thanks for the explanation, it is good and clear, but this whole thing is just teeming with questions.

How have we actually measured that this particle swaps between matter/antimatter states or is that just a theory?

Also, as I understand that all particles are actually just probabilities for something existing somewhere at some time. Would this not infer that the probability of this particular particle being matter or antimatter is just extremely close to 50%, or, actually 49% antimatter, 51% matter?

Again, I have probably misunderstood something, but I don't pretend to be a physicist anyway, just curious..

yes, the great Stephen has said it, therefore it MUST be true!

Right, of course you are correct. After having read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle I actually understand that the question was rather silly. sorry about that. Although, if everyone read the correct wikipedia entries before asking things, there would be very few questions indeed ;)

thanks.

I'm probably misunderstanding something here, but it seems that they have discovered that when the big bang happened, then because of this property, a bit more matter was created than anti-matter out of wherever they came in the first place, the rest of it annihilated with each other and everything else is made up from the "extra bits". This seems fairly reasonable.

Now, it is also known that new matter-antimatter element pairs are being created and annihilated all the time everywhere, this is where Hawking radiation comes from.

Does this new discovery mean, that it would be possible, that instead of an antimatter-matter pair a matter-matter pair is created sometimes instead and therefore the amount of matter in the universe is increasing (even if by a tiny amount)? Or are the conditions needed for this to happen too extreme to ever take place outside of big bangs and accelerators? Although as I understand some cosmic rays have far greater energies than accelerators.

Real physicists - please help me make sense of it all!

so this is the way the world ends
so this is the way the world ends
so this is the way the world ends
not with a bang, but wth a story in /.