Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs anti-matter real or science fiction? Is it dangerous, or delicious?
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There's a mysterious form of matter in the universe and it has really strange properties.
I've heard of this kind of matter, and I hear that if it touches regular matter, it explodes.
Yes, and we can only make it in super fancy particle colliders.
Apparently we don't even know why it exists.
Who even asked for it?
Who ordered that?
Who ordered that?
I'll have what she's having, but the opposite.
I don't know. Some people want to explode.
I am and I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
Where we tackle the entire universe and explain it to you.
Today on the program Antimatter. What is it?
Not antifa, not antigua, but anti matter.
That's right, These are all good anti jokes.
I actually typed in anti into Google earlier to see what the completions were. Oh yeah, and antimatter was like the sixth one. Yeah, antimatter people are curious about after Antigua and Antifa and and other sorts of anti stuff.
Yeah, so what is it, what does it have against regular matter? And more important, where is it?
And what can it do for you?
Yeah, besides blowing you up. So apparently if you touch antimatter, you're going to explode in a ball of light.
That's right, Folks out there listening to this, if you're sitting next to a blob of antimatter, don't touch it, run label it safely for other people, and then run away really fast. We are very pro safety on this podcast. We want to explain the universe, not explode the universe or kill everybody in the universe. All right, But before we begin talking about antimatter, we went out on the street. We asked people, what do you know about antimatter? What is antimatter? Here's what they had to say. I guess matters the matter, So no matter. It's like the black hole.
I mean, I've heard it in relation to like space, but I couldn't define it at all.
It's like the opposite It's like a proton has more mass and electron, but it's the opposite charge.
The electron has a positive charge, but it's like the lighter at all.
All right, So most people seem to have heard of the term antimatter. That's that's pretty cool.
Yeah, it's really cool that people have heard of antimatter, though almost nobody seems to know what it is.
Yeah. Everyone seems to have an idea that it's like regular matter, but kind of like the opposite, like it's like a weird kind of matter.
Yeah. And this is one of my favorite things about antimatter is that it's a science concept that is penetrated into popular culture and mostly kept the science intact. Like, the things people know about antimatter are mostly true, which is not the case for a lot of other things in science, you know, quantum mechanics and relativity and all this stuff. People have distorted ideas from science fiction.
Well, I think one of the biggest instances of it that I've seen in movies it was on that movie The Da Vinci Code, or the sequel to The Da Vinci.
Code, Angels and Demons.
De Yeah, where they were there's somebody trying to like harness antimatter and make a bomb out of it.
That's right. And you know that movie Angels and Demons starts at the Atlas Detector at CERN, which is where I work, which is pretty awesome.
Did you get a cameo?
I didn't get to meet Tom Hanks, and I didn't get to be in the movie. But it's all so always fun to see your workplace turned into a science fiction movie because and in the version of my workplace that they have in the movie, they have all these fancy displays and cool interfaces and retinal scans and all this stuff.
And everyone's wearing like white lab coats, right, and safety goggles as they should.
That's right. You can't do science without a white lab code.
Yeah, you don't want to get any antimatter on your clothes.
Unless they're anti clothes and an anti person. Yes, science fiction is always an inspiration for real life, so there's nothing wrong there. But there are some elements to Angels and Demons which are correct. Okay, okay, So Angels and Demons got correct that we do make antimatter at Cern, though not enough to make a bomb. We make anti matter at Stern. Yes, we produce it, but not enough to make a bomb. That's very important distinction. And if antimatter collides with matter, it does annihilate and turn into energy, so you can make explosives yes, that is all actually true.
You can make a bomb, but you're not making a bomb right now.
We have no plans to make bombs. Okay, but yes, technically antimatter can be used to make engines or weapons.
Okay, well, we'll get to how that all works, but let's maybe talk about what is it.
The simplest way to describe antimatter is just that it's the opposite of matter, right, every particle, most of matter is made of particles, right, protons, neutrons, electrons, this kind of stuff, and inside the protons and neutrons we have quarks. And the amazing thing is that each of these particles has sort of a twin, except it's the evil twin, the opposite twin, like.
A mirror twin.
Yes, like a mirror twin. It's not exactly the same, it's not identical twin. It's a mirror twin because it has a lot of the properties of it are flipped. So the electron is negatively charged. The antimatter version of the electron, called the positron, it has a positive charge. And so you're exactly right. The antimatter is like matter, but with the opposite charge and some other aspects of it are also flipped.
So it's not just the electrical charge that's flipped like plus and minus in a battery, or like an electron and a proton. It's like they have other things about them that are flipped.
That's right, because the electric charge is what tells you whether something feels electromagnetism, which is one of the four forces. But there are other charges, right.
There are other forces and so other charges.
Exactly other forces, each of which have their own charge. So for example, gravity has a charge we call that mass, but you can't flip mass because you can't have negative mass. Anti matter particles have positive mass, but the other forces, like the weak force, it has a charge called the hypercharge, and anti particles can have the opposite hypercharge as well. So every particle seems to have this antiparticle, like the electron has the positron, and the quarks have the anti quarks, and so antimatter are these particles that are exactly analogous to the particles we know and love and are made up out of, except there seem to be the opposite.
So like if a quark, regular quark feels all of the forces, right, I think.
Regular quark feels all forces, yeah, gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and strong force.
And there's a version of the quark that is the anti quirk, that has like the opposite charge, opposite hypercharge, opposite color charge. And that's what antimatter is. It's like versions of regular matter that have everything flipped to them exactly.
And the key thing is that we associate them together. We say, like, well, here's a particle we call it the electron. Here's another particle we call it the positron. And the connection between them is something that we've made, right, We say, these two are related, they're similar in some way. There there's a pattern here, And we look for these patterns all the time because we're trying to like explain the larger story, right, We're trying to understand what is what we are seeing mean, and so we're always looking for patterns.
What is the thing they have in common? Then? Is it like the mass or you know, just the kind of the arrangement of these charges. Why do we associate them together?
Yeah, great question. They have the same mass. You're exactly right, as far as we can tell, the electron of the positron of exactly this same mass and they also have the same magnitude of the charge, Like the electron is charged minus one, then is charged plus one. See, the quarks have these fractional charges two thirds one third, and the anti quarks has the opposite, you know, minus two thirds or plus one third. So they really do come in pairs. Oh, I see.
So it's not just that the flip. It's like flipped exactly. Yeah, that's why it's a kind of special.
Yeah. It's like if you if you discovered one day that you had a twin, right, and you didn't know about it your whole life, that would be pretty interesting. You'd wonder, like, why do I have a twin?
I'd be like, there can only be one?
Or you wouldn't go out necessarily and kill your twin immediately because you're worried about your inheritance. I mean, I don't know how that things work in your family.
We'll just convince them to try differentline a word.
Probably, please, we don't need another cartoonist. Yeah, what if you found out that everybody in town had a twin, right, then you would conclude, oh, there's something to this, there's something twenty about my town, or my country or my species, right, And That's the amazing thing about antimatter is that not just the electron has an anti particle, but the quarks in every particle we've discovered so far has an anti particle. So it's some deep symmetry of the universe. It's not just like, hey, look at this pattern we found. It's revealing of something.
So everything that we know and see in touch, there can be a version of it that's like the opposite.
Yeah, exactly, there's an opposite version, and not opposite in the way like you know, oh, you had a gross breakfast this morning, there's an opposite version where you had a delicious breakfast.
Huh.
You know, it's opposite in the sense that it's made out of the opposite particle. So first we're talking about anti particles, then we can talk about anti matter, which is stuff made out of antiparticles.
So that's a cool idea that you can have, like an anti electron that can form an anti atom with an anti proton that's made out of anti quarks.
Right exactly, and then you can have an anti hoohe making an anti podcast if we collide with this podcast.
Which be anti entertaining. Unfortunately, no, that's terrible anti educational. Yeah, Like, you could have an atom that's made out of anti particles and it would sort of like look almost the same way as a regular atom, Right, it would have that same kind of picture of the protons and the neutrons in the middle anti versions of those with anti electrons flying around it. And you could have like elements, right, Like you could have anti oxygen and anti carbon, right.
Is that the that's the question. The question is does antimatter mirror matter exactly? Meaning it doesn't have all the same interactions and same properties as far as we can tell. It does. As far as we can tell, it does, but that's something we're still working on because there isn't a lot of antimatter around to study. So yes, we've seen anti anti electrons, we've seen anti protons, and people have done experiments where they've made anti hydrogen and created it and studied it, and so far it looks exactly like hydrogen except for it's made out of the antiparticles. Like, it has the same energy levels and the same behavior. Beyond that, it gets pretty tough because it's hard to make antimatter and it's hard to keep it around because antimatter will annihilate with normal matter. So we still have a lot of open questions, like does it really exist the same way as matter? We know there has to be some differences because the universe is made out of matter and not antimatter. We don't know why. We haven't figured out what those differences are. But that's exactly the course of a study, and so far it looks like it. It matches everything that matter can do antimatter can also do.
I have so many questions for you, but before we dive in, let's take a short break.
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So there's a lot of questions there. So first of all, like, how do you make antimatter? How do you guys make antimatter at cern in Geneva.
Yeah, well we take our lamp and we rub it and the genie comes out and we just ask it nicely for antimatter. I meant how you do science.
That is how they do science and Disneyland.
Yeah, so antimatter is not that unusual. It just doesn't live very long. Like antimatter is being created all the time, Like thunderstorms create antimatter.
Like what what do you mean Lightning creates antimatter.
Yeah, lightning can create antimatter.
Like how does it get created by lightning?
Well, anytime you have a very high energy photon, for example, a photon can turn into an electron and a positron, so it can turn into matter and antimatter.
Oh I see. So like regular matter, if it's energetic enough or under some special condition, can certainly like proof out of existence antimatter.
Yeah, exactly. And if you have cosmic rays, for example, cosmic raise, really high energy particles hit the atmosphere, they create all these collisions and all these interactions, and some of those create high energy particles like photons or ze's or something which can create antimatter, and then of course that stuff annihilates very quickly in the atmosphere, so you don't like, doesn't fall to the earth. You can't go and pick up a piece of antimatter like a meteorite.
So I know that. I think what a lot of you see in science fiction is that antimatter. If you touch it, you're gonna explode. Like if an antimatter version of me and me shake hands, we're gonna explode.
Yes, not recommended. Do not shake hands with an antimatter person.
How about fiz bump fiz bump.
Fis bump No, No, Put that dude in a bubble, like preferably a magnetic bubble immediately. You know, that's an interesting question, like could you have time, matter, life? We don't know. But your question is does matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet? The answer is actually yes, that's one thing in science fiction that's actually true. Matter and antimatter annihilate.
But it's only if the two versions of the one thing come together, like an anti electron and an electron. If they come together, doll annihilate exactly. But not if like an elect anti electron and a regular cord, they won't.
They won't annihilate, that's right. So what we talked about earlier. Like a photon can turn into an electron apositron, the same thing can happen in the opposite direction. An electron and a positron can annihilate into a photon or into a z boson. But you're right, not every kind of particle can annihilate with its antiparticle. There are some rules about which particles and which antiparticles can annihilate into each other. A particle and its own antiparticle can always annihilate, and the reason is that they cancel each other out. So an electron is charged minus one, a positron is charged plus one, so they can make a photon which is charged zero without violating conservation of electric charge. But an electron can't annihilate with another electron because that would be charged minus two, and the photon can't have charge minus two.
So there has to be kind of like the mirror perfection in order for them to annihilate, Like you can't take an electron smash it with a proton, which has the opposite charge. But there's sort of like different things. They're not anti versions of each other, and those like a proton an electron won't annihilate that's right.
A proton will not annihilate with an electron. They'll interact and they'll bang off each other, but they will not annihilate into like a neutral particle like a photon.
Yeah, so what's the difference between a positron and a proton?
What's the difference between a positron and a proton?
Yeah, that makes it annihilate with the electron.
We don't know. It's something we do in physics where we say, well, we see this pattern. We don't understand why one thing happens and something else happens. So we'll just invent a rule. We'll say, well, let's create a number called electron this, and we say the electron carries electron neiss, the anti electron carries anti negative electron neis. I will just say, let's theorize that there's a rule that electron nes has to be conserved. And so that's why, for example, a negative electron can't annihilate with a positive muon because the positive muon doesn't carry the right amount of electron ness. And you might think this sounds totally made up. It's totally made up.
And like a neon is heavier than an electron, therefore it must have something different.
Yeah, even that, therefore there is a bit tenuous because this is like a description of what we've seen. We've never seen an electron an anti muon annihilate together into a photon. Why not? We don't have a good reason. Why not. We just invent a rule. But the rule is really just a description of what we have seen so far. We say, well, there must be this rule. We don't know why why there's this rule, but it describes what we've seen so far. People are looking for that, right.
So we don't know why matter and I with antimatter. We just know that it does.
We understand how matter can annihilate with antimatter, how the electron can annihilate with the positron. We don't know why the electron is picky, like why doesn't it also annihilate with the muon or with the tao or other stuff. There seem to be these rules, but there's plenty of these particles around. So if Jorge meets Antijorge, your electrons will annihilate with his positrons or I guess her. I don't know what anti Horge would look like, right, and your protons would annihilate with his antiprotons, so that wouldn't be a problem.
So what happens when we annihilate, like what creates the explosion?
Yeah, it's an enormous amount of energy. Everybody's heard the equation E equals mc squared from Einstein. Yeah. Yeah, Einstein's equation energy E is equal to mass times the speed of lights squared. Okay, so that tells you how much energy is stored inside mass. What happens when a particle and antiparticle meet is they turn into photons or energy, right, And that's a huge amount of energy because mass has an enormous amount of energy in it because the speed of light a C squared is a big number. So for example, let's give some people a scale. If you took a raisin, which is like one gram of matter, and push it up against an anti raisin, right, that two grams of matter has enough energy to create an explosion the size of a nuclear weapon. Wow.
Yes, So to make a nuclear weapon, you just need a raisin and an anti raisin and put them together and all their electrons and protons and anti versions would like convert into energy.
To make a nuclear weapon sized bomb out of matter and antimatter. How do we get here? We're like giving people prescriptions for how to build weapons. All of a sudden, this show.
I think this is going to get flagged by the Department of Homeland Security.
I think there's somebody knocking on my door a second. Fortunately, there's not enough antimatter on Earth to make that kind of device. I mean, I said, it's cern. We may manufacturer antimatter, but we manufacture pekograms of antimatter a year for use in science experiments, So not nearly enough to make anything practical.
Well, that's the big mystery about antimatter, right, Like it's it's we know it's a mirror version of everything around us, a regular matter like us, and so it's possible, like it's it's equally likely to exist as us, But there's none of it. There's not much of it in the universe, Like we don't see it around.
Yeah, there seems to be nothing preventing it from being created. But as far as we can tell, most of the universe is made out of matter and not antimatter. And we wonder when we see these symmetries, we're like, well, this seems like everything is the same between matter and antimatter. Why does the universe then prefer matter and not antimatter? Why are we not made out of antimatter? Now, of course there's just a word game there. If we were made out of antimatter, we would probably call that matter. The question is really, why are we made out of this kind and not the other kinds?
Like why are we made of the kind of matter where the electron has a negative charge as opposed to all of us being made out of electrons with a positive charge.
Yeah, it's a great question because as far as we can tell, there are very small differences between the way matter and antimatter work. So you can make atoms out of matter or atoms out of antimatter. Yeah, And so we don't have an explanation for that. People think that in the beginning of the universe there was the same amount.
That's one possibility, right, we started the universe with equal amounts of both matter and antimatter.
Yeah, And that's the simplest explanation because we think that the universe started in sort of a symmetric state. I mean, either the universe started in an asymmetric state, like with more matter than antimatter, and then you have to ask well why, right, That doesn't answer the question of why is there more matter than antomatter? Now either, it started with an asymmetry.
Because like mathematically, according to the equations, they're like the same. There's no reason why you would prefer the plus the negative electron as opposed to the positive electron.
That's right. We found a few ways that the universe prefers matter to antimatter, but they're really small. So if you start off saying the universe begins with the same amount of matter and antimatter, then you have to explain where did all the antimatter go, right, Because if there was the same amount, you imagine eventually they would annihilate and the whole universe would just be photons. Right, But there must have been more matter than antimatter, or something that prefers matter to antimatter, like turns antimatter into matter somehow to explain why we have matter left over but no antimatter.
So that's one possibility. We started out with the same amounts and somehow we are only left with one kind of matter.
That's right, and we have found a few ways for that to happen. It's called CP violation for those who are interested. There are a few processes we've discovered that prefer making matter over antimatter, but they're too small. They don't explain the huge asymmetry that we've seen, you know, explain like one percent of it.
So, but there is a preference in the universe. You're saying, in the laws of physics, there is a slight preference for matter and not antimatter.
That's right. Yeah, it connects to this question of charge conservation and parity and charge parity conservation, and we should do a whole other podcast on that and whether particles prefer moving forward or backward in time, and whether they prefer being matter or antimatter. But those are very very small differences, so we're looking for larger asymmetries. We haven't found that. Any people are hunting. Is there a process which can turn antimatter into matter or prefers matter. Nobody's found it so far. We're still looking.
It's a big mystery.
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Is it possible that the next galaxy over is maybe made out of antimatter.
It's a possibility that there is antimatter hiding out there in the universe. Right, So let's think for a moment, how would you find antimatter? Right? Well, I mean, if there's any antimatter on Earth, they would very quickly annihilate with normal matter, and the thing you would see is photons being created. Those photons, for example, would have the same energy of the mass of the electron. So what happens when an electron of positron annihilate is you get two photons. Actually, one that has the mass of the electron, the other has the mass of the positron, which is the and we know that number, so we can look for that, so we can see matter antimatter annihilation because we look for these photons of a specific energy, and we don't see any on Earth, and we look around in our solar system, we don't see any here, and then we look further and further.
Any kind of pockets of antimatter or even a small amount of it that's hanging out near regular matter, it would just like annihilate and we would see these explosion, right.
Yeah. And so imagine you have like a galaxy that's of antimatter that's next to a galaxy of matter. Maybe they're far enough away that they're not going to collide and annihilate in some super cataclysm, right, but they're going to be shooting particles out. There's going to be a boundary at the boundary between them. You would expect to see a lot of matter antimatter collisions, and you would see these photons of a special energy being created and so that's what people look for to see, is there like a boundary to the edge of our matter bubble. You know, maybe the rest of the universe is made out of antimatter and we're just made out of matter. So they'll look for the edge of this bubble to see how far they can how far they can push the proof of matter. Oh, I see, and they look beyond the Solar System and the whole galaxy we're pretty sure is made out of matter, and also our cluster of galaxies is made out of matter. But beyond that, we're not sure because it's really hard to see that far and to see these little blips of electron positron annihilation of antimatter interaction.
You can't just tell the difference by looking at it. Like a star you're seeing in the night sky today, or a galaxy you see out in the night sky. It could be an antimatter galaxy or an antimatter star. You wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at it.
That's right. If matter and antimatter work the same way, then an antimatter star would look just like a normal star, would have the same fusion process and send up the same kinds of photons and look exactly the same.
Yeah. Wow.
But at the core of it, it would be like anti stuff burning inside of it.
Yeah, anti fusion. But the interesting thing is maybe your listeners are thinking, well, what about the photon? Right, people might be wondering, what's that. Wouldn't anti suns make anti photons? Yeah. The crazy thing about the photon is it has no electric charge and has no weak charge, so it is its own anti particle.
Oh, because it doesn't have these charges that the other particles have. It doesn't have anything to flip.
That's right, there's nothing to flip.
It's like a perfect ball, looks the same in the.
Mirror, exactly. It's like the connection between matter and antimatter. It's the bridge, right, And so antimatter stars make photons just the same way matter stars make photons. Wow, and so's you can't tell the difference. You're exactly right. So we think the universe is probably made out of matter rather than antimatter. It's just simpler because everything around us and in our galaxy and in our galaxy cluster is made out of matter. But we don't actually know. It could be that deep out there there are huge blobs of antimatter. But even still, say that's the case, say the universe is like pockets of matter and pockets of antimatter, then you have to ask, well, why why do we prefer matter here and antimatter there? Right? There has to be some difference to explain the fact that we are matter and not anti matter. And that's a fascinating question. It's something it's like a huge symmetry in the universe that we've discovered, except this this asymmetry to it right, it's like an almost symmetry. It's a broken symmetry. And those are really interesting clues if you want to understand something deep about the universe. But it's very organization.
It's like, why are most people right handed? You could yeah, Like why isn't half the population right handed and the other half left handed?
You're right, it's a good analogy because you could be right or left handed. Right, there's no reason to prefer one or the other sort of anatomically, so why are most people right handed? Yeah? It could have been some arbitrary moment in the history, in the prehistory of humanity where you know, some gene preferred this or the other, and now we're all living that way, and it could be the same with matter on anti matter that some moment in the early universe it could have gone one way or the other, and now we're living in a matter universe. A lot of big events in the universe could come from random quantum fluctuations in the early moments.
Yeah, that just kind of flip it for everybody else.
And we're all living with that decision.
So we talked a little bit about how we study it. Like, so it's cern you take you Colli particles and hopefully sometimes out of that ball of energy out comes out some antimatter, and then what do you do with it? You can't like hold it right or how do you how do you store it? And how do you like do things with it if it explodes, if it touches regular matter.
Yeah, so it's sertned. We do two kinds of studies with antimatter. One is we just smash protons together to create exotic new particles, and a lot of times those will turn into matter and antimatter pairs, and then we just we see those like you create a z boson and it turns into a muon and an anti muon. Totally normal, everyday kind of thing. But there are people at CERN who are also dedicated to studying this question of antiparticles, and they make antimatter and then they form it into atoms and then they do trap it. The only way to trap antimatter is to build a bottle that holds it without touching it. And so you can do that with magnets.
Oh, like you create a magnetic field that traps all these antiparticles inside of the magnetic fields.
That's right, And they can like swoosh around in a circle. And so, yeah, you can control it without touching it, because antimatter also feels magnetism.
And so they've done experiments where they've created like anti hydrogen.
Yeah, anti hydrogen, and they've poked it and interacted with it, and they've you know, they've seen does it interact the same way we do? And so far it looks pretty normal. But you know, there's still some really deep questions about antimatter, like does it feel gravity the same way that we do or the opposite. To study that, you need a lot of antimatter and we can only make tiny, tiny amounts.
Well, I think this sort of relates to these deeper questions about the mathematics of the universe. You know, we have these equations that say, oh, you should see antimatter versions of everything, But then how those equations relate to the what we actually see like the real world, So that's another that's a bigger question, right.
Yeah, it comes out of these mathematical models. You're right. It's like in the twenties, people are trying to build up math that described what we saw on quantum mechanics and all that stuff was pretty new, and a guy named Paul Durak was putting together a description of really fast moving electrons and he noticed that his equation worked for fast moving negatively charged electrons the kind we saw, but it also worked for positively charged electrons. He thought, that's interesting, do those exist? And for a while he thought maybe the proton was the anti electron, but then people show that that couldn't be, so he said, well, then I'm going to postulate the existence of a new particle, the anti electron, And just a few years later a guy Caltech found it and then actually at direct won the Nobel Prize, and at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he predicted the anti proton, which was then later found. So he like doubled down at his Nobel Prize speech and went for a second one.
Wow, Well, so what do you think is the larger lesson here antimatter?
I think that the larger lesson is that there are patterns in what's going on in the universe, and those patterns are clues. They are clues that are going to tell us how things work. You know, we don't know what the whole clue though, Like we've discovered that particles have this weird mirror twin. Are there other ways that particles are mirrored? Are there other kinds of matter? Like maybe there's a particle and an anti particle and a third kind. We haven't even imagined a secret triplet, yeah, or like a neutral version of every particle or something.
Man and you would hear the soap opera music. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
That's right. I think the lesson is that we need to look for these patterns, and these patterns tell us something about the organization of the universe. I mean, my personal scientific fantasy is to figure out, like, what is the deepest layer of matter? How is everything put together? Because I feel like if we found out that the universe was made out of strings, or little beach balls or tiny hamsters or something. It would tell us something deep about the universe itself, right, So accumulating these patterns and noticing the symmetries, these things are clues that are going to help us figure out what things are, how things are arranged. Like maybe electrons and positrons are made out of the same little sub pieces, just arranged differently, right, and so then it makes perfect sense for you to have two kinds.
Maybe they're not mirror images of each other. There are just like different ways that the lego pieces inside are put together.
Yeah, they're inside out or some other analogy. We don't know. And the fact that every particle seems to have an anti particle, as far as we can tell, seems like a big clue that it's something basic about matter itself.
Well, in the meantime, the lesson seems to be if you see an antimatter version of yourself, run not. They can't.
That's right. Also, most of the stuff you read about antimatter in science fiction is real, So antimatter universes could exist out there. There could be anti people and anti podcasts and anti jokes and all that stuff. It could be out there. And maybe one day we'll meet aliens, but we won't be able to touch them because they'll be antimatter.
Oh man, that would be very anti climatic. No, I totally walked into that and with that, Thank you so much, you guys for listening.
So antimatter is a deep mystery. We don't know why it's there. We don't know what it means. We don't know does it feel gravity the same way do does it feel anti gravity? We know that there are some clues about the way the universe works and the reason it prefers matter. They're hidden in these mysteries of antimatter, and we have to just keep making it and studying it before we can figure this stuff out.
Cool. Thank you for listening. We hope you guys enjoyed that.
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