I’ve tried reading up on it but my brain can’t comprehend the concept of matter having an opposite. Like… if it’s the opposite of matter then it just wouldn’t exist?
In: 9
The naming is not great here. Antimatter is still “matter”. It have mass, energy, volume, electric charge, etc. All of what you expect from matter. So it does fall under the definition of matter. Sadly the meaning of “matter” usually depend on context but I have heard people call it “ordinary” matter and antimatter as the two types of matter.
Antimatter is still a kind of matter, its just a competley new set of particles, for every known particle there is an anti particle with opposite charge,
if these touch each other they anihilate eachother. Animatter still has mass like the regular particles and in a world with only antimatter the would would look the same as it looks now.
You know how, in math, when you combine 1 and -1 you get 0?
Antimatter is identical to regular matter in almost every way, *except* that its charges are opposite. For instance, electric charge. An anti-proton will behave very very similarly to a proton, to the point where you can even have anti-hydrogen atoms.
If you combined a proton and an anti-proton, all of their charges would sum to zero. This has the odd side effect that they will annihilate one another and release a ton of energy.
Antimatter is currently very rare in our universe and we’re trying to figure out why. Normally matter and antimatter form side by side, and so there should be the same amount of each, but there clearly isn’t very much antimatter and a lot of regular matter. We’re still running tests to see if we can find out what makes them different enough that one is everywhere and the other is scarce.
It’s not really the “opposite” of matter.
It’s still…matter. It’s just that *one* of the properties of that matter is different than what you get from regular matter. That specific property *is* the “opposite”. That specific property is the *charge* I can go more in-depth and explain what charge is but just know that antimatter having an “opposite charge” is about as mind-bending and profound as the idea of calling a car where the driver sits in the back and on the left but everything else is identical an “anti-car.”
And something tells me you aren’t all that confused by the idea of an anticar where the driver sits in the back and on the left.
It’s not the opposite of matter. It’s still matter. It has mass, for instance. A planet made of matter could orbit a star made of antimatter (in terms of the laws of gravity – it is highly unlikely that such a scenario would actually ever occur).
Antimatter is “anti” in that each type of “regular matter” particle has a “twin” so that, if the two came into contact with each other, they would annihilate each other. For instance, the anti-particle to the electron is called a “positron”. When an electron bumps into a positron, they annihilate each other and all their mass is converted into energy, in the form of two photons.
Importantly, **this only works for pairs of particles and their specific anti-particles**. If an electron bumps into an anti-neutron, they do not annihilate each other. It doesn’t matter (hehe) that one is matter and the other is antimatter. I hope that illustrates how there is nothing *generally* “opposite” about antimatter. It’s only particles and their specific anti-particles that are opposite in some of their properties (including their spin and their electric charge, for instance, if they have any).
Think of it like the positive and negative poles of magnets. One is, in some sense, the opposite of the other, and that determines how they interact. But both are still (parts of) magnets.
It’s not the opposite of matter, it’s the electromagnetic inverse. An electron has a certain mass, spin, and a negative charge. A positron (an anti-electron) has the same mass, the same spin and a negative charge. The amount of both charges is the same too, just with opposite signs.
All stuff is made of tiny bits called particles.
There are many different types of particles (some big, some small, some strange)
Every *type* of particle has an “opposite type”. In other words, the types are paired up in some way.
What is the relationship between a type of particle and it’s opposite? Why are these types related?
Well, if two particles of opposite types touch one another then they disappear.
Well, that’s not quite right. They don’t leave nothing behind at all. When they disappear there is a flash of light.
You can think of photons (bits of light) as being the “zero” of particles.
You might argue that “disappear” is a bit overly dramatic if there’s all these photons left behind, but if you exploded into flash of light, then I’d feel pretty safe saying you disappeared.
When scientists try to understand which particles are possible there is no reason why an electron should be negative or a proton positive. So they speculated that you could have the same particles but with opposite signs. When we looked for those particles we found that they do exist. So that’s neat.
When we try to create new particles we find that certain properties are conserved. So you can’t just make new electrons. There is a conserved number called the lepton number. If you create a particle like an electron, with a lepton number of 1, you need to also create another particle with a lepton number of -1. It happens that a positive electron, or positron, has exactly the opposite of all the conserved quantities. So you can create pairs of particles and anti particles together and things are conserved (everything but energy. You need to put in a lot of energy). And if a particle and it’s antiparticle collide they can disappear leaving only energy.
It’s like anti matter is the thing that balances the equations when you make matter. So that leaves an open question. Why is the universe so full of matter and so devoid of antimatter. The professes we know should produce equal amounts of each. Yet we only we one kind. This is an open question that we don’t yet understand.
Latest Answers