Surviving the Antimatter Apocalypse
Students are presented with a challenge; they are a particle of matter in the early, chaotic universe, and the goal is to avoid annihilation with antimatter to become the "seed" of a future galaxy.
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In the beginning of the universe, there should have been nothing but light. Physicists calculate that the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, ultimately annihilating each other and leaving a universe made purely of photons.
And yet here we are, orbiting a star, one of over 100 billion stars surrounding the Milky Way galaxy, among 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, all made of matter, with little antimatter to be found.
While we know what happened (matter won), the why—the precise mechanism causing this slight imbalance, possibly involving oscillating neutrinos—remains one of the greatest mysteries in particle physics.