MDenham wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I just found the phrase "evil-twin" to describe antimatter amusing, as if somehow we were lucky that we aren't made up of antimatter. Not to be obvious or anything, but if the universe had decided to give antimatter the edge instead of matter, we'd just have switched the labels. It's not like we'd be able to tell the difference...
You'd have a few other things with switched labels (first thing that comes to mind is "spin up" vs. "spin down" would be reversed) as well.
The point is that we wouldn't know they were switched, since that would be the normal state of things. It just amused me that the article seemed to imply that we were lucky that the universe resulted in 1% more matter than antimatter, not just because an even mix would be bad (which is true), but due to some idea that if it had resulted in 1% more antimatter we'd somehow have been screwed. If that had been the case, we'd all still be sitting here thanking our lucky stars that the universe resulted in 1% more
matter, since we'd call what we were made of matter, and the opposite would be "anti-matter". And this discovery would be about how lucky we are that mesons go from their matter to their antimatter state more slowly than they do the other way around.
If the universe were composed of it's "evil twin antimatter", we wouldn't notice any difference.
