LMR-043 · Matter
Antimatter
For every you, there could be a not-you.
§ A first look
§ Depths
Six ways into the same idea — from bedtime story to chalkboard. No order required.
L1 · Crayon
Told like a bedtime story.
For a curious 10-year-old. No jargon. Just a picture in your head.
For every kind of tiny particle in the universe, there's an opposite version of it — same in most ways, but with the opposite electric charge. We call this opposite stuff antimatter. The wild part: when a regular particle and its opposite touch, both of them vanish in a flash of pure light. (No, you cannot 'just touch carefully.') We can make tiny amounts of antimatter in labs. The entire universe around you is made of the normal kind, and nobody fully knows why that kind got to win. The universe is mostly here because of a small bookkeeping error in the first second of existence.
§ Strange but true
- 01Every particle has a mirror twin with opposite charge. Touch them together — pure annihilation, pure light.
- 02The Big Bang should have made equal matter and antimatter. It didn't. Why is one of physics's biggest open mysteries.
- 03A gram of antimatter would release the energy of a Hiroshima bomb. We've made about 10 nanograms total.
§ From the field journal
Antimatter
"For every you, there could be a not-you."
— observed, sketched, not yet fully understood.
§ Nearby