discovery
in 1964.
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- Complexity revealed
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- He showed that K-mesons made from ordinary
matter did not behave exactly like those made of anti-matter. But the latest
experiments show a much stronger effect and more of the underlying complexity.
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- Earlier this century, scientists predicted
and then made microscopic amounts of anti-matter. They realised that matter
and anti-matter together results in annihilation in a flash of energy.
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- If anti-matter had not vanished from
our universe, then it is possible that all the cosmos would now consist
of nothing but radiation, with no matter at all.
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- More Fermilab experiments and calculations
are planned to see if the new observations can be understood. In the meantime,
if you want to know why we are here, it is all about the difference between
left and right - just look in a mirror.
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