Baryogenesis and the Big Bang Conundrum

One of the greatest unsolved problems in physics revolves around a concept known as "antimatter". You heard right. Just as regular matter is composed of particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, so antimatter is composed of antiparticles, such as antielectrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons. In fact, every element in the periodic table has an equivalent antimatter element... antihydrogen, anybody?

I'm not making this up. These particles actually exist and have been created in the laboratory with the help of high-energy particle accelerators such as that at CERN.

There's one problem. When a piece of antimatter hits a piece of matter, the result is a tremendous release of energy as both are annihilated. For perspective, the release of energy is about 10,000 times as great as nuclear fission (think A-bomb) and about 100 times as great as nuclear fusion (think H-bomb), given the same amount of material. Antimatter and matter are very symmetrical with regards to one another, and very ill tempered.

Herein lies one of the greatest problems of the Big Bang theory. According to evolutionary theory, everything in the universe today was spawned from nothing. In other words, the net sum of matter and antimatter before the Big Bang was zero before the Big Bang (antimatter + matter = nothing).

However, antimatter is extremely rare in the Universe today, such that the ratio between matter and antimatter is 1,000,000,000:1. This is a problem. If the Universe was created from nothing, this ratio should be 1:1. There should be vast pools of antimatter in the universe, just as we have vast oasis's of galaxies made from matter. However, these pools do not exist.

This is a serious dead-end for Big Bang theorists. Baryogenesis is the branch of physics that is devoted to understanding and explaining the antimatter/matter discrepancy. However, thus far there has not been a good explanation for the asymmetric existence of baryons (matter) and antibaryons (antimatter). According to the models, the baryons and antibaryons should have all eliminated one another, leaving us with... nothing.

Just some food for thought. The reason this intrigued me is that Christians are fond of saying that the only way something could come from nothing is for God to have created it. I believe this. However, finding out about the existence of antimatter seemed to throw a monkey wrench into the works. Since antimatter + matter = nothing, a non-Christian could argue that this could actually occur without divine intervention. However, after doing a little research, it seems as though their theory falls apart entirely.