antimatter oo oh look at [Music] that so there really is antimatter it is real okay it is real and what is it against why is it against matter so much yeah you know antimatter once we came to understand the behavior of particles then there fields in which they operate and they move there are forces and if you took a step back and looked at them there was a prediction that it enabled it said this allows there to be a particle such as the electron but moving backwards through time and then you say well that's weird
that is weird what what does that mean and so it took some smart heads to come to and say well maybe it's not an ordinary particle moving backwards in time it is an extraordinary particle moving forwards in time thus was born the concept of antimatter so antimatter would be a particle where the quantum properties are the opposite of what they are for matter okay so an antimatter so what's the charge on an electron negative negative the charge on the antimatter version would be positive so rather than calling it an anti-electron which you can you're allowed
to you're allowed to came up with a word for it what positron a positron that's where you get positron keeping it positive keeping it positive so what we learned is that if you take an antimatter and matter particle and you bring them together mhm they annihilate so what I'm I'm I'm weirded out by that because isn't there like conservation of energy yes okay well no conservation of masser mass energy right yeah back in the day conservation of mass conservation of energy right Einstein comes along said dude that's one equation right E mc² you have e
on one side M on the other that's what's conserved so add up the masses of these two particles you can look it up by the way the masses are identical of a positron and an electron Right add them up write down that number stick it in equals mc² e comes out the other side if you convert all of that mass into energy that's how much energy you're going to have okay coming out the other side that's cool man that's cool that's really and you know what c squ is uh the constant that is the uh
the speed of light yeah exactly it's a speed of light squared squared so numerically oh my my gosh you start off a little bit of mass you get a lot of energy at the end of this that's crazy cuz you multiply by the speed of light squared okay from that tiny little bit of mass yes oh wow okay is that why nuclear is that why they blow up the way they do the point about matter antimatter is that it is pure there is no matter left at the end of that exchange at the end of
that interaction okay it's pure energy whereas the bombs they're not even matter antimatter right there's like you still have some matter at the it lost maybe 10% of itself right okay or whatever the 1% it's some small percent of itself is that deadly okay oh man so oh we need to figure out an antimatter bomb that was not the point of this chuck oh I mean so now you could have the neutron okay well what would be anti- Neutron if it's neutral that's my point how you going to have a anti- neutral particle when you
don't have a charge exact it doesn't have a charge so what's a neutron made of uh I don't know quarks well I knew that okay well the quirks have fractional charges okay they have to because a a proton has a full charge of plus one right plus okay right if you're made of three particles each of them has to have a fraction of a charge all right okay it adds up up to plus one for the proton and it adds up to zero for the neutron okay gotcha how do I annihilate the neutron you get
the anti- neutron that's made of antiquarks oh jeez okay so wait a minute is for antimatter does every particle in the universe have like an opposite particle yes holy crap yes yes that's what's it's profound it is profound so basically there's a there is an actual opposite world there's an actual opposite world there's an opposite Universe I'm getting there we produce antimatter all the time in the laboratory how do you make matter get a pocket of energy that is enough so that if you converted that energy back to matter you can make an entire particle
out of it okay okay so in other words we we are illuminated by lights stage lights literally EXA yeah all right those photons are visible light absolutely if you say well there's an energy of a visible light Photon let me convert it uses equals MC s see how much mass that would get me if I converted it into matter there is no particle light enough for visible light to turn into gotcha this is a very important fact I don't want to move forward until I here that you understand this so here's the deal but there's
no say that again I just got to get okay we've got photons moving through the air right okay here they go they're kissing me right now okay grab one of them and say can you be a particle a a a matter particle well let's find out how much energy do you have Mr Photon Madam Photon plug that in to the equals m c^ s formula see how much mass equivalent it is if that mass equivalent is below the lowest Mass particle it will never make a particle it'll just travel through the universe forever if you
have a photon that has enough energy so that when you plugged it into this formula oh you have enough Mass to make a particle it can spontaneously turn into matter damn yes spontaneously that's crazy wait wait wait so now because if I'm going to make matter if I'm going to make like a electron right I can't just make an electron out of energy because I started out with no net charge right I started out with no net particles so if I'm going to make particles they have to add up to nothing okay so if I
don't have a charge to begin with if I make an electron you damn sure I better make a positron right so the positive cancels the if I'm going to make a matter particle you damn sure I got to make an antimatter particle because matter antimatter cancel out look at that by the way if it's just sitting there and it makes a pair and the electron goes off in this direction where does the positron have to go the other direction the exact opposite direction so that the momentum cancels exactly so let's go back to the early
Universe okay it's hot super hot super hot the energy is making matter antimatter particles right and then they find their antimatter matter counterparts and become energy again right it's an energy matter antimatter soup right this is it's roing yeah there it is they separate here they find another one right there it is okay quarks anti- quarks electrons anti- electrons there they go now the universe expands and as it expands it cool so now the energy reaches a threshold where it's not high enough to make particles particles anymore so hold on how about the particles you
did make there's whatever's left over at that moment that the energy is not making matter anymore how about the matter that's still that's there well you had equal amounts of matter and antimatter right they would find each other annihilate become pH phons again so if the universe behaved as we expected it there would be no matter anywhere in the whole universe because everything would have become photons cooled below the particle making energy okay okay it would be a universe of just light oh that sounds lovely with no people no planets love that no stars no
galaxies right no black holes nothing but that's not what happened somewhere in there one of these reactions out of a hundred million of them one of them made a matter particle with no antimatter particle and we do not have an understanding of that I was about to say but you can't do that I know I know it's not all that doesn't make any sense but it happened so what happens 9 9, 999,999 particle anti-particle pairs annihilated to make light right and one was left over and goes what happened whated hey hey hey hey where everybody
go what's going on man what is it oh it's dark in here man it's dark in here what happened I light the light no no so the light is there they don't have animatic counterpart but they can't they can't right so now they're stuck they're stuck they're stuck they're stuck literally literally stuck so the universe is birthed with 99 thou 99 mil 99,999 photons for every one one particle correct and that one particle should have been a photon something happened should have gone back symmetry breaking right happened in the early universe and so now everything
we know and of touch me here give me tou all of this look at that shouldn't even happen is from all of that nothing none of that is from those one particles all right that's I'm done no no no I'm done okay that's crazy that happened in the early universe and we don't understand it so you can ask well could there maybe the antimatter is still there but we can't see it or interact with it are there antimatter galaxies looking like an ordinary Galaxy but we see galaxies colliding all the time and they're not annihilating
right no there's circumstantial evidence that we are in a matter universe and the antimatter is just simply not there so maybe there's a whole other Universe maybe the anti I don't know maybe this asymmetry broke the bounds of this universe and put the antimatter in another universe so they're an antimatter un having the same conversation oh my head hurts we're all antimatter and we're happen to the matter exactly except they wouldn't be call themselves anti cuz that's no they just matter yeah we're matter and those other what happened to those other matter that's insane so
if you're going to cross a universe bring a coin with you and flip it to the other beings if they annihilate that's an antimatter universe that's right cuz your matter definitely will annihilate if that our antimatter if it's somehow mysteriously tunneled into another universe who knows where what happened to it we don't know but we are in a matter Universe they would be our antimatter yes the whole universe would be our anti anybody we meet from that Universe We Come Together We like yo what's up man give me some love boom done oh that was
fascinating I'll give him that all right we got to go I love it okay I love it yet another if we're not if you don't see us again cuz we found you know what happened we found some antimatter all right I'm signing off here from my office at the Hayden Planetarium uh this was yet another Star Talk explainer keep looking up antimatter is extremely rare in the observable universe but researchers just discovered the heaviest antimatter hyper nucleus antimatter has challenged established paradigms for nearly a century now showing us how critical thinking fuel scientific and even
societal progress and thankfully our partners at Ground news make that much easier to do with their Vantage plan you have access to original research plus every article reporting on it for a more comprehensive understanding of new discoveries from showing political bias and media credibility to blind spots in reporting so you can see important stories barely receiving attention ground news helps you step out of information silos and into the world of infinite possibilities much like how the discovery of antimatter required physicists to think outside of traditional Frameworks ground news helps Foster the same type of intellectual
flexibility accessible via app or desktop ground news is giving Star Talk fans 40% off their Vantage plan for all the same unlimited access that we here at Star Talk use that's just $5 a month to push the boundaries of human knowledge to learn more head over to ground. news/ StarTalk and sign up for their Vantage plan today he [Music]
