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And of Producing Expansion

That pretty much leaves only the original Hubble redshift as the basis for the Big Bang. But as we've already seen, the steady-state theory proposed another way in which it could be explained. And back in the early sixties, Alfvén gave some consideration to another.

A theory put forward by an old colleague and teacher of his, Oskar Kleine, had proposed antimatter as the energy source responsible. Antimatter had been predicted from quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and its existence subsequently confirmed in particle experiments. For every type of elementary particle, there also exists an "antiparticle," identical in all properties except for carrying the opposite electrical charge (assuming the particle is charged). If a particle and its antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other and are converted into two gamma rays equal in energy to the total masses of the particles that created them, plus the kinetic energy they were carrying. (The thermonuclear reaction in a hydrogen bomb converts about one percent of the reacting mass to energy.) Conversely, sufficiently energetic radiation can be converted into particles. When this occurs, it always produces a particle-antiparticle pair, never one of either kind on its own.

This fact leads to the supposition that the universe too ought to consist of equal amounts of both particles and antiparticles. Kleine hypothesized that in falling together under gravity, a particle-antiparticle mixture (too rarified to undergo more than occasional annihilating collisions) would separate according to mass; at the same time, if the motion were in a magnetic field, positive charges would be steered one way and negative charges the other. The result would be to produce zones where either matter or antimatter dominated, with a layer of energetic reactions separating them and tending to keep them apart while they condensed into regions of galaxies, stars, and planets formed either from ordinary matter, as in our own locality, or of antimatter elsewhere.

Should such matter and antimatter regions later meet, the result would be annihilation on a colossal scale, producing energy enough, Kleine conjectured, to drive the kind of expansion that the redshift indicated. This would make it a "Neighborhood Bang" rather than the Bang, producing a localized expansion of the part of the universe we see which would be just part of a far vaster total universe that had existed for long before. Although this allows time for the formation of large structures, there are questions as to how they could have been accelerated to the degree they apparently have without being disrupted, and others that require a lot more observational data, and so the idea remains largely speculative.

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