Sunday 12 June 2011

Antimatter Anticertainly

So this week, as you may have read in the paper, some rather clever fellows at CERN have managed to create some anti-hydrogen and hang onto it for about fifteen minutes.

Anti-hydrogen is the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen (I think you'd probably already worked that out) and, in this instance, was created by getting some positrons (which are anti-electrons) to orbit some antiprotons, thus creating said anti-hydrogen. This isn't the first time this has been done but what's remarkable about this instance is that they held on to them for so long - fifteen minutes is literally ages in atomic physics terms.

As I understand it, as matter and antimatter are true opposites, if they both exist in the same place they will cancel each other out. Think of it a bit like having +1 and -1 in an equation; if you put them together, you just end up with zero. Therefore, one of the main gists of CERN's experiment will ultimately be to determine why we live in a universe with so much matter in it, when the Big Bang happened and huge equal  amounts of matter and antimatter were created, why was so much matter left over afterwards (when they should have added up to zero and left nothing)?

Anyway, I watched a BBC news article about this, loosely explaining the above, with helpful on-screen magic like turning half of the picture to negative colours when explaining antimatter. Well, I say helpful but I actually mean not really very helpful at all.

Reading back over what I've written above, it just makes me think how virtually impossible this sort of thing is to understand. When the BBC demonstrate antimatter as being a bit like a negative colour screen, or I compare it to plus and minus one, you think "yes, ok, I get it" but in reality it's nothing like either of those things. I can get my head round the facts presented and even understand them in a (moderately) scientific kind of way but what I can't do is relate them in any way to anything I can actually comprehend.

For example, let's take an obvious question: what does antimatter look like? You would imagine the opposite of matter to look like nothing, like a vacuum; something and nothing are opposites, right? Wrong. Antimatter plus matter equals nothing, so what we were saying before is that we know what the +1 and zero parts look like but not the -1 part.

Now, if I say that mathematically I understand the concept of minus one, but I'm fine with the fact you can't have, say, minus one apples in your hand so this is a bit like antimatter I'd be wrong again. Antimatter is a physical thing and given enough of it you could theoretically hold it in your hand, test tube or Large Hadron Collider. If it is a thing, what does it look like?

Now I know I'm jumping the gun here and we can't really be expecting lovely press shots of a substance we created in super-micro amounts for a matter of minutes. My point is that when we get on to topics like this, cutting edge sciences and so on, is that there's no real way to explain them in layman's terms.

The LHC also rustled up something called quark-gluon plasma this week too. This stuff is the densest material we've ever created; denser than a neutron star and a hundred thousand times hotter than the centre of the sun, the only things we think may be more dense are black holes; a cubic centimeter of quark-gluon plasma would weigh around forty billion tons. Great stuff, anyone understand that? Not really.

(Which kind of reminds me of watching The World's Strongest Man and the commentator saying that the giant rock the ridiculously massive bloke has just picked up weighs "as much as two baby rhinos" or "a chest freezer full of food". Do I know how much those things weigh? Of course not. A lot?)

The problem is, I guess, that in science the numbers are getting so big or small, the concepts so esoteric and exotic and the background understanding required becomes more deep or specialised, that it's increasingly difficult trying to make these things into palatable subjects for consumption by normal people.

My concern is that as cutting edge science moves steadily off over the horizon, normal people will lose sight of why it's important. I've said it before about climate science but I think it applies across the board; science and scientists need to think about the way they communicate about what they're doing and why and how it might affect the rest of us.

Perhaps antimatter is a harsh example; it's probably up there with the most complicated things we've ever done. Perhaps science is already doing a remarkable job in even distilling that understanding down to a point where particularly interested people like me can write about it.

I love all this stuff and I find it genuinely engaging, interesting, meaningful and important and I think other people should too. I just don't think you should have to be a particle physicist first.

NB. Just in case you were wondering, I've just written this whole post using my phone. This is a) pretty cool, b) quite difficult and c) has taken absolutely ages. Any nonsensical sections, bad spelling or wild grammar should be forgiven until such time as I've looked at it on a proper screen!

1 comment:

  1. Why two baby rhino's and not one adolescent one? Science indeed is baffling at the deeper levels.

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