Where did all the early matter go? Now just Radiation?

[Dav333]

They say for every billion antimatter there was 1 extra matter, & there is SO much matter still in our universe. So is it accurate to say in the early universe there was billions x the total mass of the universe now? All the matter & antimatter is now just radiation & neutrinos zipping around space? There must be an absurd amount of radiation then? Please correct me if wrong. thanks

Edited September 29, 2010 by Dav333

[Mr Skeptic]

Yeah, it was very very hot, the sort of energy levels you can only reach/approach with our best particle colliders (which is why some reporters confuse those with recreating the Big Bang).

[lemur]

This probably is going to sound like a crackpot question, but I'll go ahead and post it and see if someone says it is testable. Is there any way that radiation spontaneously converts into energy in certain situations? Specifically what I had it mind was the possibility that radiation contains its own attractive potential that would cause it to coagulate into discrete particles in extremely weak gravitation and maybe a great deal of redshifting (i.e. stretching of the waves). In that case, is it possible that small segments of radiation loop into themselves to form the most elementary of sub-atomic particles? During emission, it may be that EM radiation propagates in a manner that causes it to proceed linearly, but that this linearity can breakdown leaving the waves to propagate by oscillating back and forth in the same wave, which would result in a discrete oscillating field-wave. This almost sounds like the description of a vibrating string as well, but I don't know enough about string theory to know how those strings are theorized. Anyway, I just wondered if there would be any way to actually test this since if particles would actually form in this way, it would occur after a good deal of redshifting, I think, which would also mean that such particles might form very few and far between. It would be like a very large and thin soap bubble bursting and the skin contracting into a number of discreet droplets in random points on the previous surface of the bubble. Is this in any way possible to generate a testable hypothesis from?