Speaker 1: There's a mysterious form of matter in the universe and
Speaker 1: it has really strange properties. I've heard of this kind
Speaker 1: of matter, and I heard that if it touches regular matter,
Speaker 1: it explodes. Yes, and we can only make it in
Speaker 1: super fancy particle colliders. Apparently we don't even know why
Speaker 1: it exists. Who even asked for it? Who ordered that?
Speaker 1: Who ordered that? I'll have what she's having, but the opposite,
Speaker 1: I don't know if some people want to explode him.
Speaker 1: And I'm Daniel and this is Daniel and Jrge explained
Speaker 1: the universe where we tackle the higher universe and explain
Speaker 1: it to you today on the program Antimatter. What is it?
Speaker 1: Not Antifa, not antigua, but anti matter. That's right, These
Speaker 1: are all good anti jokes. Actually typed in anti into
Speaker 1: Google earlier to see what the completions were, and anti
Speaker 1: matter was like the sixth one. Yeah, are curious about
Speaker 1: antigua and antifa and uh and other sorts of anti stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what is it? Um? What does it have against
Speaker 1: regular matter? And more important, where is it? And what
Speaker 1: can it do for you? Yeah? Besides blowing you up.
Speaker 1: So apparently if you touch anti matter, you're going to
Speaker 1: explode an a ball of light. That's right, Folks out
Speaker 1: there listening to this, if you're sitting next to a
Speaker 1: blob of anti matter, don't touch it, run label it
Speaker 1: safely for other people, and then run away really fast.
Speaker 1: We are very pro safety this podcast. We want to
Speaker 1: explain the universe, not explode the universe or kill everybody
Speaker 1: in the universe. All right, But before we begin talking
Speaker 1: about anti matter, we went out in the street. We
Speaker 1: asked people, what do you know about anti matter? What
Speaker 1: is anti matter? Here's what they had to say. I
Speaker 1: guess matters the matter, So no matter. It's like the
Speaker 1: black hole. I mean, I've heard it in relational like space,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't define it at all. It's like the
Speaker 1: opposite It's like a proton has more mass in electron,
Speaker 1: but it's the opposite charge. The electron has a positive charge,
Speaker 1: but it's like the lighter at all. All right, So
Speaker 1: most people seem to have heard of the term antimatter.
Speaker 1: That that's that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really cool that
Speaker 1: people have heard of anti matter, though almost nobody seems
Speaker 1: to know what it is. Everyone seems to have an
Speaker 1: idea that it's like regular matter, but kind of like
Speaker 1: the opposite, like it's it's like a weird kind of matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is one of my favorite things about antimatter
Speaker 1: is that it's a science concept that has penetrated into
Speaker 1: popular culture and mostly kept the science intact. Like the
Speaker 1: things people know about antimatter are mostly true, which is
Speaker 1: not the case for a lot of other things in science,
Speaker 1: you know, quantum mechanics and relativity and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: People have distorted ideas from science fiction. Well, I think
Speaker 1: one of the biggest instances of it that I've seen
Speaker 1: in movies it it was on that movie The Da
Speaker 1: Vinci Code, or the sequel to The Da Vinci Code,
Speaker 1: Angels and Demons. Yeah, where they were there was somebody
Speaker 1: trying to like harness antimatter and make a bomb out
Speaker 1: of it. That's right. And you know that movie Angels
Speaker 1: and Demons starts at the Atlas Detector at CERN, which
Speaker 1: is where I were, which is pretty awesome. Did you
Speaker 1: get a cameo? I I didn't get to meet Tom
Speaker 1: Hanks and I didn't get to be in the movie.
Speaker 1: But it's also always fun to see your workplace turned
Speaker 1: into a science fiction movie because and in the version
Speaker 1: of my workplace that they have at in the movie.
Speaker 1: They have all these fancy displays and cool interfaces and
Speaker 1: retinal scans, all this stuff, and everyone's wearing like white
Speaker 1: lab coats, right and safety as they should. That's right.
Speaker 1: You can't do science without white lab coat. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't want to get any anti matter on your clothes
Speaker 1: unless they're anti closing your antiverson. Science fiction is always
Speaker 1: an inspiration for real life, so there's nothing wrong there. Um.
Speaker 1: But there are some elements to Angels and Demons which
Speaker 1: are correct. Okay, so Angels and Demons got correct that
Speaker 1: we do make anti matter at certain though not enough
Speaker 1: to make a bomb. We make anti matter at certain Yes,
Speaker 1: we produce it, but not enough to make a bomb.
Speaker 1: That's very important distinction. And if antimatter collides with matter,
Speaker 1: it does annihilate and turn into energy, so you can
Speaker 1: make explosives. Yes, that is all actually true. You can
Speaker 1: make a bomb, but you're not making a bomb right now.
Speaker 1: We have no plans to make bombs. Um. But but yes,
Speaker 1: technically antimatter can be used to make engines or weapons. Okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll get to how that all works, but let's
Speaker 1: maybe talk about what is it. The simplest way to
Speaker 1: describe antom matter is just that it's the opposite of matter, right,
Speaker 1: every particle, most of matter is made of particles, right, Protons, neutrons, electrons,
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. And inside the protons and neutrons
Speaker 1: we have corks. And the amazing thing is that each
Speaker 1: of these particles has sort of a twin, except it's
Speaker 1: the evil twin, the opposite twin, like a mirror twin. Yes,
Speaker 1: like a mirror twin. It's not exactly the same sound,
Speaker 1: identical twin. It's a mirror twin because it has a
Speaker 1: lot of the properties of it are flipped. So the
Speaker 1: electron is negatively charged. The antimatter version of the electron,
Speaker 1: called the positron, it has a positive charge. And so
Speaker 1: you're exactly right. The antimatter is like matter, but with
Speaker 1: the opposite charge, and some other aspects of it are
Speaker 1: also flipped. So it's not just the electrical charge that's
Speaker 1: flipped like plus and minus like in a battery, or
Speaker 1: like an electron and a proton. It's like they have
Speaker 1: other things about them that are flipped. That's right, because
Speaker 1: the electric charge is what tells you whether something feels electromagnetism,
Speaker 1: which is one of the four forces. But there are
Speaker 1: other charges, right, there are other forces and so other
Speaker 1: charges exactly other forces, each of which have their own charge.
Speaker 1: So for example, gravity has a charge we call that mass,
Speaker 1: but you can't flip mass because you can't have negative mass.
Speaker 1: Antimatter particles have positive mass, but the other forces, like
Speaker 1: the weak force, it has a charge called the hypercharge,
Speaker 1: and anti particles can have the opposite hypercharge as well.
Speaker 1: So every particle seems to have this antiparticle, Like the
Speaker 1: electron is the positron, and the corks have the anti corks,
Speaker 1: and so antimatter are these particles that are exactly analogous
Speaker 1: to the particles we know and love and are made
Speaker 1: up out of, except there seemed to be the opposite.
Speaker 1: So like if a cork, regular cork um feels all
Speaker 1: of the forces, right, I think regular cork feels all
Speaker 1: the forces. You have gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and strong force.
Speaker 1: And there's a version of the cork that is the
Speaker 1: anti cork that has like, uh, the opposite charge, opposite hypercharge,
Speaker 1: opposite color charge. And that's when a play matter is.
Speaker 1: It's like versions of regular matter that have everything flipped
Speaker 1: to them exactly. And the key thing is that we
Speaker 1: associate them together. We say, like, well, here's the particle,
Speaker 1: we call it the electron. Here's another particle we call
Speaker 1: it the positron. And the connection between them is something
Speaker 1: that we've made, right, We say, these two are related,
Speaker 1: they're similar in some way, they're there's there's a pattern here,
Speaker 1: And we look for these patterns all the time because
Speaker 1: we're trying to explain the larger story, right, We're trying
Speaker 1: to understand what is what we are seeing mean, and
Speaker 1: so we're always looking for patterns. But what is the
Speaker 1: thing they have in common? The is it like the
Speaker 1: mass or you know, just the kind of the arrangement
Speaker 1: of these charges. Why do we associate them together? Yeah,
Speaker 1: great question. They have the same mass, and you're exactly right,
Speaker 1: as far as we can tell, the electron of the
Speaker 1: positron of exactly the same mass, and they also have
Speaker 1: the same magnitude of the charge, Like the electron is
Speaker 1: charge minus one positronic charge plus. The quarks have these
Speaker 1: fractional charges two thirds one third and the anti quarks
Speaker 1: has the opposite, you know, minus two thirds or plus
Speaker 1: one third. So they really do come in pairs. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see, So it's not just that the flip it's
Speaker 1: like flipped exactly. Yeah, that's why it's a kind of special. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's like if you if you discovered one day
Speaker 1: that you had a twin, right, and you didn't know
Speaker 1: about it your whole life, that would be pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: You'd wonder like, oh, why do I have a twin?
Speaker 1: I would be like, there can only be one. Well,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't go out necessarily and kill your twin immediately
Speaker 1: because you're worried about your inheritance. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know how the things work in your family, or just
Speaker 1: convince them to try difer in line of work. Probably please,
Speaker 1: we don't need another cartoonist. Um, what if you found
Speaker 1: out that everybody in town had a twin, right, then
Speaker 1: you would conclude, oh, there's something to this, there's something
Speaker 1: twinny about my town, or my country or my species. Right.
Speaker 1: And that's the amazing thing about anti matter is that
Speaker 1: not just the electron has an antiparticle, but the quarks
Speaker 1: and every particle we've discovered so far has an antiparticle.
Speaker 1: So this's some deep symmetry of the universe. It's not
Speaker 1: just like, hey, look at this pattern we found. It's
Speaker 1: veeling of something. So everything that we know and see
Speaker 1: and touch, um, there's a there can be a version
Speaker 1: of it that's like the opposite. Yeah, exactly, there's an
Speaker 1: opposite version, and not opposite in the way like you
Speaker 1: know you had a gross breakfast this morning, there's an
Speaker 1: opposite version where you had a delicious breakfast. You know,
Speaker 1: it's opposite in the sense that it's made out of
Speaker 1: the opposite particles. So right, first, we're talking about antiparticles,
Speaker 1: and we can talk about anti matter, which is stuff
Speaker 1: made out of antiparticles. So that's a cool idea that
Speaker 1: you can have like an anti electron, like inform an
Speaker 1: anti atom with an anti proton that's made out of
Speaker 1: anti corks, right exactly, And then you can have an
Speaker 1: anti Jorge making an anti podcast if we collide with
Speaker 1: this podcast, which we anti entertaining. Unfortunately, no, that's terrible
Speaker 1: anti educational. Yeah, Like, you could have an atom that's
Speaker 1: made out of antiparticles and it would sort of like
Speaker 1: look almost the same way as a regular atom, right,
Speaker 1: it would would have that same kind of picture of
Speaker 1: the protons and the neutrons, in the middle anti versions
Speaker 1: of those with anti electrons flying around it and um
Speaker 1: and you could have like elements, right, like you could
Speaker 1: have anti oxygen and anti carbon, right. Is that the
Speaker 1: that's the question. The question is does antimatter mirror matter exactly?
Speaker 1: Mean it doesn't have all the same interactions and same
Speaker 1: properties as far as we can tell. It does. As
Speaker 1: far as we can tell, it does, But that's something
Speaker 1: we're still working on because there isn't a lot of
Speaker 1: antimatter around to study. So yes, we've seen anti anti electrons,
Speaker 1: we've seen anti protons, and people have done experiments where
Speaker 1: they've made anti hydrogen and created it and studied it,
Speaker 1: and so far it looks exactly like hydrogen except for
Speaker 1: it's made out of the antiparticles, like it has the
Speaker 1: same energy levels and the same behavior. Beyond that, it
Speaker 1: gets pretty tough because it's hard to make anti matter
Speaker 1: and it's hard to keep it around because anti matter
Speaker 1: will annihilate with normal matter. So we still have a
Speaker 1: lot of open questions, like does it really exist in
Speaker 1: the same way as matter? We know there has to
Speaker 1: be some differences because the universe is made out of
Speaker 1: matter and not antimatter. We don't know why we haven't
Speaker 1: figured out what those differences are. But that's exactly the
Speaker 1: course of a study, and so far it looks like
Speaker 1: it matches everything that matter can do, antimatter can also do.
Speaker 1: I have so many questions for you, but before we
Speaker 1: dive in, let's take a short break. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of questions there. So first of all, like, how
Speaker 1: do you make antimatter? How do you guys make antimatter
Speaker 1: at Serain in Geneva. Yeah, well we take our lamp
Speaker 1: and we rub it and the genie comes out and
Speaker 1: we just ask it nicely for anti matter. I mean
Speaker 1: this how you do science. That is how they do
Speaker 1: science and Disneyland. Um, so antimatter is not that unusual.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't live very long. Like antimatter is being
Speaker 1: created all the time, Like thunderstorms create antimatter. Like what
Speaker 1: do you mean lightning creates antimatter? Yeah, lightning can create antimatter.
Speaker 1: Like how does it get created by lightning? Well, anytime
Speaker 1: you have a very high energy photon, for example, a
Speaker 1: photon can turn into an electron and oppositron, so it
Speaker 1: can turn into matter and antimatter. Oh I see, so
Speaker 1: like regular matter if it's energetic enough or under some
Speaker 1: special condition, can certainly like poof out of existence antimatter. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And if you have cosmic rays, for example, cosmic rays,
Speaker 1: really high energy particles hit the atmosphere, they create all
Speaker 1: these collisions and all these interactions, and some of those
Speaker 1: create high energy particles like photons or z s or
Speaker 1: something which can create antimatter. Um. And then of course
Speaker 1: that stuff annihilates very quickly in the atmosphere, so you
Speaker 1: don't like, doesn't fall to the Earth. You can't go
Speaker 1: and pick up a piece of antimatter like a meteorite. So, um,
Speaker 1: I know that. I think what a lot of you
Speaker 1: do you see in science fiction? Is that antimatter? If
Speaker 1: you touch it, you're going to explode. Like if an
Speaker 1: antimatter version of me and me shake hands, we're going
Speaker 1: to explode. Yes, not recommended. Do not shake hands with
Speaker 1: an antimatter person. How about fizbump, fiz bump bump, No, no,
Speaker 1: Put put that dude in a bubble, preferably a magnetic
Speaker 1: bubble immediately. Um. You know that's an interesting question, like
Speaker 1: could you have anti matter life? We don't know, But
Speaker 1: your question is does matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet.
Speaker 1: The answer is actually yes, that's one thing in science
Speaker 1: fiction that's actually true. Matter and anti matter annihilates like if,
Speaker 1: but it's only if the two versions of the one
Speaker 1: thing come together, like an anti electron and an electron.
Speaker 1: If they come together, dull annihilate exactly, but not if,
Speaker 1: Like an elect anti electron and a regular court, they won't.
Speaker 1: They won't annihilate. That's right. So what we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: Like a photon can turn into an electron oppositron, the
Speaker 1: same thing can happen in the opposite direction. An electron
Speaker 1: and oppositron can annihilate into a photon or into a
Speaker 1: z boson. But you're right. Not every kind of particle
Speaker 1: can annihilate with its antiparticle. There are some rules about
Speaker 1: which particles and which antiparticles can annihilate into each other.
Speaker 1: A particle and its own antiparticle can always annihilate, and
Speaker 1: the reason is that they cancel each other out. So
Speaker 1: an electron is charged minus one, a positron is charged
Speaker 1: plus one, so they can make a photon which has
Speaker 1: charged zero without violating conservation of electric charge. But an
Speaker 1: electron can't annihilate with another electron, because that would be
Speaker 1: charged minus two, and the photon can't have charge of
Speaker 1: minus two. So there has to be um uh, kind
Speaker 1: of like the mirror perfection in order for them to annihilate. Like,
Speaker 1: you can't take an electron smash it with a proton,
Speaker 1: which has the opposite charge. But there's sort of like
Speaker 1: different things. They're not anti versions of each other, and
Speaker 1: those like a proton and an electron one annihilate. That's right.
Speaker 1: A proton will not annihilate with an electron. They'll interact
Speaker 1: and they'll bang off each other, but they will not
Speaker 1: annihilate into into like a neutral particle like a photon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what's the difference between a positron and a proton?
Speaker 1: What's the differ between a positron and a proton? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that makes it annihilate with the electron. We don't know.
Speaker 1: It's um It's something we do in physics where we say, well,
Speaker 1: we see this pattern. We don't understand why one thing
Speaker 1: happens and something else happens, so we'll just invent a rule.
Speaker 1: Will say well, let's create a number called electronness, and
Speaker 1: we say the electron carries electronness, the anti electron carries
Speaker 1: anti elect negative electronness. It will just say, let's theorize
Speaker 1: if there's a rule that electronness has to be conserved,
Speaker 1: and so that's why, for example, a negative electron can't
Speaker 1: annihilate with a positive muan because a positive muan doesn't
Speaker 1: carry the right amount of electron nous. And you might
Speaker 1: think this sounds totally made up. It's totally made up,
Speaker 1: and like a muon is heavier than an electron, therefore
Speaker 1: it must have some something different. Yeah, even though therefore
Speaker 1: there is a bit tenuous because this is like a
Speaker 1: description of what we've seen. We've never seen an electron
Speaker 1: and anti muan annihilate together into a photon. Why not?
Speaker 1: We don't have a good reason why not. We just
Speaker 1: invent a rule. But the rule is really just a
Speaker 1: description of what we have seen so far. We say, well,
Speaker 1: there must be this rule. We don't know why there
Speaker 1: where why there's this rule, but it's describes what we've
Speaker 1: seen so far. People are looking for that, right. So
Speaker 1: we don't know why matter annihilates with antimatter. We just
Speaker 1: know that it does. We understand how matter can annihilate
Speaker 1: with antimatter. How the electron can annihilate with the positron.
Speaker 1: We don't know why the electron is picky, Like why
Speaker 1: doesn't it also annihilate with the muan or with the
Speaker 1: tao or other stuff. There seemed to be these rules,
Speaker 1: but there's plenty of these particles around. So if Jorge
Speaker 1: meets Anti Jorge, your electrons will annihilate with his positrons.
Speaker 1: I guess her. I don't know. Anti Jorge would look
Speaker 1: like right, um, and your protons would annihilate with his
Speaker 1: anti protons. So that wouldn't be a problem. So what
Speaker 1: happens when we annihilate, like what creates the explosion? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an enormous amount of energy. Everybody's heard the equation
Speaker 1: E equals mc squared from from Einstein. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: sense equation energy E is equal to mass times the
Speaker 1: speed of light squared. Okay, so that that tells you
Speaker 1: how much energy is stored inside mass. What happens when
Speaker 1: a particle and antiparticle meat is they turn into photons
Speaker 1: or energy. Right, And it's a huge amount of energy
Speaker 1: because mass has an enormous amount of energy in it.
Speaker 1: Because the speed of light, the C squared is a
Speaker 1: big number. So, for example, let's give some people a scale.
Speaker 1: If you took a raisin, which is like one gram
Speaker 1: of matter, and push it up against an anti raisin, right,
Speaker 1: that two grams of matter has enough energy to create
Speaker 1: an explosion the size of a nuclear weapon. Yes, so
Speaker 1: if so, to make a nuclear weapon, you just need
Speaker 1: a raisin and an anti raisin and print it together,
Speaker 1: and all of their electrons and protons and anti versions
Speaker 1: would like convert into energy to make a nuclear weapon
Speaker 1: sized bomb out of matter and anti matter. How do
Speaker 1: we get here? We're like giving people prescriptions for how
Speaker 1: to build weapons. All of a sudden on this show,
Speaker 1: I think there's going to a flagged by the Department
Speaker 1: of Home and Security. I think there's somebody knocking on
Speaker 1: my door a second. Fortunately, there's not enough antimatter on
Speaker 1: Earth to make that kind of device. I mean, I said,
Speaker 1: it's certainly manufacture antimatter, but we manufacture pico grams of
Speaker 1: anti matter a year for use in science experiments, so
Speaker 1: not nearly enough to make anything practical. Well, that's the
Speaker 1: big mystery about anti matter, right, Like it's it's we
Speaker 1: know it's a mirror version of everything around us. A
Speaker 1: regular matter like us, and so it's possible, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's equally likely to exist as us. But there's
Speaker 1: none of it. There's not much of it in the universe,
Speaker 1: Like we don't see it around. Yeah, there seems to
Speaker 1: be nothing preventing it from being created. But as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, most of the universe is made
Speaker 1: out of matter and not antimatter. And we we wonder
Speaker 1: when we see these symmetries, we're like, well, it seems
Speaker 1: like everything is the same between matter and anti matter.
Speaker 1: Why does the universe then prefer matter and not antimatter?
Speaker 1: Why are we not made out of anti matter? Now,
Speaker 1: of course there's just a word game there. If we
Speaker 1: were made out of anti matter, we would probably call
Speaker 1: that matter. The questions really, why are we made out
Speaker 1: of this kind and not the other kind of Like
Speaker 1: why are we made of the kind of matter where
Speaker 1: the electron has a negative charge as opposed to all
Speaker 1: of us being made out of electrons with a positive charge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a it's a great question because as far as
Speaker 1: we can tell, there are very small differences between the
Speaker 1: way matter and antimatter work. So you know, you can
Speaker 1: make atoms out of matter or atoms that of antimatter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so we don't have an explanation for that. People
Speaker 1: think that in the beginning of the universe there was
Speaker 1: the same amount. That's one possibility, right, Like we started
Speaker 1: the universe with equal amounts of both matter and antimatter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's the simplest explanation because we think that the
Speaker 1: universe started in sort of a symmetric state. And either
Speaker 1: the universe started an asymmetric state, like with more matter
Speaker 1: than antimatter, and then you have to ask, well why, right,
Speaker 1: that doesn't answer the question of why is there more
Speaker 1: matter or than anto maatter? Now, either it started with
Speaker 1: an as symmetry because like mathematically, according to the equations,
Speaker 1: they're they're like the same. There's no reason why you
Speaker 1: would prefer the plus the negative electron as opposed to
Speaker 1: the positive electron. That's right. We found a few ways
Speaker 1: that the universe prefers matter to antimatter, but they're really small. Um.
Speaker 1: So if you start off saying the universe begins with
Speaker 1: the same amount of matter and antimatter, then you have
Speaker 1: to explain where did all the antimatter go? Right, Because
Speaker 1: if there was the same amount, you imagine eventually they
Speaker 1: would annihilate and the whole universe would just be photons. Right,
Speaker 1: But there must have been more matter than antimatter, or
Speaker 1: something that prefers matter to antimatter, like turns antimatter into
Speaker 1: matter somehow to explain why we have matter left over
Speaker 1: but no antimatter. So that that's one possibility. We started
Speaker 1: out with the same amounts and somehow, uh, we are
Speaker 1: only left with one kind of matter. That's right, and
Speaker 1: we have found a few ways for that to happen.
Speaker 1: It's called CP violation. For those who are interested. There
Speaker 1: are a few processes we've discovered that prefer making matter
Speaker 1: over antimatter, but there's too small. They don't explain the
Speaker 1: huge asymmetry that we've seen, you know, explain like one
Speaker 1: percent of it. So, but there is a preference in
Speaker 1: the universe. You're saying, in the laws of physics, there
Speaker 1: is a slight preference for matter and not antimatter. That's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it connects to this question of charge conservation and parody
Speaker 1: and charge parody conservation, and we should do a whole
Speaker 1: other podcast on that, and whether particles prefer moving forward
Speaker 1: or backward in time, and whether they prefer being matter
Speaker 1: or antimatter. But those are very very small differences, so
Speaker 1: we're looking for larger asymmetries. We haven't found any. People
Speaker 1: are hunting. Is there a process which can turn antimatter
Speaker 1: into matter or prefers matter. Nobody's found it so far.
Speaker 1: We're still looking. It's a big mystery. It's a big mystery. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that the next galaxy over is maybe
Speaker 1: made out of antimatter. It's a possibility that there is
Speaker 1: antimatter hiding out there in the universe, right, So let's
Speaker 1: think for a moment, how would you find antimatter? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, if there's any antimatter on Earth, they would
Speaker 1: very quickly annihilate with normal matter, and the thing you
Speaker 1: would see is photons being created. Those photons, for example,
Speaker 1: would have the same energy of the mass of the electron.
Speaker 1: So what happens when an electron of positron annihilate is
Speaker 1: you get to photons. Actually, one that has the mass
Speaker 1: of the electron. The other has the mass of the positron,
Speaker 1: which is the same and we know that number, so
Speaker 1: we can look for that. So we can see matter
Speaker 1: anti matter annihilation. Because we look for these photons of
Speaker 1: a specific energy, and we don't see any on Earth,
Speaker 1: and we look around in our solar system, we don't
Speaker 1: see any here. And we look further and further. Any
Speaker 1: kind of pockets of antimatter or even a small amount
Speaker 1: of it that's hanging out near regular matter, it would
Speaker 1: just like annihilate and we would see these explosion, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so imagine you have like a galaxy that's of
Speaker 1: antimatter that's next to a galaxy of matter. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: far enough a way that they're not going to collide
Speaker 1: and annihilate in some super cataclysm, right, but they're going
Speaker 1: to be shooting particles out. There's gonna be a boundary.
Speaker 1: At the boundary between them. You would expect to see
Speaker 1: a lot of matter antimatter collisions, and you would see
Speaker 1: these photons of a special energy being created. And so
Speaker 1: that's what people look for to see, is there like
Speaker 1: a boundary to the edge of our matter bubble. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe the rest of the universe is made out of
Speaker 1: anti matter and we're just made out of matter. So
Speaker 1: they look for the edge of this bubble to see
Speaker 1: how far they can how far they can push the
Speaker 1: proof of matter and and they look beyond the Solar System,
Speaker 1: and the whole galaxy we're pretty sure is made out
Speaker 1: of matter, and also our cluster of galaxies is made
Speaker 1: out of matter. But beyond that, we're not sure, because
Speaker 1: it's really hard to see that far and to see
Speaker 1: these little blips of electron positron annihilation of matter antimatter interaction.
Speaker 1: You can't just tell the difference by looking at it.
Speaker 1: Like a star you seeing in the night sky today,
Speaker 1: or a galaxy you see out in the night sky,
Speaker 1: it could be an antimatter galaxy or an antimatter star,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't be able to tell just by looking
Speaker 1: at it. That's right. If matter and antimatter work the
Speaker 1: same way, then an anti matter star would look just
Speaker 1: like a normal star, would have the same fusion process
Speaker 1: and send out the same kinds of photons and look
Speaker 1: exactly the same. Yeah, but at the core of it,
Speaker 1: it would be like anti stuff burning inside of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anti fusion. But the interesting thing is maybe your listeners
Speaker 1: are thinking, well, what about the photon, right, um, people
Speaker 1: might be wondering what they wouldn't anti sons make anti photons.
Speaker 1: The crazy thing about the photon is it has no
Speaker 1: electric charge and has no weak charge, so it is
Speaker 1: its own anti particle. Oh, because it doesn't have these
Speaker 1: charges that the other particles have, it doesn't have anything
Speaker 1: to flip. That's right, there's nothing to flip. It's like
Speaker 1: a perfect ball looks the same in the mirror, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like the connection between matter and antimatter. It's the bridge, right,
Speaker 1: And so anti matter stars make photons just to same
Speaker 1: way matter stars make photons, and so that's you can't
Speaker 1: tell the difference. You're exactly right. So we think the
Speaker 1: universe is probably made out of matter rather than anti matter.
Speaker 1: It's just simpler because everything around us and in our
Speaker 1: galaxy and in our galaxy cluster is made out of matter.
Speaker 1: But we don't actually know. It could be the deep
Speaker 1: out there, they're huge blobs of antom matter. But even still,
Speaker 1: say that's the case, say the universes like pockets of
Speaker 1: matter and pockets of vandom matter. Then you have to ask, well,
Speaker 1: why why do we prefer matter here and anti matter?
Speaker 1: They're right, there has to be some difference to explain
Speaker 1: the fact that we are matter and not antimatter. And
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating question. It's something it's like a huge
Speaker 1: symmetry in the universe that we've discovered, except there's this
Speaker 1: asymmetry to it. Right, it's like an almost symmetry. It's
Speaker 1: a broken symmetry. And those are really interesting clues if
Speaker 1: you want to understand something deep about the universe, about
Speaker 1: it's very organization. It's like, why are most people right handed?
Speaker 1: You could like, why isn't half the population right handed?
Speaker 1: And you'll have left handed but you're right. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a good analogy because as you could be right or
Speaker 1: left handed, right, there's no reason to prefer one or
Speaker 1: the other sort of anatomically, so why are most people
Speaker 1: right handed? Yeah, it could have been some arbitrary moment
Speaker 1: in the history, in the prehistory of humanity, where you know,
Speaker 1: some gene preferred this or the other um and now
Speaker 1: we're all living that way. And it could be the
Speaker 1: same with matter and antimatter, that some moment in the
Speaker 1: early universe it could have gone one way or the other,
Speaker 1: and now we're living in a matter universe. A lot
Speaker 1: of big events in the universe could come from random
Speaker 1: quantum fluctuations in the early moments that just kind of
Speaker 1: flipped it for everybody else, and we're all living with
Speaker 1: that decision. So we talked a little bit about how
Speaker 1: we study it. Like, so it's certain you take you
Speaker 1: you Colli particles and hopefully sometimes out of that ball
Speaker 1: of energy outcomes out some antimatter. And then what do
Speaker 1: you do with it? You can't like hold it right
Speaker 1: or how do you how do you store it? And
Speaker 1: how do you like do things with it if it explodes,
Speaker 1: if it touches regular matter. Yeah, so it's certainly do
Speaker 1: two kinds of studies for the anti matter. One, we
Speaker 1: just smash protons together to create exotic new particles, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times those will turn into matter and
Speaker 1: antimatter pairs, and then we just we see those like
Speaker 1: you create a z boson and it turns into a
Speaker 1: muan and anti muon. Totally normal, everyday kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But there are people at certain who are also dedicated
Speaker 1: to studying this question of antiparticles, and they make anti
Speaker 1: matter and then they form it into atoms and then
Speaker 1: they do trap it. The only way to trap antimatter
Speaker 1: is to build a bottle that holds it without touching it.
Speaker 1: And so you can do that with magnets. Ah, Like
Speaker 1: you create a magnetic field that that traps all of
Speaker 1: these antiparticles inside of the the magnetic field, that's right,
Speaker 1: and they can like swooh around in a circle. And so, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can control it without touching it, because antimatter also
Speaker 1: feels magnetism. And so they've done experiments where they've created
Speaker 1: like anti hydrogen, yeah, anti hydrogen, and they've poked it
Speaker 1: and interacted with it, and they've you know, they've seen
Speaker 1: doesn't interact the same way we we do. UM. And
Speaker 1: so far it looks pretty normal. But you know, there's
Speaker 1: still some really deep questions about antimatter, like does it
Speaker 1: feel gravity the same way that we do or the opposite.
Speaker 1: To study that, you need a lot of antimatter and
Speaker 1: we can only make tiny, tiny amounts. Well, I think
Speaker 1: this sort of relates to these deeper questions about the
Speaker 1: mathematics of the universe. You know, we we have these
Speaker 1: equations that say, oh, you should see antimatter versions of everything, um.
Speaker 1: But then how those equations relate to the what we
Speaker 1: actually see like the real world. That's a that's another
Speaker 1: that's a bigger question, right, Yeah, it comes out of
Speaker 1: these mathematical models. You're right, It's like in the in
Speaker 1: the twenties, people are trying to build up math that
Speaker 1: describe what we saw on quantum mechanics, and all that
Speaker 1: stuff was pretty new, and a guy named Paul de
Speaker 1: Rac was putting together a description of really fast moving
Speaker 1: electrons and he noticed that his equation worked for fast
Speaker 1: moving negatively charged electrons the kind we saw, but it
Speaker 1: also worked for positively charged electrons. Thought that's interesting, Uh,
Speaker 1: do those exist? And for a while he thought maybe
Speaker 1: the proton was the anti electron, but then people show
Speaker 1: that that couldn't be, so he said, well, then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna postulate the existence of a new particle, the anti electron,
Speaker 1: And just a few years later a guy at Caltech
Speaker 1: found it, and then actually at direct direct won the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize, and at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he
Speaker 1: predicted the anti proton, which was then later found. So
Speaker 1: he like doubled down at his Nobel Prize speech and
Speaker 1: went for a second one, woh, well, so what do
Speaker 1: you think is the larger lesson here about antimatter? I
Speaker 1: think that the larger lesson is that there are patterns
Speaker 1: in what's going on in the universe, and those patterns
Speaker 1: are clues. Their clues that are going to tell us
Speaker 1: how things work. You know, we don't know what the
Speaker 1: whole clue though, Like we've discovered the particles have this
Speaker 1: weird mirror twin. Are there other ways that particles are mirrored?
Speaker 1: Are there other kinds of matter? Like maybe there's a
Speaker 1: particle and an anti particle and a third kind we
Speaker 1: haven't even imagined a secret yeah, or like neutral version
Speaker 1: of every particle or something. Then you would hear the music,
Speaker 1: that's right. I think the lesson is that we need
Speaker 1: to look for these patterns, and these patterns tell us
Speaker 1: something about the organization of the universe. I mean, my
Speaker 1: personal scientific fantasy is to figure out, like what is
Speaker 1: the deepest layer of matter? How is everything put together?
Speaker 1: Because I feel like if we found out that the
Speaker 1: universe was made out of strings or little beach balls
Speaker 1: or tiny hamsters or something, it would tell us something
Speaker 1: deep about the universe itself. Right, So accumulating these patterns
Speaker 1: and noticing these symmetries, these things are clues that are
Speaker 1: going to help us figure out what things are, how
Speaker 1: things are arranged, Like maybe electrons and positrons are made
Speaker 1: out of the same little sub pieces, just arranged differently. Right,
Speaker 1: and so that it makes perfect sense where you have
Speaker 1: two kinds. Maybe they're not mirror images of each other,
Speaker 1: they're just like different ways that the lego pieces inside
Speaker 1: are put together. Yeah, they're inside out or something, you know,
Speaker 1: other analogy. We don't know. And the fact that every
Speaker 1: particle seems to have an antiparticle as far as we
Speaker 1: can hell, seems like a big clue that it's something
Speaker 1: basic about matter itself. Well, in the meantime, the lesson
Speaker 1: seems to be if you see an antimatter version of yourself,
Speaker 1: run that's right. Also, most of the stuff you read
Speaker 1: about antimatter in science fiction is real. So antimatter universes
Speaker 1: could exist out there. There could be anti people and
Speaker 1: anti podcasts and and and anti jokes and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: It could be out there, and maybe one day we'll
Speaker 1: meet aliens, but we won't be able to touch them
Speaker 1: because they'll be antimatter. Oh man, that would be very
Speaker 1: anti climatic. No, I totally walked into that and with dad.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, you guys for listening. So antimatter
Speaker 1: is a deep mystery. We don't know why it's there,
Speaker 1: We don't know what it means. We don't know. Does
Speaker 1: it feel gravity the same we do? Does it feel
Speaker 1: anti gravity? Um? We know that there are some clues
Speaker 1: about the way the universe works and the reason it
Speaker 1: prefers matter. They're hidden in these mysteries of antimatter, and
Speaker 1: we have to just keep making it and studying it
Speaker 1: before we can figure this stuff out. Well, thank you
Speaker 1: for listening. We hope you guys enjoyed that. Yeah, thanks
Speaker 1: very much. If you still have a question after listening
Speaker 1: to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or
Speaker 1: email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.