The Problem of the Baryon Asymmetry

You are made of the leftovers.

The universe is made of matter. Not antimatter. This is strange. The laws of physics are nearly symmetric between matter and antimatter.

For every process that creates a particle, there is a corresponding process that creates its antiparticle.

If the universe began in a symmetric state — equal parts matter and antimatter — then all the matter should have annihilated with all the antimatter, leaving nothing but photons.

A universe of light and no structure.

Instead, approximately 10⁸⁰ baryons and essentially zero primordial antibaryons. The baryon-to-photon ratio η ≈ 6 × 10⁻¹⁰ tells us that for every billion matter-antimatter pairs that annihilated, roughly one extra baryon survived.

A surplus of one part in a billion.

The standard account (Sakharov, 1967) identifies three necessary conditions for generating this asymmetry: (1) baryon number violation, (2) C and CP violation, and (3) departure from thermal equilibrium.

These conditions are necessary but not sufficient — the Standard Model satisfies all three but cannot produce a large enough asymmetry. The precise mechanism of baryogenesis remains one of the open problems in physics.

The axioms offer a different account. The asymmetry is not generated by a dynamical process during the early universe. It is structural. It is present in the axiom itself, before any dynamics occur.