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Ah, antimatter, that strange and wonderful force in the universe that hasn’t yet managed to rip us apart.

What’s not to fascinate?

Find out more about the substance sci-fi loves to exploit while we fumble around with it in the here and now thanks to this list from Symmetry Magazine.

1. Antimatter should have annihilated all of the matter in the universe after the big bang.

According to theory, the big bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, leaving nothing but energy behind. So in principle, none of us should exist.

But we do. And as far as physicists can tell, it’s only because, in the end, there was one extra matter particle for every billion matter-antimatter pairs. Physicists are hard at work trying to explain this asymmetry.

2. Antimatter is closer to you than you think.

Small amounts of antimatter constantly rain down on the Earth in the form of cosmic rays, energetic particles from space. These antimatter particles reach our atmosphere at a rate ranging from less than one per square meter to more than 100 per square meter. Scientists have alsoseen evidence of antimatter production above thunderstorms.

But other antimatter sources are even closer to home. For example,bananas produce antimatter, releasing one positron—the antimatter equivalent of an electron—about every 75 minutes. This occurs because bananas contain a small amount of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. As potassium-40 decays, it occasionally spits out a positron in the process…

Full story at Symmetry Magazine via Presurfer.

Weird science.

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