Where did matter come from? The fact that we exist, surrounded by something rather than nothing, may not puzzle many of us. But to a cosmologist the existence of stuff is a troubling business, a question that has resisted an answer since it was placed before theoretical physicists nearly half a century ago. The best theories of the origin of the universe still fail to explain how it managed not to turn up empty.
Figure 1. Our universe is not a great void; instead it is filled with the stuff we call matter, including ourselves. How did this happen? Theories focus on the nature of the asymmetry that might have created an excess of matter over antimatter in the moments after the big bang. In a 1955 episode of the I Love Lucy television series, Lucille Ball and Harpo Marx had some fun with the notion of a good, but not perfect, mirror symmetry between two antagonists when they re-enacted the famous "mirror scene" performed by Groucho and Harpo in the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup. In the episode Harpo and Lucy, facing each other in a doorway, mimic each other's actions almost perfectly, to hilarious effect. There are mirror-like symmetries between fundamental particles as well, but these must have been violated in the early universe to keep matter and antimatter from annihilating each other.
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