They Dropped the Most Expensive Material In The World

I recently got to visit the anti-matter factory at CERN. This is the only place in the world where they've managed to make antihydrogen. This is antihydrogen. It's an atom of antimatter made of an anti electron, also known as a positron and an antiproton in the middle. This is arguably the most expensive material in the world, costing an estimated thousand trillion dollars per gram. They have to be incredibly careful with this antimatter, because it's a kind of opposite matter to what our world's made from. So if the antimatter touches literally anything, it will annihilate, immediately turning all of its mass into pure energy. Fortunately, antihydrogen is slightly magnetic, so the scientists at CERN can stop it from touching anything by hovering it in a magnetic field called a penning trap. After the Big Bang, half of the universe was made of anti-matter and the other half normal matter. According to many of our best theories of cosmology. But today we don't see any antimatter in the universe and is a mystery where it went. So making anti-matter in the lab means we can study its properties, which might give us some clues about what happened to half a universe’s worth of anti-matter. This experiment I visited tested which direction antihydrogen would fall in gravity. Would it fall down like matter? Or because it's anti-matter? Would it fall up? Turns out it did fall down slightly. Disappointing, because now I can't invent hoverboards. But it's really cool for me to actually see the actual experiment from when all of that news came out. So it's pretty cool to be in an anti-matter factory. For a great overview of all of particle physics, check out this YouTube video The Map of Particle Physics, and you can grab the poster at dosmaps dot com


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