By the logic of science, things simply shouldn't exist. The best scientific minds of several generations have reasoned that shortly after the Big Bang created the universe, matter and antimatter should have wiped each other out.
So that explains the global chain reaction of excited e-mail messages among physicists last month, after scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory "opened the box" - their jargon for taking a peek at newly crunched data - and raised hopes of someday solving the riddle of existence.
"It's like looking back to the instant where everything began," said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the sprawling research facility near Chicago.
Simply put, the Fermi team sent protons and antiprotons around its underground Tevatron accelerator ring into a head-on collision, which produced slightly more tiny fragments called "muons" than tiny fragments called "antimuons." It was a laboratory victory of matter over antimatter, and a minuscule replication of what scientists think must have happened shortly after the Big Bang, though exactly how matter won out has long confounded them.
Previous tests have produced similar results. But they never have risen above a statistical shadow of doubt for physicists working with computer calculations about particles and interactions they can't see.
By contrast, the latest discovery by Fermilab's DZero team seems statistically solid. If it makes it past critical peer review, it will lead to a re-evaluation of existing theories and, possibly, a deeper understanding of physics and why things exist. It certainly will inspire a barrage of additional supercollider tests, as other labs try to verify the discovery or shoot it down.
Either way, it could be one incremental step toward the holy grail of atomic physics: the long-sought discovery of the elusive "Higgs boson," a theoretical particle assumed to be the fundamental building block of all matter.
"It'll be written about in physics books a hundred years from now," said Zoltan Ligeti, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the Fermilab experiment.
It's really something
The question of existence is something that humans have wondered about ever since there were humans to wonder: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" as the 17th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put it.
Clearly, things do exist, but, theoretically, they shouldn't.
After the Big Bang, energy condensed into matter but also into its opposite, antimatter. The two being mutually destructive, they should have canceled each other out. Instead, Lykken noted, matter joined together in ever larger concentrations - nuclei, atoms, stars, galaxies.
Lykken postulated there could be an infinite number of universes, some vastly different and others similar, though not exactly.
"I can imagine a universe exactly like ours," Lykken said. "Except that the Cubs win a World Series."
