Anti-matter is unstable matter

[CraigD]

To answer your first question Hydro, (and this is my opinion) there can be only four types of universe (all of which come from an EM pulse BB) an anti-matter, a matter, a positive electron proton, and a negative electron proton universe.

I've never heard of the positive proton&electron/negative proton&electron versions of possible universes' Does mirror matter figure in this possible universes' scenario?

I can't recall having heard of positive or negative “electron protons”, or the “four types of universe” LB mentions, either. :confused:

 

LB, do you have a link to someplace explaining this? or, if this is an original idea, can you explain it in more detail?

[CraigD]

When the proton anti-proton pairs were made in the early universe they would have annihilated each other except that about one collision in every billion would have involved say two anti-protons and one proton colliding at exactly the same instant leaving one extra proton.

Two antiproton and one proton colliding at exactly the same instant, or slightly different instants, won’t, according to commonly accepted theory, result in one extra proton. Rather, you’d get one antiproton, the net -1 charge of the original 3 particles remaining unchanged.

 

Recall that what current theory actually describes occurring in mater-antimatter annihilation is an interaction like your example is annihilation of the protons’ fundamental fermions – up, down, anti-up and anti-down quarks – with their respective antiparticles. I described this in more detail in post #17.

This picture would have produce enough protons to make the universe.

According to current theory, the matter-antimatter imbalance had to occur “upstream” from the annihilation of primordial quarks and antiquarks, in the period when quarks were “condensing” from more fundamental, “grand unified” forces. Something had to have caused this process to produce slightly more antiquarks than quarks, resulting in a net charge imbalance among all of the quarks and antiquarks in the universe. This is the much-mentioned CP-violation, which I outlined in post #58.

 

It’s also important to note that, according to the Big Bang model, much more matter-antimatter annihilation occurred prior to the formation of protons and antiprotons from the primordial quark-gluon plasma than after. This annihilation was less significant, because the universe was still hot enough for the resulting energy to generate new quark-antiquark pairs, making these annihilations much more “reversible” than they are nowadays.

[Little Bang]

My opinion is that quarks are extremely short lived waveforms not particles. The standard model has no ability to explain what happened in the early.

[CraigD]

My opinion is that quarks are extremely short lived waveforms not particles.

One of the central tenets of quantum physics – wave–particle duality - is that everything is both a wave and a particle. You simply aren’t correctly interpreting the formalism of quantum physics if you naively consider anything as being exclusively wave-like or exclusively particle-like.

 

There’re are lots of possible, non-naïve interpretations of quantum physics, some of which view everything as waves that have particles, others as particles that have waves, but all must embrace this fundamental duality.

The standard model has no ability to explain what happened in the early [universe].

While the Big Bang model is, I think most experts in it agree, far from complete, I don’t think it’s accurate to say is has “no ability” to explain the early universe.

 

The physics of particles with color charge - quarks and gluons - though difficult, is IMHO some of the most fascinating, dramatic, and important. It’s also, I think, some of the least well commonly understood. My imagination is boggled by some of the basic QCD concepts:

• That less than 2% of the mass of a proton or neutron is from its 3 quarks, the remainder being from its virtual “sea” of gluons
  
• How strong the strong force - the force carried between quarks and gluons by gluons – is: on the order of [math]100 \,\mbox{kg} \cdot \mbox{m/s}^2[/math], acting on particles with mass on the order of [math]10^{-29} \,\mbox{kg}[/math]
  
• That even thought the strong force is one of the practically shortest range forces, effectively limited to within atomic nuclei, technically it doesn’t vary with distance.
  

This last quality is, in a sense, the central one by which the Standard Model explains the generation of quark-antiquark pairs, and thus why colliding high-speed protons with copper-iridium plates generates antiprotons. The mechanism proposed by the Standard Model, color confinement, is pretty amazing: as a pair of quarks within a proton or neutron is forced beyond their usual distances from one another, primarily by interactions carried by photons of magnetic force, the mass/energy of the “gluon tube” connecting them exceeds that of required for 4 quarks and their gluons, and thus 2 antiparticles are born.

 

As I’m unaware of a catchy name for this, I’ll call it “color charge silly putty”, amazing stuff that, if stretched, creates antimatter. It’s mind-expanding to imagine how different the universe would be if quarks constituted a larger fraction of the mass of baryons (protons, neutrons, and more exotic quark-gluon composite particles).