• Question: do any of you wish that you could know all about matter and antimatter because i sure do >:>

    Asked by deadlox to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 15 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      well that’s why I became a physicists because I wanted to know all about matter and anti-matter. We don’t have all the answers and there’s plenty to work on but we do have lots of answers. For instance we know a lot about anti-matter. At CERN at the moment they are making anti-hydrogen atoms which is really amazing. They are then going to see whether matter and anti-matter behave a little bit differently. The experiment is called Alpha if you want to google it.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Yes! Yes I really would like to know all about it, especially because it would earn me a Nobel Prize, hehe.

      Finding differences between anti-matter and matter is one of the great problems of modern science. Theoretically, anti-matter is a sort of reflection of matter: same mass, but almost all the other fundamental properties are reversed.

      That’s a problem with this though: at the beginning of our universe, huge amounts of matter and anti-matter were created. However more matter needs to have been created than anti-matter, otherwise it all would have been annihilated and we wouldn’t exist!

      So here’s the conundrum. The laws of physics have to treat matter and anti-matter differently, to create the matter/anti-matter imbalance at the start of our universe. But anti-matter is a near perfect reflection of matter, and so by definition *shouldn’t* be affected by the laws of physics in a different way to matter.

      The secret lies in the fact that anti-matter and matter have very ever-so-slight differences in their fundamental properties, but finding these differences is extremely difficult and, as I said earlier, is one of the great problems of modern physics.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Sure, who would say no to knowing everything? 🙂
      Would knowing everything about matter and antimatter also include being able to predict which lottery balls end up in the slots? Because then I am definitely onboard.
      Plus, yeah, also scientifically it would be very good, but Tim and Zachary pretty much explained why.

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