[Eternal Student]

Hi.

Happy birthday to your dad.

Sooooo... the asymmetry that allowed regular matter to triumph over antimatter was brought about by the early universe being in a state of insanely high energy? It's that simple?

   I don't KNOW that for certain.  No one does at this time.   However, it seems likely.
You're partially ignoring the state of the Inflaton field and the Higgs field.   Specifically inflation (if it occured, which most physicists think it did) had only recently stopped in the early universe when matter synthesis was happening.   So the energy in the inflaton field had fallen but possibly not as low as it is now.  I'm not aware of any experiments that claim to influence the inflaton field.  Simply getting to high energies (like high velocity particles that might locally re-create conditions of high temperature and pressure) may not be enough to set the inflaton field back up to to the state it was in.

Also theoretically speaking, if we COULD find a way to replicate this process, how much matter could we create before we unintentionally spawn a black hole?

   I don't do these experiments, they are a bit beyond the tools I have in the kitchen.    There was some media hype a little while back about the possibility of accidentally creating a micro-black hole at CERN.   Of course the media didn't really say that it COULD create be a MICRO black hole   only that CERN could create a Black Hole.
    Here's some relevant web-pages:
https://scoolmedia.com/en/cern-creates-a-black-hole-that-they-can-not-control/
   Here's one quote I quite like......
...Scientists did succeed in making a black hole and
they could not control it. The microscopic black hole dropped right through the particle
accelerators containment fields, gravity pulled the hole towards the center of the Earth where
the hole now is growing bigger by absorbing the atoms surrounding it. It is growing slowly now
but with every minute passed it is getting larger and larger at an ever increasing pace. A few
days are left until the hole will grow big enough and two jets from two opposite sides of the
Earth will blow up and prove us that there is a giant black hole eating our world from the inside
out.

    This is the somewhat more credible version.   It's not that different, I suppose....
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/10oct_lhc
The world did not end. Switching on the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, did not trigger the creation of a microscopic black hole. And that black hole did not start rapidly sucking in surrounding matter faster and faster until it devoured the Earth, as sensationalist news reports had suggested it might.

Anyway....  the important thing to note is that creating a microscopic black hole isn't as dramatic as creating a science fiction sized black hole.   Hawking radiation increases in rate as the size of black hole decreases,  so microscopic black holes should last only a fraction of second and they are only harmful in the sense of creating huge tidal forces in a region that is extremely close to them.    If a black hole formed that had the mass parameter of a particle,   then it creates no more gravitational pull on you (at a distance of say 5 metres) then the original particle had.   Let's phrase that another way,  we all experience some gravity on the surface of earth.   However we could replace all of that matter with a tiny black hole right where the centre of the earth was.  If that black hole has the same mass parameter (e.g. if it was made from the stuff the earth was made from but just compressed into a small size).   Then provided you find a way to stay a distance away from the black hole that is equal to the radius of the earth you wouldn't notice any difference in the force of gravity.
    Anyway,   CERN were hoping to observe interesting things that might even include a micro black hole   BUT  to the best of my knowledge, they haven't.

    So, I don't really know how to answer your question:  We could spawn lots of black holes but it doesn't necessarily need to be too much of problem.   We are getting close to the sorts of energy densities that should create a micro black hole.  The main problem is likely to be that the black holes would rip the particles created in the close region into .... only speculation knows.... and/or merge with them to make a larger hole for a brief moment.   So it could be more of a production problem rather than anything else:   Do you recall A level organic chemistry where the yield of the product you wanted to create is lower than you hoped for?  Usually because the conditions were wrong - like it was too hot and some other products were formed and/or some of the desired product was accidentally decomposed.   Anyway, a blackhole could be a bit like this - something ruining your yield of desired product.

Best Wishes.

[Eternal Student]

Hi again,

Ah, I see. So even if we found a way to magically remove the virtual particles popping in and out of existence all of the time, we would still have underlying, universal fields in space representing each of the four fundamental forces that hold all of existence together, thus preventing it from ever being truly empty. That also means that photons (and all forms of electromagnetic radiation) can exist independently of matter. Sweet!

    Yes, that's the right idea.
    Sadly, there's some junk or technical details that get in the way.  We couldn't remove all the virtual particles, they are a consequence of the field existing and quantum uncertainty.  So the only way to remove the virtual particles would be to remove the field.   Also, it's not certain that the four fundamental forces as we know them would exist in exactly the same way during the early universe.  The electromagnetic force seems to unify with the weak force to become the electro-weak force, for example.  So some of the fundamental forces are "missing" or blended into one.    However, you do seem to be expressing the general idea correctly.   Don't forget that matter particles like leptons and quarks should also be represented by their own fields (these particles are just excitations in their own underlying field, which just like other fields also exist throughout all of space).  So all we're really saying is that a photon field could have excitations in it (photons can exist) without any requirement for the matter fields to have some excitation (no matter particles have to exist).

it seems highly unlikely that, if I ever did take up a career in the world of science and physics, you'd be one of the people I'd teach.

    In a few years, if I can still work a computer, I will be needing help and some tolerance from people like yourself.

Best Wishes.