{"id":223823,"date":"2025-10-23T04:21:01","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/the-key-to-why-the-universe-exists-may-lie-in-an-1800s-knot-idea-science-once-dismissed"},"modified":"2025-10-23T04:21:01","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:21:01","slug":"the-key-to-why-the-universe-exists-may-lie-in-an-1800s-knot-idea-science-once-dismissed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/the-key-to-why-the-universe-exists-may-lie-in-an-1800s-knot-idea-science-once-dismissed","title":{"rendered":"The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-key-to-why-the-universe-exists-may-lie-in-an-1800s-knot-idea-science-once-dismissed2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether. The idea was soon disproven. Atoms turned out to be something else entirely. But his discarded vision may yet hold the key to why the universe exists.<\/p>\n<p>Now, for the first time, Japanese physicists have shown that <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/knots\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">knots<\/a> can arise in a realistic particle physics framework, one that also tackles deep puzzles such as neutrino masses, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dark+matter\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dark matter<\/a>, and the strong CP problem.<\/p>\n<p>Their <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/s3vd-brsn\" target=\"_blank\">findings<\/a>, in <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>, suggest these \u201ccosmic knots\u201d could have formed and briefly dominated in the turbulent newborn universe, collapsing in ways that favored matter over antimatter and leaving behind a unique hum in spacetime that future detectors could listen for\u2014a rarity for a physics mystery that\u2019s notoriously hard to probe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether. The idea was soon disproven. Atoms turned out to be something else entirely. But his discarded vision may yet hold the key to why the universe exists. Now, for the first time, Japanese physicists have shown that knots can arise in a realistic particle [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}