What Are The Hidden Rules Of The Universe?

this video has been kindly supported by one trim imagine a glorious future where humans have overcome our present troubles and we eventually leave this tiny planet behind to live Among the Stars in time our descendants spanned the entire Milky Way countless trillions living in Harmony from the galactic center to the most distant spiral arm one day a message arrives from outside from another distant Galaxy another distant cluster there is other life other intelligence out there in the universe ideas are exchanged and science art and philosophy prosper and eventually plans are made in the darkness of Intergalactic space the two great civilizations will meet many generations labor to build the immense craft capable of traversing great distances and many generations are born live and die on the immense Journey but after countless Millennia in the inky Blackness the emissaries of the two civilizations approach two individuals float across the void hands reaching out they touch and both vanish in a blinding Flash [Music] the great ships stand off from each other staring in amazement the civilizations are fundamentally different and it is only now it becomes clear one is made of matter and the other antimatter and any contact leads to annihilation the ships Retreat into the darkness knowing the true contact will always be impossible but how did it come to this how did they not know about the difference in their fundamental makeup they had shared their science their mathematics and their engineering surely this difference would have been obvious but the scientists knew better they knew that nature holds on to its Secrets tightly they knew that written into the laws of the universe were rules that cloaked these secrets rules fundamental to the functioning of reality they knew that these rules were built into many of the universe's processes from the supermassive to the microscopic and they knew that it was these rules that had helped reality freeze in the first billionth of a second of time and behind them all they knew that there was always one common factor symmetry have you ever wondered how your brain works or how the Earth formed or how civilization began wondrium is the perfect place for you and has been a huge inspiration for both history of the universe and history of the earth wandrium used to be called Great Courses plus which made the university level lecture series and they've now expanded to contain even more content from travelogues and tutorials to long-form documentaries wandrium is the best place for high quality enjoyable content that will make you smarter one great example of this is the Theory of Everything series by Don Lincoln an easy to understand University level lecture series and one I like to listen to to get inspiration for the channel indeed the two lectures on how symmetry Works in physics were a huge help in making this video it's exhaustive totally understandable but never dumbed down it is the best educational subscription service out there hands down and they're giving viewers a great offer of a free trial so get the Fantastic education I did by heading over to wandrium.com forward slash history of the universe thanks to wandrim for supporting education on YouTube and sponsoring this video two great civilizations inhabiting two distinct and distant regions of the universe and yet we know their laws of physics must have been the same then how could they have failed to tell Mata from antimatter to particles two atoms two Intergalactic beings with opposite electric charge in our patch of the universe Mata is everywhere and antimatter is rare but in their patch of the universe the inverse must have been true whilst we live by the light of a star they lived by the light of anti-stars whilst our ships were built from atoms theirs were constructed from anti-atoms it would be understandable to think that the laws of physics do not care about the difference between matter and antimatter but that is not quite true we now know that nature does treat matter and antimatter slightly differently though these differences are subtle and unexpected and related to one of the deepest Concepts in all her physics what is symmetry we all know our first perception of symmetry a mirror Reflection from left to right armed with such a mirror a child can sketch a symmetrical shape with what is on the left also seen on the right and vice versa but looking in a mirror reveals that this reflection runs deeply in nature our faces and bodies are symmetrical a right eye with a left a left arm with a right nature makes many uses of this mirror or bilateral symmetry most mammals reptiles birds and fish share this simple mirroring and when the rules of Nature's symmetry are broken such as the oversized claw of a fiddler crab the appearance can be quite jarring symmetry is more than just reflection a starfish builds itself using rotational symmetry so when rotated its appearance does not change a millipede uses translational symmetry building its body with identical chunks through these symmetries nature is being economical in design symmetry can also spark a deep emotional response in human concepts of beauty symmetry of appearance is pleasing even though beauty is only skin deep and inside we can be quite asymmetrical and this appreciation of symmetry has made its way into Art and Design the great temples of the Ancients in Egypt and Greece show Exquisite symmetry as to more modern buildings like the Taj Mahal and Arc de Triomphe and many great artworks such as Da Vinci's Last Supper and art in design call on more than just simple mirror symmetry as rotational symmetry can be powerful from the rotating discs of the pre-columbian Americas to the Exquisite Islamic patterns adorning many mosques across the globe indeed the massive Pentagon home to the U.S Department of Defense Bears its geometry in its name symmetry is everywhere but you might be wondering how this relates to the fundamental rules of the universe well our story starts as all good stories do with a duel at dawn on the 30th of May 1832 two men met in a field outside of Paris the cause of the conflagration is unclear but rumor has it it was over the affections of a young woman by the time the sun was fully up that day twenty-year-old mathematician Everest galwa Lay Dying in the grass the night before galwar had had a premonition of his untimely death into the early hours he had scribbled with letters to friends and colleagues and amongst these missives he'd pulled out the last of his mathematical ideas for in his short life galwar had brought many new ideas to the world of maths and Central to these was the idea of symmetry the mathematics of symmetry was not a New Concept ancient geometers had realized that a rotated Circle remained the same Circle and triangles squares and pentagons appeared the same after fixed rotations the galwar saw deeper his Focus was algebra and more specifically polynomials polynomials are equations with quantities to a power squares cubes and higher for example 1 plus X Plus x squared is a simple polynomial as is three plus five times x to the power of 5 minus x to the power of seven such polynomials are found across all of science engineering economics and many other fields other mathematicians had scrambled to try and find algebraic solutions to higher order polynomials but galwa wondered if such an equation existed for all polynomials one equation to unlock them all yet instead of discovering this ultimate equation he actually showed it was a errand the solutions just didn't exist and he didn't do this by simply fighting through the algebra but by looking into the symmetries of the solutions he realized the solutions to polynomial equations were complex numbers each being a point on the infinite complex plane these points could appear as shapes triangles pentagons or others and shapes of course have symmetries they can be reflected or rotated this was a radical way of doing mathematics translating equations into a geometric picture and thinking about their symmetries and since this work in the early 19th century mathematical insights into symmetries have grown and it has since blossomed into group Theory the study of groups of things that share properties and symmetries modern cryptology is underpinned by group Theory but it is symmetry's impact on science which has been the most startling and so as he Lay Dying In The Morning Light galwar couldn't have known that his scribbles would revolutionize our universe long before they met our two great civilizations came into Contact radio beams were fired Across the Universe taking many millions of years to reach their destination it was a slow and cumbersome way of talking but this new conversation with our distant neighbors did at least work both civilizations knew the laws of electromagnetism on Earth the jiggling of atoms formed the radio beam that carried the messages and in the instruments of the aliens charges jiggled as the messages arrived but unlike on Earth these were anti-electrons positrons dancing to the beat of the radio waves electromagnetism has a fundamental symmetry if you swap all the positive and negative charges the outcomes remain the same this meant that the exchange of radio waves alone between the two civilizations could never tell Mata from antimatter something else was needed some crack in the tree of physics and to understand why we need to start our story almost a century ago we need to start with a funeral on the 1st of May 1935 an obituary appeared in the New York Times this was not unusual but the author famous physics Professor Albert Einstein certainly was Emmy nurtur Einstein wrote had been the most significant creative female mathematical genius produced so far and her insights had been necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature but what did he mean Emmy NATO was only 53 when cancer struck her and while her name might not be as iconic today as Einstein and the other old fathers of physics her work was just as important and nerta's Theorem has everything to do with symmetry key to this was one simple fact the universe nature itself is lazy with the coming of modern science mathematics had steadily replaced mysticism and geometric symmetries had emerged from the equations the spherical pull of Newton's gravity resulted in spherical planets and stars whilst the magnetic field of an electric current was found to be shaped like a cylinder these geometric symmetries symmetries of shape were pleasing to the eye but they were really only skin deep there were other much deeper symmetries lurking in the mathematics of the universe as with any story there were many potential players but here we will focus on just two the first was italian-born geosepi lodovicho lagrangia better known as Joseph Louis LaGrange and Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton they share few similarities in their lives the grandia lived through the French Revolution and was instrumental in bringing in the metric system whereas Hamilton grew up as a Wonder kid in Dublin almost a century later but despite their separation time their work dovetailed on one key thing reformulating the equations of Newton and key to this Insight was the idea that the Universe was lazy the Curious concept of least action indeed long before the French mathematician Pierre de fermat had proposed that light always took the quickest path through any Optical system imagine you are at the beach with waves crashing into the shore often the distance somewhere to the left you spot Something In The Water a person is waving no a person is drowning you have to rush to save them but which way do you go you can run fast on the sand or you can swim slower in the water dashing straight to the shore and then swimming out on the left will take too long should you run along the shore and minimize the time you've spent swimming as you race the calculations in your head you realize there is a better path an optimal path you can run part way along the beach and then dive into the water this path will be the shortest time between you and the drowning man all other paths are longer fermat realized that light traveling from one place to another is like you on the beach light takes the minimum time between two points the bend path of light as it refracts in water is just like the bent path you take between the land and the sea but of course fermat only considered this for light lagrangia and Hamilton wondered if this notion could be expanded across all of physics and so hidden within the equations they found that all nature somehow always chose the laziest of options this might sound strange why does the universe function like this we still don't know but it works to test this physicists Define what is known as the action and then consider every conceivable possibility of a physical process indeed there are an infinite number of imaginary paths that light can take between two points and for each of these paths physicists can calculate the associated action it seems that the path where the action is most minimized is always taken by Nature from Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's electromagnetism from quantum mechanics to Einstein's general theory of relativity the universe is laziness Reigns Supreme and so the principle of least action is written in the language of mathematics and it is this that Emmy nurtur was looking at when she noticed something intriguing she realized that if the equations possessed symmetries then this would mean there would be special unchanging quantities associated with the symmetries this was an idea Central to Modern physics the idea of conserved quantities amounts that do not change foreign of these is the idea of conservation of energy as school children we are told that energy cannot be created or destroyed only changed from one form into another throw a board into the air and the energy you expend is converted into potential energy and then back into kinetic start a fire and the fuel you put in will equal the heat and light that comes out the other side but that is just the beginning physics is full of conserved quantities and particle reactions for every positive electric charge that is created or destroyed and equal but opposite negative charge is also created or destroyed the total charge of the universe therefore remains a harmonious quantity of zero in a collision between two objects the quantity of momentum is conserved the amount of momentum before the Collision exactly matches that after the Collision and so in terms of momentum the universe once again appears to be harmoniously balanced but why are these quantities conserved other physical quantities mass speed acceleration temperature are not what makes these quantities special what is it that separates the conserved from the non-conserved the answer is found by Emmy nurtur is symmetry imagine you have a physics experiment set up on a table something involving Springs and bouncing balls you do your experiment and record the outcomes how the various bits and Bulbs move and interact then you push the table 10 meters to the left and redo the experiment of course moving the table does not change the outcome of the experiment the Springs stretch and the balls bounce in the same way as before the physics controlling the experiment does not change with the change of location and this means that the laws of physics have a symmetry translational symmetry to nurture the existence of this symmetry have to mean that something was conserved something didn't change and from the mathematics underlying the principle of least action the mathematics of a lazy Universe she showed that this conserved quantity is just linear momentum meaning translational symmetry implied the conservation of linear momentum and there were other symmetries hidden in the mathematics meaning there must be other conserved quantities perhaps the most startling is the implications of the Symmetry in time performing The Experiment tomorrow should give the same result as today and it is the existence of this symmetry that results in the most famous Conservation law for symmetry in time results in the conservation of energy eminota had found that the equations led to a remarkable conclusion tested improved countless times in the century since every conserved quantity in the universe can be traced to an underlying Symmetry and every symmetry results in a conserved quantity although they are not always straightforward many are buried deep in the equations of quantum mechanics and whilst being subtle their impact can be profound in quantum mechanics things are described by waves these Quantum waves are like ripples on a pond but unlike Rippling water Quantum waves are waves of probability these waves share a lot of similarities with the oscillations of water as well as a wavelength that tells you how long a wave is quantum waves have amplitudes that tell you the strength of that wave and like water waves Quantum waves also have a property known as their phase the phase is a measurement of where in the cycles of oscillations the wave is is the way even a peak or in a trough but the properties of an electron are independent of the phase of its wave function they don't change no matter how the phase May alter and it is this symmetry this similarity between the electrons that gives us the conservation of electric charge other symmetries in the mathematics of quantum mechanics reveal even more esoteric conservation laws barrier number lepton number ISO Spin and strangeness to name a few symmetries can even be found that predict the fundamental forces gauge symmetries for example result in gauge bosons like the gluons that hold protons and neutrons together through the strong nuclear force the Symmetry between protons and neutrons they're inherent to similarity results in this Quantum force and so when physicists unravel the complex interactions of particles in the Large Hadron Collider these Quantum conservation laws rule Supreme inevitably we should expect the Dual fundamental interactions are totally Bound by these fundamental rules symmetries and conservation laws operating hand in hand everything in balance and indeed they mostly are but there are exceptions and it is these exceptions that may have formed our universe [Music] by the mid-20th century astronomers were thinking about aliens giant radio telescopes scanned the skies for any faint beep from distant civilizations some wondered just what we would say to our ET cousins when we eventually made contact but others worried about more fundamental questions for example the existence of antimatter beings the problem was centered around telling left from right this might seem trivial but it is implicitly tied to Mata and antimatter and the twin fates of our doomed Intergalactic civilizations how do you tell an alien the meaning of left and right it's harder than you think you can't send a picture as they would need to know left from right to properly reconstruct the image you can't refer to trappings of civilizations such as writing as they again would need a reference you need to appeal to left and right written in the fundamental universe and you need to find a break in symmetry that allows you to do this you need to start thinking about parity in 1956 the universe was broken in a laboratory in Washington DC individual atoms of cobalt were spinning in a magnetic field the experimenter Chang Wu was watching patiently for the Cobalt to change to undergo radioactive decay and spit out an electron in cooling the Cobalt atoms and placing them in a magnetic field Wu could ensure that they were all spinning together and she could chart the directions that electrons sped away from the Cobalt and conservation of angular momentum meant that they should be spat out from the poles of the Cobalt some heading from the Cobalt to North Pole and the same number emitted from the South but as Wu sat and counted the electrons a disturbing pattern appeared instead of a mix of electrons heading north and south all appeared to be escaping from just one side of the Cobalt atom it appeared that this radioactive decay of cobalt was not symmetric but what did this mean so what if Cobalt preferred to spit out electrons from one side rather than another well it all came down to a concept called parity up until the 1950s the conservation of parity was core to fundamental physics it meant that whatever was seen in a mirror Universe was as real as the physics that is seen in our universe think of an atom when an electron jumps from one energy level to another a photon of light is emitted but in which direction does this Photon flee you should see half of the photons heading to the right and the other half heading to the left but what if you view the atoms in a mirror the mirror switches left to right and vice versa but it also flips spins from clockwise to anti-clockwise and anti-clockwise to clockwise so the view in the mirror is half the photons moving to the left half to the right and so the emission of a photon an electromagnetic interaction obeys parity conservation and the same is true for the gravitational force imagine a planet spinning and orbiting its star in a clockwise fashion in the mirror universe everything would slip to anticlockwise motion at the quantum level there are other forces that we need to consider inside protons and to neutrons quarks interact with quarks exchanging a small particle known as a gluon this is the strong nuclear force in action the force that binds your Atomic nuclei together both electromagnetism and the strong force respect Quantum symmetries and Quantum conservation laws perfectly balanced but there is another fundamental Force the weak nuclear force and the weak nuclear force seems different it is responsible for aspects of radioactivity changing neutrons into protons and spitting out electrons but radioactivity is not so common in the universe and it can seem that the weak force is little more than a bit player but it was this that all changed in 1955 when it was realized that the weak force is the strangest of them all particle physics had flourished in the first half of the 20th century a flurry of particle discoveries and Quantum insights peeled away the world of the very small and as patterns and pictures began to emerge in the families of fundamental particles the action of the weak Force came steadily into Focus Chen ning Yang and sung Dao Li were at the Forefront of this effort as young scientists at Princeton they began to explore what nuclear experiments had revealed they knew that the weak force was responsible for some radioactivity and that in these decays the great Wolfgang poorly had predicted the existence of a ghostly new particle the neutrino and whilst no one had ever seen a neutrino the conservation of energy was sacrosanct and so it must exist Yang and Lee were puzzled however over what they saw they understood that fundamental forces should conserve parity but there was no smoking gun to prove that the weak Force understood that this was the rule and so an audacious idea to cold maybe the weak Force didn't conserve parity maybe it wouldn't work in a mirror universe whilst this sounded interesting as a theoretical idea they needed an experiment that could show that the weak Force broke the universe and this is why Wu had cooled her Cobalt atoms and placed them in a magnetic field just like a photon being spat out of an atom the spin of electrons can be switched between clockwise and anti-clockwise and we should expect equal numbers of electrons heading both northwards and southwards but of course this was not what Wu saw in her sensitive experiment why would electrons preferentially emerge from one pole of a spinning Cobalt nucleus the startling conclusion was that Paulie's neutrino could only spin One Way relative to its motion this meant that there were only clockwise neutrinos and by the conservation of angular momentum they can only be emitted from one Cobalt pole the electron from the other a mirror view of the neutrino would therefore appear to be spinning anti-clockwise but such neutrinos simply do not exist in our universe the mirror version of the weak Force therefore also does not exist in our universe the weak Force violates parity this discovery won Yang and Lee the Nobel Prize in 1957. it was one of the fastest ever awarded in physics much faster than the 17 years that Einstein had to wait Wu mysteriously missed out but her name is written into the history books of science for the experiment that shook physics to its very core the weak Force violating parity means that neutrinos no right from left that the universe itself somehow knows right from left but the weak Force goes deeper and in the following years other forms of parity started to Tumble and it turned out there were other symmetries that the weak Force like to crack and it is now that the mystery of matter and antimatter can begin to be unraveled [Music] it was realized that order could be restored to the Wu experiment if as well as parity another transformation was made if all the particles were transformed into their anti-particles known as a Charged conjugation transformation the mirror view with the spin anti-neutrino could occur in our universe this double transformation is known as CP for charge and parity and so whilst the weak Force violated parity perhaps it would obey CP but it didn't take long for a new series of experiments to show that this was also not the case and this experiment explored the weird behavior of particles known as chaons chaos and mesons a combination of one quark and one anti-cork and neutral chaons chaons without charge are a mix of a strange quark and a down Quark but there are two types of neutral chaons one with a strange quark and anti-down quark and another with an anti-strange and a down Quark this peculiar situation means that the two neutral chaons can mutate into one another and a beam of neutral chaons has to be considered a quantum mechanical mix of the two chaon's lifetimes are very short decaying into lighter mesons pions in about a billionth of a second and the conservation of charge and parity together means that there should always be three pions in the Decay and so in 1964 an experiment was set up to explore whether the combination of charge and parity were actually conserved firing a beam of chaons down a long tube physicists counted the outcome of decays almost all of the decays 499 out of 500 resulted in a burst of three mesons but one in 500 resulted in only two pions and it was here the universe was broken once again charge and parity were not conserved in the decay of Chaos once again the result won the experimenters Val Fitch and James Cronin the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics but what does CP parity violation really mean for the universe deep down it tells us that the laws of the universe are different for matter and for antimatter thinking back to the meeting of the great Intergalactic civilizations when we began this journey this finally gives us a solution to avert the disastrous events that unfolded neutral chaos must be considered a Quantum mix of matter and antimatter and sometimes this Quantum mix can Decay into electrons and its antimatter partner the positron if CP was conserved these decays should produce equal numbers of electrons and positrons but again Cronin and Fitch found that CP was not conserved for every 300 electrons produced into case there were 301 positrons and so all our Intergalactic descendants needed to do was independently undertake experiments with neutral chaos and they would have known batter from antimatter they would have known whether it was safe to finally shake hands whilst communication through electromagnetism wouldn't help nor discussions about gravity and the strong nuclear force were this distant meeting to occur we would be able to talk about experiments with the weak nuclear force and there would we find absolutes but the question remains why does the universe break these seemingly obvious symmetries it would be a much simpler place if the physics of matter and antimatter were perfectly symmetrical perfectly balanced and indeed that is only the beginning it seems the implications of CP violation as it is known have much more far-ranging consequences for the universe and to truly understand this we will need to return to the very beginning of time when the intense Fireball of the Big Bang somehow froze [Music] what is the ultimate goal of fundamental physics is it to understand what everything is made of to try and reveal the origins of the universe [Music] to Einstein on his deathbed there was a simple answer the Ultimate Prize was a Theory of Everything a theory that would finally unite all of the fundamental forces gravity electromagnetism the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force long the Holy Grail of quantum mechanics and general relativity physicists have taken steady steps in this Direction first uniting the weak force with electromagnetism in the 1960s the strong force took more work but in Quantum chromodynamics it too joined the party and the ultimate aim the focus of fundamental physics for more than a century has been to incorporate gravity a goal that physicists have yet to definitively accomplish but just how do physicists build these theories of everything once again guiding them are ideas of perfection and symmetry important Clues have come from high energy experiments where particles are smashed together at high speeds as the energies of the interactions are increased something peculiar begins to happen to the fundamental forces they begin to change their spots they alter just how they operate between particles they start to lose their distinct nature and all begin to look the same let's consider electromagnetism and the weak force in the universe today they seem radically different with electromagnetism connecting charges and the weak Force being a form of radioactivity electromagnetism is also carried by the massless photon whereas the weak Force uses three massive particles the z0 and W plus and minus but at higher energies this distinction begins to blur and what is known as the electro-week theory these seemingly distinct forces are truly one single force and so when the universe was hot and young only this single Force existed it was the cooling of the universe through the big bang that broke their Symmetry and made them distinct at higher temperatures still the distinction between Electro weak and the strong force Fades away and it's thought that at ultra high temperatures gravity 2 becomes indistinct this suggests that the universe's birth there was just one true Force the Super Force and this Super Force was perfect and symmetrical the Bible begins in Genesis with the line in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God the Bible begins with Godly Perfection that was ultimately corrupted modern cosmology begins in a very similar fashion [Music] beginning the universe was perfect and symmetrical there existed the one true Super Force and it reigned over all but this Ultra hot Universe expanded and cooled and fractures appeared in the perfect symmetry of the cosmos out of perfection imperfections began to appear the individual forces separated first gravity then the strong force as the universe continued to cool the weak Force separated from electromagnetism but these separations as the universe cooled were not uneventful as a force went its own way the very nature of the cosmos changed the universe before and after the separation was distinctly different it had undergone a phase transition as temperature decreases water freezes into ice its symmetry is reduced in the same way the separation of a fundamental force is the universe cooled marked a distinct fracture in the symmetry of the universe cosmologists think that these separations impacted the important features of reality gravity separating was at the Planck time when the universe was about 10 to the power of minus 43 seconds old this is an age of the universe we know almost nothing about and until we can write down our grand unified theory uniting the quantum realm of gravity it may forever remain a mystery but the separation of the strong force is different it occurred much later at about the age of 10 to the power of minus 34 seconds and this is a time that physicists think they have a much better handle on for this is about the time that inflation blew up the universe in the late 1970s Alan Guth was worried about the cosmos he had started his research career in particle physics hunting for Grand unified theories as well as hunting for a permanent position as a professor but in 1978 he attended a lecture that changed everything the speaker was Robert Dickey an elder Statesman of science being at the other end of his career to Guth Dickey had explored many Mysteries of the cosmos and in this talk he was wondering just why the universe appeared to be flat rather than curved like a sphere or a saddle somehow the birth of our universe must have been fine-tuned selecting flatness from all possible geometries Guth was intrigued by this seeming specialness of the universe and wondered if it related to the fact a chunk of the universe appeared to be missing a chunk predicted once again by symmetry the motivation was James Clark Maxwell on the nature of electricity and magnetism his equations were profoundly asymmetric possessing electrical charges but no magnetic equivalent all magnets we see have a north and south many before gooth had wondered where these magnetic monopoles pure Magnetic North or South Poles may be and so Guth decided that they must be hiding in the earliest moments of the universe when it was hot and dense and seething Guth suggested that the electromagnetism was symmetric and that magnetic monopoles were a part of the cosmic mix of particles but as the universe underwent an immense burst of expansion doubling 80 times almost instantly the magnetic monopoles were thinned out enough so that there was only one per observable universe after this period known as inflation there wouldn't have been enough energy in the universe to create new magnetic monopoles they were effectively lost never to be seen in a Physics laboratory so what happened to the universe during its dramatic expansion a background field of energy known as the inflaton must have dominated the density of the universe fell precipitously as all particles were robbed of their energy and the universe became a frozen empty place but space still seethed as the inflaton eventually decayed and inflation came to an end and so the energy of inflation was dumped back into the universe reheating the universe to many billions of degrees and creating the matter that inhabits the universe today but the magnetic monopoles were long gone but there was something strange in the timing all this started around the same time as a phase transition just as the strong force separated was this just a coincidence or was it the departure of the strong force that ceded the inflaton with energy we are still not sure indeed our knowledge of the physics of this Epoch is still a little hazy in parts and so we cannot be sure that we have found the true culprit of inflation indeed some have also tied the inflaton to the formation of the Higgs field the field that gives particles Mass whilst others have wondered if the inflaton is just in early incarnation of today's dark energy and so when the universe was about 10 to the power of minus 12 seconds old and a Barbie 10 to the power of 15 Kelvin all of the fundamental forces had separated into the distinct forms we know today but the action of symmetry breaking still had one more trick to play for it was in this Epoch that barriogenesis occurred this is the time when the super fundamental particles quarks and gluons began to condense into protons and neutrons and the matter in the present Universe the matter of you and me was finally born but a problem of symmetry remained remember that the energy of the inflaton was poured back into the universe after inflation and this is the ultimate source of matter and photons in the cosmos today this reheating should have equally produced matter and antimatter one of the starkest asymmetries in the universe today is the odd preponderance of matter over antimatter Cosmic searches have revealed a wealth of matter across the cosmos and the barest traces of antimatter as an example scientists believe there is about one part of antimatter to a quadrillion parts of normal matter within the Milky Way so where did this asymmetry arise in the lifetime of the universe why is there so much more matter it is thought the answer is buried deep somewhere in bariogenesis whilst we know and have seen that the laws of physics can differentiate between matter and antimatter the degree of difference is simply too small to account for the difference in matter over antimatter and so that still leaves us scratching at the fundamental laws of the universe to determine why there is any matter at all [Music] we can also estimate the degree of matter antimatter asymmetry from an unlikely Source the cosmic microwave background these photons were emitted when the Mata and antimatter in the universe finally annihilated and for every Proton or Neutron in the universe today there are about a billion of these Cosmic microwave background photons this means that the Universe must have been almost symmetrical for every billion antimatter particles there must have been a billion and one Mata particles and it is this tiny difference that is the source of all the universe's Mass today it is sobering to think that we are only here because of this tiny asymmetry but there is still one final mystery that symmetry could help reveal if symmetry is our true guide and fundamental physics is purely symmetrical there should be more than just magnetic monopoles out there to be discovered in the cosmos within a supersymmetric theory for example for every Quark there should be a symmetric squawk and for every electron a supersymmetric selectron this naming process carries on throughout the standard model from neutrinos to smuons for fermions and hexenos to fotinos for bosons a hidden supersymmetric Universe of spartacles would be lingering just Out Of Reach indeed supersymmetry is a key part of many potential theories of everything and scientists had long expected to finally find evidence in the Large Hadron Collider but hunts for these mysterious particles in our colliders have so far yielded none of these supersymmetric candidates always find are The Usual Suspects the quarks and electrons of our universe some physicists have claimed symmetry has led us astray and we are on the wrong path but for others symmetry is simply too alluring and the hunt for supersymmetry and the Super Force continues we are almost at the end of our journey and we have seen that symmetry is clearly Central to our understanding of the universe but it is really the breaking of symmetries that gives the universe its peculiar personalities the fundamental laws and the existence of matter truly arise from cracks in perfection but there is one final thing to consider even though it feels like the breaking of symmetries is something that happened in the distant past our universe is still expanding still cooling still changing and we are mere footsteps into the infinite future that lies ahead and so hidden in energies well below our experimental reach might yet be other undiscovered symmetries and as the universe continues to cool one day these two might crack fracture and break unleashing new forces and new phases that could radically change the cosmos our universe is March from Perfection to Ultimate corruption might not yet be over you've been watching the entire history of the universe don't forget to like And subscribe and leave a comment to tell us what you think thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: History of the Universe

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Length: 49min 0sec (2940 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022