| The proportion of matter and anti-matter depends on the temperature. With increasing temperature, the thresholds of generation for various particle-antiparticle pairs are exceeded, so those kinds of particles and antiparticles are generated in collisions and become a component of the matter of that temperature. At very high temperatures, matter is composed of almost equal quantities of particles and antiparticles, of a very large number of kinds. With cooling, some particle-antiparticle pairs are no longer generated and the existing are annihilated, so they cease to be a component of matter. When the temperature diminishes to a few tens of MeV, then the only particle-antiparticle pairs that remain are of electrons and positrons, while the rest of the matter consists only of free protons, free neutrons, photons and various kinds of neutrinos. With further cooling, protons and neutrons begin to bind into nuclei, i.e. nuclei of isotopes of hydrogen, helium and lithium. Then, with even further cooling, the temperature becomes insufficient for generating positrons, so the huge number of existing electrons and positrons annihilate with each other, leaving a much smaller number of electrons, which is equal to the number of protons (free or bound in nuclei of deuterium, He isotopes and Li isotopes), and the amount of charged antiparticles becomes negligible. At the stage when the temperature is a few tens of MeV and the variety of the particles composing matter is minimal, any memory of what may have happened at other temperatures is erased. Thus, we cannot extrapolate the Big Bang towards higher temperatures, because there is no evidence of what may have happened before, e.g. of whether higher temperatures have ever existed. The existing evidence could also be matched by a cooler earlier Universe, which has been heated somehow up to a temperature of a few tens of MeV, decomposing any previous matter. Our astronomical data is consistent with the visible Universe starting at a temperature of a few tens of MeV and high concentration, then cooling and expanding from that state, e.g. this explains the observed chemical composition of the celestial objects. It can be fun to speculate about what may have happened before that, but it must be kept in mind that for now there is no way to verify any theory that attempts to model earlier stages, e.g. there is no way to verify if the Universe had ever been hotter than a few tens of MeV, i.e. if there have ever been any other abundant antiparticles except positrons (and antineutrinos, which remain abundant even at the present low temperatures, but the nature of antineutrinos is not well understood even today, as anything else that are named antiparticles participate in electromagnetic generation/annihilation reactions with their particle correspondent, while the exact differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos are not clear). |