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Or rather, since we’re not going to call ourselves “anti-matter”, it’s a mystery how the universe managed to not be balanced between… the two types of matter. However, when we (people) make new particles they always appear in matter/anti-matter pairs, so how the universe has managed to have more matter than anti-matter is a mystery. The early universe was so hot that all of the particles flying around were moving at particle-accelerator speeds and new particles were generated continuously. When describing these events, CERN scientists inevitably make “explodey sounds” with their mouths. The trajectories of newly formed particles flying away from the collision of two gold nuclei. When they do slam together all of that energy is released as a burst of new particles plus the kinetic energy of those (typically very fast) particles plus some light. We can get individual particles moving so fast that they carry many thousands of times their mass-equivalent in kinetic energy. That’s why we use “particle accelerators” like CERN to slam particles together, instead of using huge lasers or lenses or anything else. Kinetic energy (the energy of movement) is the easiest way to concentrate a lot of energy in one place. This is Einstein’s famous energy/mass conversion rate: E=mc 2. If the new particle has mass m, then the energy present is reduced by mc 2. There are lots of clever guesses, but there isn’t much solid, direct data to pick out which guesses are good.Īs for how it became matter, that’s “easy”: when you get enough energy in one place, new particles form spontaneously. If the question is “how much?” or “where did it come from?”, the answers are unfortunately “a hell of a lot” and “we can only guess”. What was the energy at the start of the universe and how did it create matter?

Physicist: This was an interesting back-and-forth, so the original questions are italicized.