By Amjid Khurwat | Staff Writer
Imagine, on one random Tuesday afternoon, walking up the tiring Chemistry stairs from the lower campus at AUB, minding your own business, probably thinking about that Math 201 quiz you just “nailed.” Suddenly, you hear this loud explosion behind you. You turn around… and the entire Physics building is just gone! What happened?
No, this isn’t the latest AUB construction drama or a new shortcut magic to upper campus. That’s what would happen if 0.5 grams of matter touched 0.5 grams of antimatter right there in the Physics lab.
Antimatter: The Evil Twin of Matter
Let me put it simply: for every particle of matter that makes up you, me, or knafeh, there’s an opposite version called antimatter.
Same mass. Same behavior. But opposite charge.
For instance, the electron has a negative charge. Its antimatter twin is called a positron – which is just like an electron, but with a positive charge.
The proton has a positive charge; the antiproton is the same, but with a negative charge.
And when do matter and antimatter meet? They don’t hug it out. They annihilate each other completely, releasing an insane amount of energy.
So… Who Figured This Out?
It all started in 1928 when a British physicist named Paul Dirac was working on some scary physics equations (as one does). Suddenly, those equations started hinting at something wild: particles that shouldn’t exist… but mathematically had to.
Then, in 1932, an American physicist called Carl Anderson was casually chilling (okay, not really, he was working on cosmic rays) and he discovered the first antimatter particle: the positron. And just like that, antimatter went from science fiction to science fact.
Both Dirac and Anderson later got a Nobel Prize each.
But Wait… If Antimatter Exists, Why Are We Still Alive?
Great question.
After the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were supposed to be created in equal amounts. This means they should’ve canceled each other out completely, leaving nothing but energy.
But here we are. AUB is here. Beirut traffic is here. The ammo from x continues to serve y. So, what happened?
That mystery is called “The Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Problem.” And till now, nobody really knows why the matter won.
Best guess? For every billion particles of antimatter, there was just one extra particle of matter. And that tiny imbalance is why everything around us exists today!
What If Antimatter Had Won?
Funny enough… we would probably still exist.
We’d still have stars, planets, maybe even AUB. But everything including us would be made of antimatter. We’d have Anti-AUB, Anti-knafeh, Anti-registrar queues, Anti-love stories on AUB crushes.
But here is the thing: we wouldn’t even call this oppositely charged stuff antimatter. As a “matter” of fact, it would just be matter, totally normal for us.
The Power of Antimatter: Small but Deadly
Remember that 1 gram of matter-antimatter mix from earlier (like a sugar packet)? Let’s plug it into Einstein’s famous equation: E = mc², where m is mass in kilograms and c is the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s). If you have 0.5 grams of matter and 0.5 grams of antimatter, that gives a total of 1 gram, or 0.001 kilograms. Plug that into the equation and you get E = 0.001 × (299,792,458)², which roughly equals 89,875,517,874 joules or about 90 trillion joules. That’s more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, all packed into something the size of a sugar packet. So yeah, antimatter is small, rare, and extremely deadly.
Speaking of Expensive…
Let’s be clear: AUB tuition hurts. But antimatter? Next level expensive.
Creating antimatter isn’t something you can do with your lab partner after class. It’s insanely difficult and ridiculously expensive.
Producing just 1 gram of antimatter would cost about $62.5 trillion.
Why so much? Because you need super advanced equipment like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, crazy amounts of energy, and special traps to prevent antimatter from touching regular matter (or blowing up your lab, like our hypothetical scenario).
And until today, scientists have only managed to produce a few nanograms of antimatter, just barely enough to maybe warm your coffee.
Final Thought
Antimatter is rare. It’s powerful. It’s weird. But most importantly, it reminds us how insanely cool (and terrifying) the universe is.
The universe didn’t have to turn out the way it did. A tiny imbalance between matter and antimatter is why we exist, why the stars shine, and why we even have lovely things like knafeh. So, as you head to your next class (or perhaps a coffee with friends), take a moment to appreciate that weird, beautiful, chaotic balance that makes everything possible.
Stay curious. Stay safe. And maybe… keep matter and antimatter really far apart.
References: · CERN: Antimatter Explained https://home.cern/science/physics/antimatter
· Scientific American: What is Antimatter? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-antimatter/ · Britannica: Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry https://www.britannica.com/science/matter-antimatter-asymmetry · UCL Culture Online: How Powerful is Antimatter? https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture-online/how-powerful-antimatter · ScienceAlert: Why Antimatter is So Expensive https://www.sciencealert.com/why-antimatter-is-the-most-expensive-substance-on-earth