Incredible New Evidence of 'Symmetry Violation' May Explain Our Literal Existence
In the very first microseconds of the Big Bang, something strange happened. Matter somehow outnumbered antimatter and kept the fledgling universe from annihilating itself.
This break with conventional physics is known as the “parity symmetry violation.”
A new study from the University of Florida analyzed a tremendous amount of cosmological data using a supercomputer to find compelling evidence that this parity symmetry violation explains why everything...well...is.
Why does anything exist? Why, in any given space, is there something rather than nothing? It’s a question that has been pondered by scientists, philosophers, and theologians for millennia. No one would be surprised if, in the very beginnings of Homo sapiens’ reign on Earth, our hunter-gatherer ancestors looked to the stars and asked “why?”
From this fundamental question sprung religion, culture, and our most up-to-date cosmology. But the question still remains: why are we here? Well, scientists may not be close to unpacking the philosophical side of that question, but the science side is becoming more and more clear. A new research paper published in Physical Review Letters shows that scientists from the University of Florida and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found actual evidence of the “parity symmetry violation” that could help explain why our universe is filled with, well, everything.
“I’ve always been interested in big questions about the universe. What is the beginning of the universe? What are the rules under which it evolves? Why is there something rather than nothing?” Zachary Slepian, a UF astronomy professor and study supervisor, said in a press release. “This work addresses those big questions.”
In physics, parity symmetry refers to the mirror-like reflections that are often described as left- or right-handedness. The particular spin of an electron, for example, is sometimes called handedness. In the physics we observe day-to-day, this handedness doesn’t really matter, and a mirror reflection will be exactly that—a reflection. But in order for the universe to exist, this rule of physics must have been broken at some point (which is the “violation” bit).
If parity symmetry was never violated, after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter would have formed in equal measure. They would have fully annihilated each other, and left the universe just as empty as it was before. They fact that you and I are breathing on Planet Earth, which is located in a solar system tucked away in one galaxy among many billions means that specifically did not happen.
Researchers have seen evidence of this symmetry violation before, but not in any kind of large-scale cosmological structure like the organization of galaxies—until now. To find it, researchers used the university’s HiPerGator supercomputer to analyze a million trillion groups of galaxies in tetrahedron shapes, and used sophisticated mathematical formulas to complete the calculations. Thanks to the supercomputer’s serious computational horsepower, the team was able to discern that the early universe did indeed imprint a preferred “handedness” that became the observable galaxies. While these calculations didn’t discern the universe’s handedness, previous studies have theorized that the universe has a left-handed bias (that’s good new for Ned Flanders).
This research further confirms the existence of the parity symmetry violation to a degree of seven sigma, a measure of how likely it is to get this same result through random change (anything above five sigma is considered pretty confident). The existence of this violation also provides evidence for other theories about the early universe, especially the period known as “inflation”—when everything expanded exponentially within a fraction of the second of the Big Bang.
“Since parity violation can only be imprinted on the universe during inflation, if what we found is true, it provides smoking-gun evidence for inflation,” Slepian said in a press release.
Maybe the reason why we are here is a question best answered by our own personal philosophy, but science is beginning to piece together how everything became everything.
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