The Antimatter of Self
A celestial meeting between mirrored universes
13.8 billion years ago, a singularity became an ever-expanding universe. In that singularity, the whole universe already existed as an extreme amount of energy. The same vast amount of energy as there exists in our current universe, as the energy is constant.
Needless to say, it was a dense situation … a hot mess. Except it was not that messy, the entropy being a measurement of disorder, was at its absolute lowest point.
It was a hot, but ordered, mess. Almost like an accountant trying to get high on psychedelia, I suppose, except very much different.
The universe clearly needed space. And so it huffed and it puffed expanded and gradually it cooled down.
Very quickly it cooled down to create photons, electrons, and quarks, which soon got together in threesomes with gluons and created protons and neutrons, and then came the atoms, or rather mainly hydrogen and a small amount of helium, and then later the stars, which created heavier atoms by fusion inside the core of a star, and some of the largest stars exploded in supernovas and created even heavier atoms and shock waves from the explosions created new stars and the galaxies and we’ve got planets orbiting the stars and long story short, one of them was earth and then some complex molecules became large proteins and some of them became conscious and wrote stuff on the internet … phew!
But this was not what this story was supposed to be about.
Because when all the particles were created, at the same time their antiparticles were also created. Antiparticles, constituting antimatter, are particles with the same properties as their counterpart, except for the opposite charge. So the anti-particle of an electron is a positron, which is an electron with a positive charge.
Antiparticles can be created in the large accelerators at CERN. The creation of matter from energy (E=mc²) creates an equal amount of particles and antiparticles. But then what happened to the other half of the universe — the antimatter? Nobody knows.
When matter and antimatter come together, it annihilates each other back into energy. An electron and a positron would immediately annihilate into energy E = mc², where m is the mass of the electron and positron and c is the speed of light. A rather high amount of energy from a small mass.
If an equal amount of matter and antimatter were created from ground zero, this would suggest that it all annihilated into energy. Instead, we have matter, but none of the antimatter.
One suggestion is that there was a lot more matter and antimatter created, but most of it was annihilated. For some reason, the amount was not completely symmetric, and hence the matter we have now, is what was left, while all the matter is annihilated, while the universe expanded.
Another idea is that matter and antimatter repel each other gravitationally and hence created almost two distinct universes with a vast distance apart.
In that case, there exists a universe with antimatter. A universe where there might be an anti-earth and an anti-you and anti-me. But then again, we don’t know if the universe plays by deterministic rules, so maybe the is no us. Baybe there is just Uncle Bob, who is an alien blob.
The universes might not just be separated by space. They might be separated by time, having opposite directions of the arrow of time.
There would be complete symmetry (CPT-symmetry) if we changed three things:
- Change matter to antimatter (charge)
- Mirror the three spacial dimensions (parity)
- Let the time run backward
And hence everything would follow the same universal rules as we have here. They are not so different, the antis. The antimatter, the anti-you, and the anti-me might exist backward in time from the big bang.
And then when an anti-star explodes backward in time in the time-reversed space, it will create the you that I met, but we could never be stable. We belong in different universes, as mirror images of self, with slightly different compositions. You became you, I became me.
And whenever we meet, we annihilate into energy, before we we turn back into all that matters in our separate selves. You and me, mirroring each other in isolated universes.
My time passes forward as I move on, while your time will pass in the opposite direction, and perhaps someday we meet again for the very first time.
