M: Good evening and welcome to Physics Today. Here we interview some of the greatest minds in physics as they help us to understand some of the most complicated theories. Today, I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Melissa Phillips, professor of theoretical physics. She's here to tell us a little about what it is she studies. Dr. Phillips, you seem to study everything.
W: I guess that would be fair to say I spend most of my time studying the Big Bang theory and where our universe came from.
M: Can you tell us a little about that?
W: Well, I'm very interested in why the universe exists at all. That may sound odd, but the fact is at the moment of the Big Bang, both matter and anti-matter were created for a short time, and I mean just a fraction of a second. The whole universe was a super-hot soup of radiation filled with these particles. So What's baffled scientists for so long is "why is there a universe at all?"
M: That's because matter and anti-matter are basically opposites of each other. They are exactly alike, except that they have opposite electrical charges. So when they collide, they destroy each other?
W: Exactly. So during the first few moments of the Big Bang, the universe was extremely hot and very small. Matter and the now more exotic anti-matter would have had little space to avoid each other. This means that they should have totally wiped each other out, leaving the universe completely barren.
M: But a recent study seems to point to the fact that when matter and anti-matter were first created, there were slightly more particles of matter, which allowed the universe we all live in to form?
W: Exactly. Because there was slightly more matter, the collisions quickly depleted all the anti-matter and left just enough matter to create stars, planets, and eventually us.