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Is there a scientific reason why the universe exists? In other words, what is the science of why there is anything at all, instead of only nothing?

The answer has to do with opposites. Scientists have found that the universe exists because it began with a slight imbalance between matter and antimatter. Particles of matter that is, all of the electrons, protons and neutrons in the atoms and molecules of regular stuff differ from particles of antimatter, which carry the opposite electric charge but are similar in many ways. Matter and antimatter do not get along. When their particles collide, they annihilate each other in an intense burst of gamma-rays. Fortunately, antimatter is now extremely rare. Although antimatter had a foundational role in the formation of the universe, the fact that there is now so little of it is one of cosmology's great mysteries.

Antimatter was predicted by English physicist Paul Dirac almost 100 years ago as part of his pioneering work on quantum mechanics, and it has been confirmed experimentally since the 1930s. Nowadays, scientists can create antimatter in particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider.

But Dirac predicted there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter, according to Pasquale Di Bari, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton in the U.K. So the fact there is now so little antimatter and so much matter — including all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe, although some scientists once suggested there might be "anti-galaxies" of "anti-stars" — is a big scientific problem.

Related: Do quantum universes really exist?

"We think the universe started as 50-50 matter-antimatter in the Big Bang but very quickly afterwards became dominated by matter," Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool, told Live Science in an email. "For this to occur there needs to be a very slight difference, or asymmetry, in the behaviour of matter and antimatter to allow one to ultimately dominate over the other."

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