By Ron Grossman, Tribune reporter
May 29, 2010
By the logic of science, things simply shouldn't exist. The best scientific minds of several generations have reasoned that shortly after the Big Bang created the universe, matter and antimatter should have wiped each other out.
So that explains the global chain reaction of excited e-mails among physicists this month, after scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory "opened the box" — their jargon for taking a peek at newly crunched data — and raised hopes of some day solving the riddle of existence.
"It's like looking back to the instant where everything began," said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the sprawling research facility near Batavia.
Simply put, the Fermi team sent protons and antiprotons around its underground Tevatron accelerator ring into a head-on collision, which produced slightly more tiny fragments called "muons" than tiny fragments called "antimuons."
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-fermi-existence-discovery-20100529,0,3299924.story"It'll be written about in physics books a hundred years from now," said Zoltan Ligeti, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the Fermilab experiment.