Eli5 what is anti matter?
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In the universe, everything can be broken down to basic particles, and there‘s like 17 of them (I think). Basically all matter consists of up-quarks (charge 2/3), down-quarks (charge -1/3) and electrons (charge -1).
All those particles have an electric charge.* That just is a feature of those. And all particles are described by a mathematical equation.
That equation has a loophole: Having the same particle with the exactly opposite charge is also allowed. So, since that equation is really really good at describing reality, those particles with flipped charge really exist. Those are called anti-particles. And if you only consider those anti-particles interacting, they do that the same way as our matter would***. So three antiquarks could form a anti-proton with charge -1, and if you add a anti-electron** with charge +1, you get anti-hydrogen.
But, if you throw together one particle and its one antiparticle, then something really cool happens: They both annihilate each other! Producing a lot of energy, since energy is conserved in the universe.
*Not all of them. Some (like photons of light) are chargeless and have no anti-particle, and the ones called neutrino are chargeless but have anti-particles.
**Called Positron. They are generated on earth kinda regularly, by one form of radioactivity. Bananas emit these.
***You may also have to flip left and right and make time go backwards. The universe is very weird in what symmetries are allowed.
There isn’t really any need for stronger warheads. What matters is better/faster ICBMs and ways to shoot them down before they reach targets. With a bit of luck no (thermo)nuclear weapons will ever be used in conflict thanks to MAD doctrine[0] and antimatter would be likely treated same way
[0] there are countries that might not care about retailiation like North Korea
Nothing whats anti-matter with you?
To add to the other answers: Antimatter is actually inevitable if you assume just a few basic principles:
1. the existence of particles that can scatter and interact with each other
2. the existence of some charge that can be exchanged during such an interaction and that is conserved by the interaction. Meaning that total amount of charge before and after the interaction is constant.
3. the uncertainty principle, you cannot know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time
4. locality, all physical processes happen due to interactions at single points, as opposed to over a distance. If you want to act over a distance a particle has to be exchanged
5. special relativity, more specifically, we need “[relativity of simultaneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity)”, which describes the fact that 2 observers can disagree about the order of events, as long as the events happen far from each other.
Now to understand how antimatter comes about take a look at a completely hypothetical scattering event.
Incoming are two particles A,B. Assume particle A carries one of our hypthetical charges and B doesn’t (“is neutral”). They exchange an intermediary particle C which carries the charge from A to B, so that after wards A is neutral and B is charged.
There are two events to consider: first, A emits a charge-carrier C and secondly, particle B absorbs it. Due to the uncertainty principle these 2 events can be far away from each other. In fact and this is important (!): they can be so far away that by relativity of simultaneity the order of these two events is swapped for another observer.
This second observer will interpret what he sees another way: A charge carrying particle flies off from the initially neutral B and after that it arrives at the positively charged A, changing A to neutral.
In the first case (A->C->B), the charge carrier C has to have positive charge which he carries to B. Whereas in the second case, (B->C->A) the charge carrier has to carry negative charge! The second observer sees the anti-matter version of the exchange particle!
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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.
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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.
Imagine all the parts of an atom, but with opposite charges.
Protons are now negative (antiproton), and electrons are now positive (antiproton).
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