The problem for physicists is that in the first second of the Big Bang matter - that's all the stuff around us - and anti-matter existed in equal quantities, but the anti-matter disappeared in an instant afterwards and no one knows why.
Now physicists at the atom-smasher in Switzerland believe they’ve found evidence of a particle that decays in a different manner to its anti-matter counterpart, which may eventually help explain what happened to all the anti-matter after the universe exploded into life.
Anti-matter is simply matter, but with an opposite charge. Should matter and anti-matter ever meet, the result is explosive to say the least.
So it’s a good thing that anti-matter is extremely rare.
Pushing the boundaries: The LHC has been running experiments on anti-matter that could herald 'new physics'
A joint Nasa-Japan search for it in the 1990s using an array of sophisticated upper-atmosphere sensors, for instance, drew a complete blank.
The experiment at the LHC saw particles smashed together at close to the speed of light and their decays analysed by the LHCb detector, which is specifically designed for this job.
The collisions were so violent that anti-matter was created, but the super-computers at the LHC noted that D-meson particles that were in the mix decayed at different rates to anti-D meson particles.
According to the Standard Model of Physics, this should haven’t happened, they should have behaved in a similar fashion.
Scientists see the results as a major clue as to why the universe as we know it actually exists.
The search for the mysterious 'God particle', meanwhile, goes on.
'I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist,' said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, recently.
