The Definitive But Totally Incomprehensible Answer to Why We Exist

The New York Times reports that physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new clue that could help us understand “why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter”.

The team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

Brain … hurt … Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t this the sub-plot of Dan Brown’s sequel to the Da Vinci Code?

Anyway, muon/anti-muon chat quickly became the hot weekend cocktail party convo among physicists and people who are way too smart for their own good, who have deemed the results “impressive and inexplicable.”

From the looks of the 30-page report, which includes, like, a million footnotes along with things (sentences?) like this, we’d have to agree:

We measure the charge asymmetry A of like-sign dimuon events in 6.1 fb¡1 of pp collisions recorded with the D0 detector at a center-of-mass energy ps = 1:96 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. From A, we extract the like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry in semileptonic b-hadron decays: Absl = ¡0:00957 § 0:00251 (stat) § 0:00146 (syst). This result di®ers by 3.2 standard deviations from the standard model prediction Absl(SM) = (¡2:3+0:5¡0:6) £ 10¡4 and provides ¯rst evidence of anomalous CP-violation in the mixing of neutral B mesons.

Fortunately, someone a little more on our level had the decency to break it down to the level of Ho Hos, and though we don’t really understand this either, we like the idea of an anti-Ho Ho.

Dang it, now we’re hungry.