Does antimatter exist
The antimatter equivalent of an electron (with a negative charge) is the positron (with a positive charge). On a simple level, every particle has a partner that is the same but with opposite charge. Dirac, at first puzzled by this, suggested that a mirror-electron could exist. We now call this anti-matter. Antimatter sounds like science fiction, but it does occur in nature, first predicted by British physicist Paul Dirac in the 1920s and discovered in experiments on cosmic rays soon after.ĭirac used Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to calculate that an electron, a fundamental particle that surrounds the protons and neutrons found in the nucleus of an atom, can have positive and negative solutions.
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There was an early hypothesis that a mirror-universe could exist, just like our own universe but made entirely of something called antimatter. One of the most promising lines of enquiry suggested by String Theory is that the universe, instead of being simple space-time or 4 dimensional as Einstein proposed in Special Relativity, could be 10 or more dimensions.įrom here on in it is difficult to guess what future physicists will be able to tell us about how the Universe works. So far we’ve seen in Part 1 how Quantum Mechanics works on small scales (about the size of an atom), and in Part 2 how Gravity works on larger objects (bigger than atoms) finding out how they both work across all scales is what any theory of Quantum Gravity tries to explain.
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Having glimpsed at Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, what happens if you try to bring them together.