Re: antimatter imbalance and moving backwards in time


<maxwell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1169412810.576941.297090@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm trying to understand (not refute!) something about the matter/
antimatter imbalance.

I understand that it's an accepted fact that there is far more matter
than antimatter in our universe, and what small amount of antimatter
exists is produced by present day processes, not left over from the Big
Bang.

It is only an accepted fact amongst those who have no imagination. There is
*not* an imbalance - there exists just as much anti matter out there as
matter, only it is not observable because it has a different phenomenology.

This seems to have been a puzzling fact, now explained by the
asymmetry in the weak force. What I'm trying to understand is why this
was puzzling, and why the weak force parity violation is considered
necessary to explain it.

Parity has nothing directly to do with it. The antimatter is gravitationally
negative which means it falls up in a gravitational field.


Feynman proposed that antimatter (I've heard he was talking about
positrons, but presumably this applies to all antimatter) could be
viewed as matter moving backwards in time. Never mind that I don't
really understand this, but I would have thought that this would
provide the answer to the matter/ antimatter asymmetry. Namely, at the
Big Bang, if equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced,
wouldn't the antimatter instantly (literally) have disappeared by going
backwards in time?

It disappears because it moves directly away from the regions of the
universe which contain matter, such as the place we currently reside.


(OK, this presumes that the Big Bang was somehow a zero point on a
timeline, with time going backwards and forwards from there. I don't
know whether that makes sense, but it seems to make as much sense as
thinking of the timeline as a ray that extends in only one direction
from the Big Bang.)

I'm not proposing this as an answer, I'm only asking why--considering
that it seems obvious--it is not considered as a possible answer.

Mcswell



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