Science

The Broken Mirror

T2K result, April 2020
The universe should not exist: matter and antimatter were made in equal amounts and should have annihilated completely. In 2020, neutrinos gave the strongest hint yet of the asymmetry that let you happen.
Documented

The beam and the asymmetry

The T2K collaboration's April 2020 Nature paper compared muon-neutrino and muon-antineutrino beams fired from Tokai to Super-Kamiokande, 295 kilometers away: electron-neutrino appearance outpaced electron-antineutrino appearance, excluding CP-conserving values of the phase delta-CP and ruling out CP conservation at 95 percent confidence. The known quark-sector CP violation, observed since 1964, is far too small to explain the cosmic matter surplus; the lepton sector is the remaining hope, via leptogenesis.

Assessment: Documented in Nature: the 3-sigma exclusions and the asymmetry. The leading explanation for existence now runs through a water tank in Gifu.
Stories

The honest tension

The sibling experiment NOvA, firing neutrinos 810 kilometers across the American Midwest, sees no such evidence and sits in slight tension with T2K. The 2020 result is an indication, not a discovery; the field's own threshold for claiming one is five sigma, and T2K's asymmetry is not there. Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE are being built to settle it.

Assessment: Stories: two flagship experiments, one hint, one null. The answer to why anything exists is currently a disagreement between Japan and Minnesota.
Interesting claims

We are the rounding error

The arithmetic of existence: the early universe held almost exactly equal matter and antimatter, they annihilated to light, and the residue, roughly one particle of matter per billion pairs, became every galaxy, star, and reader. Everything you have ever touched is the ashes of a broken symmetry.

Assessment: Interesting: cosmology's most casual fact is also its most vertiginous. You are the leftover of an almost-perfect cancellation.
Sources and further reading
  1. T2K Collaboration, Nature 580:339-344 (April 2020): CP conservation excluded at 95 percent, delta-CP intervals at 3 sigma
  2. Sakharov, 1967: CP violation as a necessary condition for the matter surplus
  3. NOvA's null result and slight tension with T2K; Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE as the planned resolution
Worth asking

If we exist because of a symmetry violation measured in a beam of ghosts, what is existence, an imbalance that never corrected?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+