What Happened To All Of The Antimatter

At the start of the universe equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have been formed. As matter and antimatter annihilate upon collision then there should be no universe; there should at least be equal quantities of matter and antimatter but that doesn't appear to be the case. So, what happened to all of the antimatter is a puzzle.

Most current explanations rely on some very slight deviation in the creation of matter, a deviation that favours matter over antimatter, so that after the violent annihilations the universe will evolve into one of just matter. I propose an alternative here.

What if matter and antimatter were indeed created in equal amounts but in two separate places, perhaps separated by a dimensional change, but at least separate zones that matter could not pass between. The separation would result in an evolution into one zone containing matter and the other of antimatter and the lack of obvious communication between zones would hide one universe from the other. In short the antimatter could still be here but in a separate universe, a mirror of our own.

One implication of this is the shape of the universe. The universe could not have formed in a perfectly uniform way or else gravity would not be able to act upon the differences, eventually forming stars and galxies. The two universes hypothesis would explain this variation but also suggest that the antimatter universe is an inverse of the matter universe in design. Where we detect peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the antimatter universe would have troughs, and ultimately where we have galaxies, the antimatter universe has void and vice versa.

Even more startling is the possibility that both unvierses evolved in identical ways, but each the inverse of the other. If true, an antimatter version of you is reading this right now.

There are other implications too, the quantity of matter in the universe would actually be double of that we can detect, which would help explain some of the descrepency between the oberved and unobserved matter.

Communication between universes could not be ruled out and it's possible that gravitational effects from one universe would still affect the other. Although both universes would start with inverse topology, an interaction between the two as a result of gravity would produce complex results. In this instance both universes combined might create a flat universe devoid of variation, although if both unvierses began as the inverse of the other then the fact that gravity decays logarithmically over distance would create variation.

If the two universes can interact using gravity then a black hole in the antimatter universe would create a gravity well in the matter universe too, and the intense gravity in initially empty space would probably form a black hole there too. The same would be true of stars, and under such circumstances both universes might evolve to be idential instead of different even though both universes began differently.

Mark Sheeky, 27 May 2008