Why hasn’t the universe been destroyed? We have been told so many times that matter and antimatter annihilate each other and there must have been equal parts of both during the creation of the universe. So how come we are living in a universe dominated by matter today? Don’t get me wrong, it certainly is lucky for us things turned out this way, but it is just another case of scientific theory gone wrong. A new experiment has shown there may be a slight anomaly connected with the idea there were equal amounts of both matter and antimatter formed and it looks like the reason might have something to do with neutrinos. I guess the first thing I should do is define a neutrino. A neutrino is any of the massless or nearly massless electrically neutral leptons. There is a distinct kind of neutrino associated with each of the massive leptons. There, that is clear as mud. Let me put it another way, a neutrino is a tiny object which probably has no mass and millions of them pass through us and the earth every second. The experiment I was talking about seems to indicate a neutrino can change its type and somehow this has something to do with the reason there is so much more matter than antimatter. Are neutrinos part of matter or part of antimatter? I don’t think anyone has the answer to that yet.

There could be other reasons why it seems like there is far more matter than antimatter. The reason I say this is the fact there is so much about the universe we don’t know and what we see is all in the past. The speed of light is a hindrance to us when we look at other objects in space and when you hear an object is 100,000 light years away from us it means we are looking at the light from that object it put out 100,000 light years ago. Even when we look at a person we are looking at what they did slightly in the past. Sure it may be only billions of a second ago, but it is still in the past, because the light has to reach our eyes and this takes time. Antimatter could have eliminated some of what we see and the light from that elimination has not reached us yet. We think if we see antimatter it looks the same as matter, so how do we know we are looking at matter when we look through our telescopes? All we can do is observe how it behaves. Things happen in space and we have theories for why most of it happens. An example is a nova which is an exploding star. We think this is a natural occurrence which was caused by stars running out of nuclear fuel and its mass flowing to its core. This is said to cause the heavy core, which is subject to gravitational forces to cause the explosion.

Could we be wrong about this and could antimatter somehow be responsible? We really don’t know for sure how some things work, we just have theories about them. Some scientists claim our theory of the sun burning nuclear fuel is wrong, because it would have used up all the fuel by now, but most think it is correct. As far as why stars blow up, perhaps we will find out there is some connection between matter and antimatter which causes this explosion. Could a star create antimatter? It seems it could, because science tells us that tiny amounts of antimatter are contained in at least some cosmic rays and hit the earth and the current thinking is the rate of collision with our atmosphere is from less than one per square meter to more than 100 per square meter. Scientists also believe they have found evidence of antimatter creation above thunderstorms. Here is something which is very hard to believe and it is our bodies contain potassium-40 and we emit positrons which are miniscule amounts of antimatter and they are very short-lived because they get annihilated. It is hard to believe humans put out antimatter, but get this, so do bananas. If all the antimatter ever made by humans could be captured and set off at once it wouldn’t even have enough energy to boil a cup of water.

Some scientists have suggested we might be able to trap antimatter. It is a matter of stopping it from annihilating itself. You can’t use a trap made of matter, because the antimatter would touch it and annihilate. Since there are many types of antimatter, just about one type for each type of matter, scientists have not been able to build a trap which will work for all the different types. Magnetism seems to be able to trap some antimatter and the areas around the earth’s magnetic field, where the Van Allen radiation belts exist, are said to contain some antimatter particles.

Scientists have made some antimatter at CERN, that is where the Large Hadron Collider is located, but the amount is so tiny it is hardly worth mentioning. There is not enough power on earth to create even a teaspoon of this stuff and probably not enough money on the entire planet to do it. Could neutrinos switch their state from positive to negative making them become antimatter, some scientists are investigating this right now as I have mentioned above.

One of the things scientists worry about with antimatter is that even though it looks like there wasn’t enough antimatter to eliminate all matter, this could be wrong and somewhere in space that antimatter may be waiting to destroy us. How do we know the insides of black holes do not contain antimatter and this is how they destroy matter, not by crushing it, but by eliminating it? We are constantly being pulled toward something in space and this something might be a huge amount of antimatter bodies. We just don’t know enough about what lies in space to be able to say for certain that everything we see in space is matter and not antimatter.

Scientists would love to be able to make enough antimatter for rocket propulsion since it contains so much power, but the problem is someone would surely use it to make the most powerful weapons the human race ever saw. These weapons could easily destroy the planet and make nukes look like fire crackers. I have always said technology is a double edged sword and knowing what human nature is like, we would be much better off if we don’t figure out how to make enough of this stuff.