Let's assume you have a friend called Fineman, one very Sunday you guys went camping in the woods and you both noticed an alien spaceship. Suddenly the door opened and someone came out. The creature looked exactly as same as your friend Fineman. That creature said he was from the planet called Anti-Earth and his name is Anti-Fineman. Your friend went nuts and ran to greet that creature! They shook hands and pooof! You find no trace of your friend nor the creature. You, as a curious Earthling, decided to find the explanation of this unknown event.
1928, a young English physicist named
Paul Dirac, was busy unifying Relativity( which
Einstein invented) with Quantum theory(which
Bohr and others invented). Dirac was a stubborn theoretical physicist. He loved exploring the universe through equations! And his love for mathematics and physics made mankind see and learn about a new world.
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Dirac Equation
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This beautiful equation is known as the
Dirac equation. Well please don't get frightened away if you don't understand all the symbols in this equation(I don't either) because you don't need to unless you have something to do with this field. When Dirac reached the solution to this equation, he noticed there are two solutions. Dirac was familiar with one of them, it was indicating the particle with the
elementary charge of
-1.6 * 10^(-19), an electron. But the other one was telling a whole different story, something no one knew at the time! The 2nd solution indicated towards a particle( I mean party-cal) that had a charge of 1.6 * 10^(-19) C, but this time
positive. You might think, that particle must be a proton, but no, it wasn't! Because though a proton has the same but opposite charge as an electron but it's quite heavier than the electron. So the only option left is this should be a new particle that no one knows about! An anti-particle! In this case, a
positron. It took Dirac around three years to gather all the courage he needed to claim that he just discovered a whole new world through mathematics. And maybe that is the reason why he stated:
"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world"
After Dirac's theoretical prediction of anti-electron, Carl D. Anderson discovered them for the first time in 1932 and named them positrons. Scientists predict, right at the beginning of time, there was not only ordinary matter but also anti-matter. And this brings the big question, that is if there was an equal amount of matter and anti-matter, then how do we exist? Anti-matter is just something that has the same mass as its identical matter pair but the opposite charge and we all know that opposite charges cancel each other when they come in contact, just like +2 and -2 give you zero. For instance, suppose you have an electron and a positron, and you are curious enough and eager to see what happens when you bring them in contact. You did and poof! They annihilate leaving behind pure energy. Now you know the reason why your friend Fineman disappeared, it was because of matter-antimatter annihilation!
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Matter anti-matter annihilation.
(Photo by Fermilab Today)
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Anti-matters aren't that rare. Let me give you an everyday example, every 75 minutes, bananas produce anti-matter, and that is a positron. It happens because bananas contain a small amount of
potassium-40, a natural isotope of
potassium, and when it decays it occasionally spits out anti-matter. Guess what? Our bodies contain
potassium-40 too, which means you emit positrons the way bananas do. As they annihilate in contact with normal matter, so they have a very short lifespan. Scientists have evidence of anti-matter production above thunderstorms.
As we discussed before, according to the theory, the big bang should create an equal amount of matter and anti-matter, so there should be no matter or antimatter left but energy! None of us, the galaxy's, the stars, you, me, no one should exist! But we do! The only way this could happen is if there was an asymmetry, for every billion matter-antimatter pair there should be one extra matter. But we don't know the whole picture yet. Solving this mystery is still one of the greatest challenges in physics. In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and anti-matter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why. Studying this imbalance will help us understand why is our universe matter-filled.
Antimatter in fighting Cancer -
According to Wikipedia, cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. Over time these cancerous cells may grow tumors. Along with
Chemotherapy and other treatments, we have also used heavy charged particles (mainly protons) to destroy cancer cells. But this particle beam therapy inflicts very little damage to the tumor. Only the last millimeter of the journey causes significant damage to the tumor. 'It’s similar to a car gently rolling to a stop, and then suddenly putting on the brakes,' explained
Michael Doser at
CERN, one of ACE (Antiproton Cell Experiment) collaborators.
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Antiproton Cell Experimet
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Antiproton Cell Experiment or ACE is a small experiment with a potential of big impact. This experiment directly compares the cell irradiation using protons and antiprotons. For testing, the impact researchers used hamster cells suspended in
gelatin to simulate a cross-section of the human body. The beam had a range of 2cm in water. The results were promising. "To achieve the same level of damage to cells in the target area, one needs four times fewer antiprotons than protons. This significantly reduces the damage to the cells along the entrance channel of the beam of antiprotons, compared to protons. Due to the antiproton's unsurpassed ability to preserve tissues, this type of beam could be highly valuable in treating cases of recurring cancer, where this property is vital", said
Michael Holzscheiter, spokesperson of the ACE experiment. Which means antiprotons are way more effective than protons in fighting cancer. At first glance, antimatter seems an unlikely candidate for fighting cancer but results indicate that they could lead to more effective cancer radiation therapy.
The applications of antimatter are limitless and there is still a lot to discover. What about a spacecraft fueled with antimatter? Seems like the topic of another new blog!
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