The Quiet Hum of Midnight Code It was past two in the morning, the kind of quiet that settles over Kolkata only when the last hawkers have packed up and even the stray dogs are dreaming. I was tracing a stubborn bug in a client's server logs, lines of code stretching into the blue glow of my screen. The logic was supposed to be balanced, an 'if' for every 'else', a 'try' for every 'catch'. But something was missing, a crucial piece that made the whole system tilt, generating an imbalance that crashed the process every few hours. It reminded me, in a strange way, of something I'd read earlier that day about the universe itself: this grand, sprawling system that also seems to have a fundamental imbalance at its very core. We call it matter-antimatter asymmetry . For decades, physicists have grappled with a profound cosmic mystery. If the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, why is our universe almost entirely made of matter? W...