It is difficult to find a material object or a substance that would excite the consciousness of
mankind as much as this one. No wonder! It has so many prizes in “the most” category.
Very valuable prizes. For example, this is the most expensive substance that humanity
only possesses. The production of one gram of it, according to NASA estimates,
would cost 100 trillion dollars! That is 5 times the annual US budget! It is 2.5
trillion times more expensive than gold and 3 trillion times more expensive than black caviar.
This substance is the best explosive in the world. In terms of the strength of the explosion,
nothing can be compared to it, even theoretically. It is the same as it’s impossible to surpass the
speed of light. And it is also the most mysterious substance. So mysterious that if our world was
created by God, then the existence of this substance allows us to accuse God of… bias!
[INTRO]
Let's take a closer look at this most mysterious and intriguing substance. It's called antimatter.
The prefix anti means that it is the complete opposite of our familiar matter, our familiar
world, to which each of us belongs. So opposite that when it comes into contact with ordinary
matter, a grandiose explosion occurs, which is called annihilation, which in Latin literally
means complete destruction. Matter and antimatter will completely disappear, turn into light, into
energy. Matter will disintegrate not even into atoms, but into particles much smaller than them.
To understand which monstrously huge amount of energy is released during annihilation,
let's give a few figures. US thermal power plants burned 419 million tons of coal in 2021
to generate 844 terawatt-hours of electricity. If we had a power plant running on antimatter,
then it would take only... 17 kg of antimatter to produce this amount of electricity.
Just imagine the difference - a huge mountain of coal, which would take more than 4 million railway
cars to transport, and an ordinary travel bag with 17 kg of antimatter, which can be lifted by
one person. And no pollution, no huge emissions of carbon dioxide. Greta Thunberg would be pleased.
And such a grandiose reservoir of clean energy was discovered
quite by accident! Prior to this discovery, humanity did not even know about it at all.
In 1930, a 28-year-old English theoretical physicist was solving the equation of electron
motion at speeds close to the speed of light. It all came down to solving a quadratic equation that
described the value of the electron's energy. But a quadratic equation, as you know, has two roots,
which means, two solutions. With one root, everything is clear - a well-known electron
corresponds to it. And what did the second, negative root mean? Well, energy can't be
negative, can it? Many scientists, having learned about the result obtained, dismissed it - the
second solution simply has no physical meaning. That is, they acted like ordinary schoolchildren
who, when solving the problem of how long the two buses will meet and getting a positive and
negative time value, tell the teacher that the second value has no physical meaning. But Dirac
insisted that the second solution must also have a physical meaning. There must be a particle exactly
like an electron, but with a positive charge. Namely, an antielectron. Moreover, the Englishman
at the same time predicted the annihilation of the pair - electron + positron with the release
of a large amount of energy. Oh, how he was criticized for his stubbornness! It is enough
to quote Heisenberg, by the way, a close friend of Dirac: “The saddest chapter of modern physics
is and remains Dirac’s theory... I consider it simply rubbish that no one can take seriously.”
But the truth eventually triumphed, and in 1932 K. D. Anderson discovered this anti-electron,
which he called the positron, that is, the positive electron - positive + electron. So
Dirac was right?! Does antimatter exist? After all, if there is a positron, then there must be
an antiproton, that is, a particle exactly the same as a proton, but with a negative charge.
There must also be an antineutron. We combine an antiproton with an antineutron, launch positrons
around them, and now we have an antiatom. And a lot of anti-atoms create anti-matter.
And that means there is also annihilation - a huge source of energy. We already gave an
example of this huge energy at the beginning of the video. A peaceful option, so to speak. And
the military prospects are no less grandiose. The annihilation of 1 gram of matter releases
100 trillion joules of energy. This is equivalent to detonating a 10-kiloton atomic bomb. Hiroshima
was destroyed by a 15-kiloton atomic bomb. For what it would take only 1.5 grams of antimatter...
But many scientists stubbornly refused to believe in antimatter, just as they had previously refused
to believe in the positron. Like, yes, there is a positron, but it is a one-of-a-kind particle.
The whim of the Creator, in a manner of speaking. And antimatter does not exist. If it existed,
then there would be anti-planets, anti-stars, anti-galaxies. And we would definitely notice them
from the grandiose cosmic explosions. We would never have nights! The whole sky would be on fire!
And in general, the laws of our world are symmetrical. For the Universe or God,
everything is the same - matter or antimatter. At the time of the creation of matter after
the Big Bang, the same number of atoms and anti-atoms should have been created. And if so,
then immediately there would be a grandiose bang and instead of the Universe we would have a
boundless ocean of light and elementary particles. Therefore, the experimental discovery of the
antiproton in 1955 at the newly launched Bevatron accelerator was a rather nontrivial result.
In 1956, the antineutron was also discovered in the same accelerator. And the last doubts have
disappeared - antimatter really exists. And when the first anti-atoms were discovered in 1965, they
were anti-hydrogen atoms, it did not cause such a hype. And the Nobel Prize was not given for it.
And scientists who completely refused to believe in the existence of antimatter, apparently
intuitively understood that this question is too fundamental and can shatter our ideas about
the world. It’s the nature of antimatter, it has tremendous destructive power. But for now, we will
keep the intrigue on this issue and first we will explain some interesting facts about antimatter.
Fact 1. Why is antimatter considered the most expensive in the world? We said before that one
gram of antimatter costs about 100 trillion dollars. Why such a staggering price? For
two reasons. First, the enormous complexity of production. To extract such material, very precise
and energy-intensive technologies are needed. To create 1 gram of antimatter, it would take a
whole year to use all the electricity generated on the planet. And this is approximately 25 million
billion kilowatt-hours of energy! To date, the inefficiency in the production of antimatter is
enormous. Given the costs of obtaining antimatter, only a tenth of a billion of invested energy can
be returned. If scientists could collect all the antimatter we have ever produced and destroy it,
the energy produced would not even be enough to boil a cup of tea.
Secondly, the huge costs of storing antimatter. The world we live in is made up of ordinary
matter. As we know, annihilation occurs at the contact of opposite types of matter.
Fact 2: Antimatter is closer to you than you think. One should not think that antimatter
is hidden somewhere in the depths of the Cosmos, hundreds, thousands and millions
of light years away from us. Small amounts of antimatter are constantly raining down on Earth
in the form of cosmic rays, consisting of elementary particles. These antimatter
particles reach our atmosphere in amounts ranging from one to over a hundred per square meter.
There are other sources of antimatter that are closer to us. For example, …. bananas. They
produce antimatter by emitting one positron about once every 75 minutes. This is because bananas
contain small amounts of potassium-40, one of the isotopes of potassium. The decay of potassium-40
sometimes produces a positron. The human body also has potassium-40. Therefore, each of us emits
more than four thousand positrons per day, or about 180 positrons per hour.
Fact 3. Many people associate antimatter with the Cosmos and flights to the stars. Thanks to science
fiction. Antimatter is indeed an ideal fuel. Probably, many have seen a photo or video of the
launch of the Saturn 5 rocket, which delivered astronauts to the moon. Remember this colossus
110 m high, 10 m in diameter and weighing 2965 tons? 90% of that weight was fuel.
Can you imagine how much fuel you need to get to Mars? Poor Elon Musk! But if humanity
had an engine running on antimatter, then it would take only... 1 milligram!
And since we are talking about the Cosmos, let's talk about the most intriguing thing related to
antimatter. Why is there so little of it in the universe? Where are the antistars, antigalaxies?
Where, after all, is the anti-universe, a mirror image of our universe. After all, how nice it is
to realize that somewhere out there, beyond some line, your double lives, your exact copy. And if
something in your life is not right, maybe, on the contrary, everything is OK with them?!
Admit it, it’s nice to have a kindred spirit, even if it's billions of light years away from you.
So why isn't there anything like this? There is a fundamental law in the world,
which has not yet been proven by anyone, but it was not broken in any experiment for a long time.
It says that there is CPT symmetry, from the capital letters Charge, Parity, Time,
meaning the behavior of any physical system, including the entire Universe, should not change
when all particles are simultaneously replaced by antiparticles, parity and time inversion. In
other words, for matter and antimatter, all physical laws must be the same. Therefore,
the number of particles and antiparticles must be exactly the same. But the catch is
that matter and antimatter do not tolerate each other. On contact, they annihilate. But then,
as we said above, the Universe would simply not exist. But since you are watching this video,
it still exists and is not going to explode, at least for the next couple of billion years.
So where did the antimatter go, which should have been formed after the Big Bang in the
first moments of the existence of our universe? Scientists had to admit that there is still a
certain asymmetry and that more matter was formed in the Big Bang than antimatter.
Calculations show that it was enough for every 10 billion identical quark-antiquark pairs to have
just one extra quark. Over time, these millions of pairs annihilated, and from one "extra" particle,
all the matter of the Universe came out, which we can see around us. It turns out that CPT-symmetry
is not fulfilled with absolute accuracy. But it had to be proven. We needed to find a physical
process in which the symmetry would be broken. And such a process was found!
In 1956, Chinese American scientist Chien-Shiung Wu, also known as Madame Wu, conducts her famous
experiment, which was later named after her. The experiment proves that the parity conservation law
does not work in weak interactions. That is, the laws of physics are different for our
and the mirror world. For some reason, for God or nature we turned out to be a priority! As to why,
so far, no one has been able to give an answer. But if it was different, if there was equality,
then our Universe, and therefore we, people, would not exist! So, equality is not always a
good thing. What do you think about this? Write about it in the comments below this video.
And if you enjoyed it, please press a Like to appreciate our work. And do not forget to
subscribe to our channel, there are still a lot of secrets of the Universe that we will talk about.