Allan Milne Lees
1 min readDec 16, 2021

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As Dr Hossenfelder point out, the "mystery" of matter-antimatter asymmetry is artificial. Physicists like problems, and often become so enamored of mathematics that they assume certain things to be necessary (e.g. symmetry) and then wonder why there are violations.

But nature can be more subtle than formulae, and when we make assumptions about nature we risk creating false axioms There is in the Standard Model no a priori need for matter-antimatter symmetry. The "mystery" is therefore an artificial intellectual construct rather than a real problem for physics. To see why this is, let's imagine we lived in a universe with a precise 1:1 ratio of matter-antimatter in which the two forms of matter were sufficiently distributed in spacetime so as to escape mutual annihilation. Physicists would then declare this perfect symmetry to be a "mystery" that needed some explication.

While the Standard Model has been very successful, it also has some glaring holes and so it can't be the final word with regards to particle physics. Therefore, assuming its axioms are correct is highly unwise.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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