Disclaimer: I am not a physicist or have a degree in a field studying antimatter. Antimatter is an extremely confusing and ununderstood thing even in the science world. If anyone who is qualified reads something that is incorrect please let me know because I am looking for any information about antimatter I can get.
Antimatter is one of the coolest and scariest things we have ever discovered in science. Antimatter is the opposite of matter in the literal sense. Our atoms’ nuclei is positively charged and has electrons around it, the antimatter is negatively charged with positrons around it. Now, being that antimatter is the partner of matter, the two cannot touch. If they do both the matter and antimatter will be annihilated leaving behind 100% pure energy. The two particles bond and leave behind no physical waste. If you look at our power plants today they produce an incredible amount of waste to create energy, and even the nuclear power plants, which are much cleaner, produces an incredible amount of waste compared to the bonding of antimatter and matter. What this tells us is that energy can be produced with no physical waste.
This discovery raises a ton of questions in my head that I am having trouble finding answers to. The biggest question is, if our entire world got annihilated by antimatter and matter touching, leaving behind pure energy, wouldn’t there just be space in our place? Is the combination of antimatter and matter just the space that we picture astronauts floating in? Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about an idea that if you added up all the electrons and the protons in the universe you would get zero. In his words this effectively means that all it would take is someone knowing how to make a universe and ,in theory, they could make an infinite amount of them simultaneously. This theory changed the way people think about our universe and how we were created.
Now that I’ve wracked my brain for a while trying to understand this, here’s what I came up with: when antimatter and matter touch they destroy each other and create pure energy. Scientists currently state that antimatter and matter should have been created in equal amounts during the big bang but we don’t actually see that in reality. If they were created in equal amounts we wouldn’t exist because all of the matter and antimatter would have destroyed itself almost immediately after the big bang. This led scientists to believe that we only became because there was a tiny bit more regular matter than antimatter during the big bang. While this is a good explanation now, antimatter is being rigorously studied and attempting to be understood by the smartest people in the world to find what is really going on.
To conclude, I wonder if all of the antimatter of the universe came in contact with all the matter what would happen? Everything would be converted to pure energy and there would be no matter or antimatter remaining, leaving just space. I ask once again, is the space that astronauts are floating through just the result of matter and antimatter touching? If we learned how to separate space would we create matter and antimatter? These are the questions that we must answer to solve another riddle of the universe.
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