This is from Toronto's "The Star", which, I'm guessing, is a local news media (someone can tell me that that's not right and I would be happy). First of all, why is a "medical oncologist" writing an article on cosmology? They can't get the many cosmologists hanging around the University of Toronto, or they can't contact someone from the Perimeter Institute?
In any case, that should be a major tip-of that things are not going to go well as far as accuracy is concerned. For example:
So the creation wasn't really a matter of "Let there be light", as much as a matter of "Let there be a separation of light and anti-light."
Of course I have to admit, as I have mentioned before, there is no simple way of explaining the concept of anti-light (because I simply don't understand it actually). Perhaps it would be useful to think of anti-light particles as the units of darkness that suck up light and create all-pervading gloom and impenetrable night.
That makes no sense, of course, since a photon is its own antimatter. I guess he's confusing the scenario where pair production forms out of energy during the early period after the BB. How this became "anti-light" is anyone's guess.
Anyway, as we now understand it, the entire cosmos is made of matter. Which is rigorously defined in the complex jargon of quantum physics as "that of which the entire cosmos is made." (Do stop me if I'm going too fast, won't you?)
No, I think you are going too fast for you! It is a general consensus that the predominant content of our universe, as of now, is dark energy, followed by dark matter (the nature of which we still haven't quite pinned down). So the "matter" that we know of is actually a very small portion of our "entire cosmos".
Anyway immediately after the Big Bang and the subsequent Big Separation, all the antimatter disappeared, although nobody seems quite certain where it went. A friend of mine called Derek, who is a major astrophysics nerd, has a theory that all the antimatter in the cosmos ended up in Huddersfield in Northern England, but I think that was just because it was a wet Sunday and there was nothing to do.
Anyway, Picozza's group simply set up a particle collector and put it on a satellite. (Since it collects cosmic rays you can't just leave it running in the living room apparently.) And it has collected low-energy positrons which are the antimatter equivalent of electrons (minus the GST of course). But there's more. After that, they discovered high- energy positrons — the "Grande Latte'' of subatomic particles – which, they deduced, must have been produced from dark matter. So (apparently) Q.E.D. – the theory of the Big Separation still holds.
Those two paragraphs combined produced utter nonsense. How does the possible detection of "dark matter" somehow verifies the "big separation"? Of course, the article never even once mentioned that the imbalance of matter and antimatter could be due to the CP-violation that we have detected. But then again, one actually has to understand what "CP-violation" is to be able to make such a connection.
If this was someone's blog entry or some "letter-to-the-editor" type of nonsense, I probably wouldn't have cared, though I might still write something. But this appears to be a regular article in, of all places, the "Living" section of the news. Did anyone proof-read it for accuracy before it got published? Obviously not. Maybe since it wasn't in a "Science" section, there's no reason to make sure it is scientifically accurate since, maybe, this is more of an attempt at humor than anything else. At least, I hope it is, because the content sucks!
If you are interested in reading a MORE ACCURATE report of the report that is being referred to in this silly article, read the PHYSICS article at the APS webpage. It may be "dryer" and does not have all the "funny" retorts, but it is at least accurate! I've also reported on this in an earlier blog entry.
So, anyone wants to tell me that I'm being too harsh on the guy?
Zz.
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