The Universe ain't what it used to be.

Do you remember that post I wrote on antimatter about a week ago? Near the conclusion, I speculated that there could be whole antimatter galaxies that science has yet to discover, and thus blew your mind with physics. Well, someone decided to take it a step further. The physicist Dragan Hajdukovic recently published a paper describing an alternate Big Bang theory, one that I found fascinating. In his theory, the universe eventually stops expanding, shrinks down, and then switches all of its matter into antimatter. 

....what.

That’s right: we would live in an antimatter universe. Let’s Tarantino this theory and see how Dragan came to this shocking conclusion.

First of all, scientists have established that there are places that contain absolutely nothing; they refer to these ‘empty’ spaces as quantum vacuums. Yet even in a quantum vacuum, electromagnetic waves float in and out constantly, and ‘virtual’ particles instantaneously appear and disappear. To make a real matter-antimatter pair out of these virtual particles, they have to be influenced by a strong electromagnetic field themselves, a process known as the Schwinger mechanism. 

....er.

Originally, scientists hypothesized that when the universe began to crush itself under the force of its own gravity, it would condense everything into an infinitesimal point, then explode outward again, creating another universe in the process. Hajdukovic disagrees, precisely because of the effects of the Schwinger mechanism. He theorizes that, when the universe is just starting to super-condense into that singularity, the gravitational forces will be so strong that they will provide the same energy to virtual particles that electromagnetic fields would, turning them into very real matter-antimatter fundamental particles. Since matter and antimatter repel each other at extremely close distances, a super-condensed universe would just start repelling everything without discretion, changing all existing matter into antimatter in the process. 

This is a big departure from classical Big Bang theory. For one, Hajdukovic’s theory implies that the smallest the universe would ever have to get is around a couple of kilometers for everything to switch matter type. And the time that it would take to make that turn-around? A fraction of a fraction of a second. The whole thing almost sounds too good… but that’s Hajdukovic’s point. He pointed out in a recent article that most theories of the universe fail to account for some pretty serious phenomena, like dark matter and the dominance of matter over antimatter. Several existing Big Bang models try and fit a fact to a theory, rather than a theory to a fact; as Sherlock Holmes would put it, many physicists were implying, not inferring, a big no-no when trying to solve this kind of mystery. 

Watson Disapproves.

In contrast, Hajducovic worked with what he had, and moved back. In fact, another one of his papers made the argument that dark matter actually is the repulsion of virtual matter and antimatter, a concept that actually, kind of, sort of makes sense. Huh. 

Yet, regardless of whether his hypothesis is right or wrong, his suggestion certainly opens the doors to a wider range of theory, one that brings all facets of the universe, including those we don’t fully understand, into account. Just imagine what the universe would be if we were all antimatter beings...

Plus, it’d make great science-fiction. There’s always that.

The fail-safe of the theoretical physicist.