Eli5 what is anti matter?

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Eli5 what is anti matter?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

[removed]

Anonymous 0 Comments

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!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Nothing whats anti-matter with you?

Anonymous 0 Comments

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

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.