That the universe exists at all is something of a mystery to physicists. The laws of physics state that for every particle of matter there is a corresponding particle of antimatter, and that when these come into contact, they destroy each other, leaving only radiation behind. But if this were true the whole universe would consist only of radiation. All particles would have destroyed one another in the mêlée of the first few seconds of the big bang.
While emerging, like Archimedes, from the bath one day, Toshihide Maskawa figured out why some particles of matter survived instead. As a theoretical physicist at Kyoto University, he had been bugged by that question since reading, in 1964, a paper by James Cronin and Val Fitch, which