An article today in the New York Times reports that, in physics anyway, we are on the verge of discovering why there’s something rather than nothing… or at least why the Big Bang has produced more matter than anti-matter. It all has to do with “the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds”-
They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”
The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.
Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”
Okay guys, get poking! But, of course, a new model that explains the matter-anti-matter asymmetry better than the old “standard” model won’t solve the Really Big Question that metaphysicians, like very young children, always have at the ready: why? Why has this (fill in any impressively predictive physical model you like) ever happened? It seems unlikely that any merely descriptive theory, no matter how useful, will ever satisfy those who find this question engaging. Of course, it’s easy to write the question off as presupposing a sort of anthropomorphism, as if a universe had to be designed for a reason or purpose. But I think the question goes deeper than that, because even if you recognize that expecting the universe to have a purpose or a raison d’être is committing a sort of logical error or “category mistake”, the question still feels sensible. Maybe such a feeling just indicates that one is banging up against the limits of the human mind… and maybe not.
Why? Why not?
Why not? Why?
:-)-: [the ying/yang emoticon]