Eli5 what is anti matter?

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Eli5 what is anti matter?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Anti Matter is basically the mirror equivalent to normal matter. Matter (everything from air molecules, steel, your skin, water, farts) consists out of atoms. Atoms (as a very easy simplification) consists out of protons (positive charge), often neutrons (no charge) and electrons (negative charge) … with antiprotons having a negative charge and antielectrons (called positrons) having a positive charge.

Antimatter is at least right now incredibly difficult and expensive to create, the theoretical value of one gram of Antimatter is somewhere in the 50 trillion USD range. So any kind of mass production is out of the question, and this is perhaps for the better, because antimatter, aside from its very interesting physical properties, known for causing one of the most violent reactions known to humanity: the matter / antimatter annihilation. Would such an annihilation of equal mass of matter / antimatter happen the result would be on par or easily surpass the biggest nuclear weapons ever created.

SYL

Anonymous 0 Comments

No one knows.

But astro-physists noticed that some stars in the outskirts of galaxies are moving way, way faster than they should be, given the forces of gravity acting upon them by regular matter which is detectable. They therefore theorized that there must be other matter…a lot of it…which they’ve so far been unable to detect, but which is causing gravitational pull on these unexplainably fast moving stars.

Edit…all that is wrong. I was thinking of dark matter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In math you have positive numbers and negative numbers right, and when you add an positive number and a negative number with the same absolute value they add up to 0.

Just like that you have regular matter, and it’s opposite, antimatter. Just like positive and negative numbers regular matter and antimatter anihillate eachother when they meet, producing insane ammounts of energy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Antimatter is exactly the same as normal matter, just “opposite”. Normal hydrogen for example is composed of a proton and an electron, with the proton being positively charged and the electron being negatively charged.

For antimatter the positively charged proton would be replaced by a negatively charged antiproton. Same mass, same strength of charge, just flipped. The negatively charged electron would also be replaced by a positively charged positron. Again identical to an electron except with opposite charge.

Antimatter seems to behave exactly the same as normal matter we are familiar with, at least as far as we can tell. This means we would expect all the same elements to be made, and even chemical reactions to work the same with antimatter. Of course we can’t test this very well because handling antimatter is very difficult since if it encounters normal matter they annihilate each other and release huge amounts of energy. Making antimatter is very difficult and can only be produced in small quantities so the testing we can do so far is limited.

And yes, it is a bit strange that matter is the way it is and not the flipped antimatter version. Scientists are still trying to figure out why the universe seems biased towards one kind (the one we are familiar with).

Anonymous 0 Comments

In figuring out what everything in the universe is made of, we have discovered a group of particles which, as far as we can tell, aren’t made up of anything simpler. We call these particles “elementary particles” and they are:

* Quarks (up, down, charms, top, bottom)
* Electron family particles (electrons, muons, tau)
* Neutrino family particles (electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, tau neutrinos)
* Force particles (gluons, photons, Z/W bosons, Higgs boson)

Naturally, you might ask how can we tell what kind of particle something is? Well, there are a handful of properties that essentially determine what a particle is:

* Mass
* Spin
* Electromagnetic charge

And that’s pretty much it. If you have a particle that is 9.1093837015×10^(−31) kilograms, has a spin of 1/2, and an electric charge of -1, then it’s an electron.

We have also discovered the existence of particles whose properties match those of the particles listed above, except the electromagnetic charge is different. For example, there exists a particle that is 9.1093837015×10−31 kilograms, has a spin of 1/2, and an electric charge of +1.

We call these particles anti-particles, as they appear to be the “opposite” of the particles whose mass/spin they match, and annihilate them on contact. In some cases they get a special name (e.g. the anti-particle of the electron is called the positron), but generally it’s just “anti-” (e.g. anti-up quark).

As far as we can tell, anti-particles obey all the same physical laws as normal particles, they just have opposite electrical charges.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine all the parts of an atom, but with opposite charges.

Protons are now negative (antiproton), and electrons are now positive (antiproton).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Y’know how, in simple arithemtic, there are negative numbers? -1, -2, -37, -659, etc. When you only consider addition and subtraction, negative numbers more or less behave exactly like regular numbers. -3 + -3 = -6, just like how 3 + 3 = 6. It’s like they’re a full and complete mirror copy of all the positive numbers that follow all the same rules.

But what happens when you try to mix a positive number with its negative “mirror” copy, then? 6 + -6? They cancel out. It doesn’t matter which pair you pick, they all have the same result. Any positive number added to its negative counterpart cancels out to zero. You could thus say negative numbers are like “anti-numbers”, since they “destroy” positive numbers on “contact”.

As it so happens, matter itself, the “stuff” that makes up everything you normally think of in the universe, has a “negative” counterpart, too, that we call “antimatter”. And it more or less has all of the properties we just talked about–antimatter follows all the same rules of physics as its “normal” matter counterpart. And if antimatter and matter come together, they will cancel each other out and leave nothing behind.

Well, in the real world, they *do* leave something behind, actually. One of the so-called “laws” of physics that, for all we’ve been able to tell, cannot ever be broken is that energy can’t be created or destroyed. The “conservation of energy” is usually how it’s phrased. Energy can be moved around or it can change form, but you can’t create it from nothing or delete it from the universe after it’s there.

You may have some familiarity with Albert Einstein and his legendary math equation, E = mc^(2). This is a very profound equation once you understand what the variables mean and what it implies. *E* refers to a quantity of raw energy. *m* refers to a quantity of mass. And *c* is the speed of light in a vacuum. What is this equation telling us, then? If you have a chunk of matter, it will have a certain mass. If you multiply it times the speed of light (a stupidly huge number), and then multiply that answer by the speed of light *again*, it will be equal to… some quantity of energy. A *lot* of energy. So… okay then? What does that mean? Turns out, it’s actually possible to convert anything with mass (including both matter and antimatter) into pure energy, and back again. And that equation shows you the “conversion ratio” between the two. And as we saw, a teensy tiny amout of mass can unleash a *stupidly huge* amount of energy.

This isn’t just a theoretical thing, either. You know how nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are a thing? This process of converting mass to energy is actually the basis of how they can do what they do–take a teensy tiny amount of fuel, and turns a fraction of a fraction of it into a shitload of power. To put that into perspective, they say the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in World War II unleashed all of that power from a single bank note’s worth of mass. It’s also how fission can do the same thing, which powers the Sun itself, and all other stars in the universe.

So, antimatter. If you bring it into contact with normal matter, the two cancel out and disappear. But both of those have mass. And mass is equivalent to energy. And we know energy can’t just disappear. So when they cancel out, all of their mass is converted to energy and released instantly. *All of it*. A nuclear bomb, for comparison, might be able to convert 0.3% of its nuclear fuel to destructive energy. A matter-antimatter collision will convert *200%* of its fuel to energy (because both the antimatter *and* the matter it touches are converted). This is perhaps one of the single most violent events that can happen in the universe. It even has a special name: annihilation.

So if you ever find a lump of antimatter in a museum some day in your lifetime, don’t bump it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Anti-matter and matter are like fire and water. Throw too little water on the fire and you still have a fire. Throw too much water on a fire and you just have water. Throw just the right amount of water on and they cancel each other out and you just have a lukewarm mess. Right now we have a flood of matter/water so any anti-matter/fire is extinguished right away, taking a little water with it. The opposite could just as easily be true and there wouldn’t be a lot of difference in our day to day lives.