Friday is here, and the "A Taste of Science for the Weekend" corner is back — number 93.
This time: the most expensive substance in the universe, and the physical challenges involved in creating and transporting it.
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The cheerful band of nerds in the video achieved a historic first — successfully transporting a uniquely special cargo: antimatter.
The custom container that holds it was meticulously designed over many years, and the theoretical price of the antimatter it carries works out to more than $62 trillion per single gram!
The most astonishing thing is that antimatter looks completely unremarkable from the outside. A car made of antimatter would appear absolutely identical to a car made of ordinary matter.
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Matter is made of atoms. Every atom consists of a nucleus composed of protons — which carry a positive electric charge — and neutrons, which carry no electric charge. The nucleus is surrounded by electrons, which carry a negative electric charge.
Although the magnitude of their charge is identical, protons are far heavier than electrons.
In antimatter, the electric charges are reversed. Positrons are electrons that carry a positive electric charge, and antiprotons are protons with a negative electric charge. Together they can form anti-atoms: a negatively charged nucleus surrounded by positively charged electrons.
When ordinary matter and antimatter meet, a very interesting process takes place.
According to Einstein's famous equation E=MC², energy and matter are different expressions of the same thing. When matter and antimatter collide, their mirror-image properties cancel each other out. As a result, they shed their material properties and convert into an enormous burst of energy.
Such a reaction is capable of producing energy with an efficiency 10 billion times greater than that of conventional fuel.
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Because antimatter annihilates instantly upon contact with ordinary matter, it can only be produced on Earth through the reverse process — generating enormous energy and converting it into particles created from nothing.
This process is currently carried out exclusively at CERN's laboratories in Switzerland. It involves accelerating particle beams to tremendous speeds through magnetic tubes until they violently collide with a heavy metal target, and capturing individual antimatter particles within a fraction of a second.
The antimatter must be stored at temperatures close to absolute zero, in a vacuum, and within strong magnetic fields that prevent it from coming into contact with ordinary matter particles. The container shown in the video was built precisely for this purpose, and it is capable of storing several dozen antiprotons for a period of several hours.
Transporting these particles is significant because it will allow them to be studied at advanced laboratories in Germany that are free from the magnetic interference present at CERN.
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Mastering antimatter is an exciting dream that has captivated humanity for decades, as it promises unlimited energy and a path to the most distant stars.
In practice, it remains a very distant dream — and the most compelling near-term application is cancer treatment using antimatter beams, which have been shown to destroy cancer cells with high efficiency while causing almost no damage to the surrounding healthy tissue.
Shabbat Shalom 😊
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Video credit: CERN
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