Obama’s Stupid Earth Day Celebration, and “New Physics”

“Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me.  The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels.  And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.”

Can anyone imagine a stupider way to celebrate Earth Day than rolling out yet another version of one of the most lethal fighter-bombers ever invented?

And now for something completely different!

(Because reading and writing about Barack Obama and the rest of our brainless political clown-scape is like eating a diet of stupid all the time.)

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us.

But now physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new asymmetry in the behavior of fantastically weird sub-atomic particles called neutral B-mesons, which might be sufficient to explain the otherwise inexplicable preponderance of matter over anti-matter, which allows our existence.

(Neutral B-mesons) oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.

But of course this “new physics” is partially based on some older physics from Andrei Sakharov, James Cronin, and Val Fitch, in the general area of CP symmetries and asymetries.

CP symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry, or charge conjugation symmetry), and left and right were swapped (P symmetry, or parity symmetry).

But neutral B-mesons switch back and forth from matter to anti-matter with a very slight preference for matter instead of anti-matter, and that very slight preference suggests a new way of addressing the deepest of all questions…

Why does our universe exist, instead of nothing at all?