Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Where is all the Antimatter?

Assumed predictions of the Big Bang have lost a lot of credibility, because scientists have not found any large quantities of antimatter in the universe at all!

An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. Antihydrogen is an example of antimatter, which are exact copies of identical matter particles, except that each antimatter particle has the opposite charge.  

The electrodes (gold) of the trap
used to combine positrons and
antiprotons to form antihydrogen.
A research collaboration at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, has managed, 38 times, to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap for more than 170 milliseconds. The group reported the result in Nature online on 17 November 2010. "We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work," says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA collaboration at CERN.

This huge accomplishment reminds us about yet another problem with the Big Bang theory. According to the Big Bang cosmology, most evolutionists assume that every particle of matter created by the energy of the Big Bang should have a particle of antimatter created at the same time. These assumed predictions of the Big Bang have lost a lot of credibility because we have not found nearly the amount of antimatter in the universe that could be accepted under such a model. Paul W. Lamicela's research article has a detailed discussion of the many shortcomings of Big Bang cosmology related to antimatter.

Selections from Antimatter and the Big Bang by Paul W. Lamicela.

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published by Answers in Genesis, March 2006, at http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/contest-winner/lamicela.pdf).

When matter and antimatter come together, they annihilate and form energy. According to the big bang, all the matter in the universe formed from energy. But this would produce an equal amount of antimatter. So just as easily as the matter/antimatter came into existence it could come back together and very soon, there would only be radiation.

Could the antimatter have separated from matter soon after the big bang and now be in distant regions of space? There is no evidence that there is much antimatter out in space, or that other galaxies are made of antimatter.

What about Charge Parity violation? Normally, Charge and Parity together must be conserved, so that if you swap a particle with its antiparticle and change its direction of spin, it would behave the same way as it did before the changes. But this is not true of K mesons. If there was CP violation in the first seconds of the big bang, matter would have won out over antimatter. Unfortunately for the big bang, it has been shown that the amount of CP violation is several orders of magnitude less than would account for matter/antimatter imbalance.

What about Grand Unified Theories? GUTs attempt to explain the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces as being different aspects of a single force under extremely high energies. But GUTs predict that protons eventually decay, and will have a lifetime of 10+31 years. All experiments have failed to find any proton decay at all.

How is antimatter not a problem for the biblical model? God created matter in the beginning, but He did not create much antimatter. God did not want all the matter to annihilate with antimatter. He designed the universe to function!

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