Why Is There Anything at All? The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter

The early universe should have produced matter and antimatter in almost equal amounts. When the two meet, they annihilate. So why did everything not disappear? Somehow, the young universe developed a tiny preference for matter. After almost all matter and antimatter destroyed each other, that tiny excess survived. It eventually became every galaxy, every star, every planet, and every person. Physicists have discovered real differences between the behavior of matter and antimatter. But the differences contained in our current Standard Model appear insufficient to explain the universe we actually inhabit. Somewhere in the earliest moments of cosmic history, something happened. And without it, there may have been no stars to observe and no observers to ask why.