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Origin of Matter
Name: Wilmer Bruce W.
Status: other
Age: old
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 2001-2002
Question:
In the matter of converting energy into matter, so far as
I've been able to find out, or rather to not find out, no experiment
exists in which energy is converted into matter with out the intermediary
of matter, e.g., fast moving particles. That is, the energy in question
is usually (always?) the kinetic energy of particles. The claim is that
in the early moments of the big bang matter hadn't yet formed. So when it
was finally formed, what was it formed out of? Presumably matter was
formed out of energy of which there was a super abundance. So how did
this happen? I'd like to know of an experiment in which the m*c*c's after
the event is accounted for by just the total E before the event. I can
see that once just even a smidgen of matter is somehow created, it can be
used to create more matter through collisions and fusions, etc. What I
want to know is how to get the whole thing started, i.e. how to get the
first instance of matter. Somewhere in all of this ramble is my
question. It's been decades since I studied physics, and even longer
since my father in law (Joseph Walters C.), who instigated this query,
did. So humor us a bit. What are we over looking?
Replies:
Wilmer,
Energy forming into matter usually happens on a very small scale. One
example is a beam of high energy photons of light passing through a magnetic
field. A photon of high enough energy can change into an electron and an
anti-electron (called a positron). In most cases, the electron and positron
rejoin into a photon again. In the large magnetic field, the two particles
are pulled apart. This prevents them from rejoining.
To get more matter to form requires a much greater amount of energy, all in
the same place. When the energy is in the form of fast-moving particles
(kinetic energy and mass energy), it is very easy to contain. Two colliding
particles is a great deal of energy at the collision site. Other forms of
energy (e.g. radiation, heat, potential energy) are either very small or
hard to contain.
You might then wonder how all the universe energy got into one location to
begin with. One theory states that the universe expands and collapses
repeatedly. When collapsing, all the matter gets so compact that it changes
into heat, like a super-giant star collapsing. It then explodes, changing
into matter when there is enough room to do so. The matter, with a great
deal of kinetic energy, expands. As it does this, small pieces of matter
join into larger pieces, eventually becoming stars. After expanding for
perhaps trillions of years, the matter starts pulling back together. The
whole process repeats forever. The universe had no actual beginning and
will not really ever end.
If there is only one explosion, then we cannot scientifically talk about
what was before the explosion. Before the universe began to exist, before
the explosion, time as we know it hadn't actually started. We cannot even
truly state what the universe was before the explosion. We know it was
energy, but we do not know the kind of energy.
Dr. Ken Mellendorf
Physics Instructor
Illinois Central College
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Update: June 2012
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