The BASE collaboration’s Stefan Ulmer tinkers with the apparatus for measuring the properties of antimatter. Credit: Maximilien Brice, Julien Ordan/CERN

When a pair of mid-October press releases summarized a stride of more than two orders of magnitude in precisely measuring antiproton magnetic moment, journalists worldwide zeroed in on one line in the release from Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Unlike the statement from Japan’s RIKEN research organization—and, for that matter, unlike the Nature paper that reported the measurement advance in the first place—the German release gave reporters a whale-sized news hook. It quoted the Nature study’s first author, RIKEN’s Christian Smorra: “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist.”

Despite worldwide journalistic enthusiasm, that apparent paradox is old news. It was a half-century ago, one analyst explains, that physicist Andrei Sakharov “laid the foundation for all future attempts to explain the matter excess.” Those attempts have become “one of the greatest challenges in physics,” according to a public-information write-up from the international physics laboratory CERN in Geneva.

That write-up does point briefly in the same direction as Smorra’s startling statement. It observes that if “matter and antimatter are created and destroyed together, it seems the universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.” But it also recommends attention to CERN’s ALPHA collaboration, with a research approach completely different from measuring magnetic moment. In August in Nature, the collaboration reported results from a new measurement of antihydrogen’s hyperfine spectrum. Those results, according to an editor’s summary, “reveal no differences between hydrogen and antihydrogen.”

Other experiments in this physics domain look at mass and even whether antimatter “falls up.” It’s a wide domain. The existence-of-the-universe paradox does frame it as an overall physics challenge. But the news this fall is about one marvelous advance, which took place at CERN’s antiproton decelerator facility, in the empirical quest to resolve it.

Sensationalized research news

Nonetheless, media reports about the measurement advance trumpeted the existence issue. “Our existence is one giant, inexplicable head scratch,” the New York Post reported. “The universe shouldn’t technically exist, according to top scientists who have spent their careers trying to figure out how the beginning of everything didn’t immediately destroy itself.”

A Forbes.com headline declared, “Science still doesn’t know how the universe exists.” Headlines at the UK’s Daily Mail and Independent began “The universe shouldn’t exist,” with the Daily Mail adding “World’s top scientists struggle to explain why our cosmos didn’t destroy itself as soon as it came into existence.” The Independent extended the headline by adding “scientists say after finding bizarre behaviour of anti-matter,” apparently in the belief that the bizarreness itself is new news.

The India Times’s headline writer somehow found in the news a “new theory that questions everything we know.” At the decade-old political blog Hot Air, a generally flippant posting went further in the confusion about what’s new. “The latest Crazytown theory coming from the world of particle physics,” it mocked, “is that the Big Bang should have produced the same amount of matter and anti-matter.” Though researchers discern no certainty in this incompletely understood area of physical law, WorldNetDaily.com proclaimed confidently that after the measurement advance, “the laws of physics still dictated the universe should not exist.”

Researchers used a Penning trap to pin down the antiproton’s magnetic moment. Credit: Stefan Sellner, Fundamental Symmetries Laboratory, RIKEN, Japan

Some of the coverage projected personal feelings and beliefs onto the science. Space.com headlined “Antimatter angst: The universe shouldn’t exist.” A Times of Israel commentary reported that “many theologians” perceived in the research “vindication of the belief that the creation of the universe was miraculous in nature.” The Blaze headlined “Scientists say universe shouldn’t exist—and believers in God will love one question that stumps them.” The article cited that question, from Smorra as quoted in Newsweek: “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?”

The UK’s Express sensationalized with outright hysteria in the headline “‘It should NOT EXIST’ Hadron Collider scientists fear universe could DIE at any moment.” The subhead compounded the misreporting: “SCIENTISTS are worried the universe could destroy itself at any moment after a study ruling the cosmos should ‘not actually exist.'”

“Small sensation” research

Though journalists will never stop seeking whale-size news hooks, much can be made not just of the mysterious existence-of-the-universe issue but of the plainly vivid marvelousness of the research effort itself. Consider a passage from the German press release:

Antiprotons are artificially generated at CERN and researchers store them in a reservoir trap for experiments. The antiprotons for the current experiment were isolated in 2015 and measured between August and December 2016, which is a small sensation as this was the longest storage period for antimatter ever documented. Antiprotons are usually quickly annihilated when they come into contact with matter, such as in air. Storage was demonstrated for 405 days in a vacuum, which contains ten times fewer particles than interstellar space. A total of 16 antiprotons were used and some of them were cooled to approximately absolute zero.

Did anybody in the popular media talk that way about the research effort by Smorra and colleagues? Well, yes, in fact—at least one. Gizmodo ran a piece by science writer Ryan F. Mandelbaum, headlined “Antimatter property beats regular matter after scientists make incredible precision measurement.”

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.