• Question: What is the opposite of matter?

    Asked by anon-187796 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 9 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      The opposite of matter is Anti-matter. An Anti-matter particle is the same mass as its normal matter counterpart but have the opposite electric charge. For example: An electron is a negatively charged particle but the anti-matter version is called a positron and is a positively charged particle. They act exactly the same as regular matter, the only difference is the charge!

      If matter and anti-matter touch they both get destroyed and release loads of energy!

    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      The opposite of matter would probably be antimatter! Every particle in the universe has an “antiparticle”, which has the same mass and other properties, but different “charge” (the thing that makes it feel a force, like positive and negative electric charges). So as well as protons you can get antiprotons, and as well as electrons you can get antielectrons (positrons). Our universe seems to contain almost entirely matter, and not antimatter, and nobody knows why! We’ve managed to create antimatter experiments though, so we know it exists. One really interesting thing is what happens when a particle and an antiparticle meet. It turns out that they “annihilate” — both of the particles disappear and release a massive amount of energy, far more than you’d get from splitting an atom! Maybe one day this could be used as an energy source…although I think we’re a little way off yet.

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 9 Nov 2018:

      Antimatter: exactly the same as matter but with the opposite electric charge. So a positive electron would flow the opposite way down a wire.

      They were first thought of because you need both + and – to balance out in some equations: this was the prediction. Then someone spotted what looked like an electron going the wrong way through a detector.

      We don’t know why, but there’s much more matter than antimatter in the universe. The Large Hadron Collider smashes matter into antimatter all the time (tiny amounts) and we might be able to use it to find out if there’s something about antimatter that explains where it’s all gone.

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