The Origin of Matter The question of how matter triumphed over
antimatter in the formation of the universe still awaits a
satisfactory answer One of the first questions for cosmologists,
posed most elegantly by the Russian dissident physicist Andrei
Sakharov, is: Why is there stuff? In the first moments after the
big bang, it's thought that the universe was utterly empty.
Shortly thereafter, matter was created—and necessarily more
matter than antimatter, because otherwise the stuff and the
antistuff would have annihilated each other. Cline lays out the
candidates for a theory of how the fundamental particles called
baryons—components of the atomic nucleus—came about. It's
possible that leptons—electrons and their particle cousins—arose
first, creating an asymmetry that led to the predominance of
matter over antimatter. Go to Article