C For "charge conjugation," which turned matter into matter, and P for "parity reversal," which interchanged left and right(be185)
CP was violated when studying the decay of certain mesons(be185b)
At the beginning of time, there was, as a result of CP violation, a slight imbalance of matter over antimatter (roughly one part in a billion). This means that the matter and antimatter in the universe annihilated each other at the Big Bang, creating radiation, but one-billionth of the original matter was left over. This excess, then, constitutes our physical universe(be186)
At first, news of CP violation was met with disappointment. It meant that the universe was less symmetrical than originally expected(be186)