A team of physicists exploring an old and outdated model of the atom believes that it could help solve one of the most basic questions about our universe: why it exists at all. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

In 1867, British physicist, mathematician, and engineer William Thompson (better known as Lord Kelvin) attempted to explain why there is an abundance of atoms in the universe, but they came in such few varieties. Lord Kelvin was working with a lot less knowledge than we have today. The luminiferous aether was a popular idea at the time, a hypothetical fluid thought to fill all of space, and the electron had not yet been discovered.

The idea Kelvin came up with was that what we think of as matter or atoms was in

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