The conventional picture of Big Bang cosmology holds that 13.8 billion years ago, all mass and energy was packed into a singularity, a state that predated even atoms, protons, and quarks. Then, a lot happened in a very short time, including the rapid inflation of the universe and the creation of the fundamental building blocks of matter, which eventually coalesced into, well, everything.
Except that shouldn’t have happened at all, according to the Standard Model, otherwise known as Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, or ΛCDM model. During that immense Big Bang (which, of course, didn’t produce any “bang” at all), matter and antimatter created mere fractions of a second after the cosmic event should have annihilated one another in equal measure, leaving behind only a rapidly expanding void filled with radiation—no stars, no planets, no us. But, as evidenced by your eyeballs scanning these very words, that very much didn’t happen, and instead we live in a universe dominated by matter.
So…what gives?
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