Matter and antimatter

While a well-honed scientific theory can cut through to reveal clarity, dig deeper and the facade slips leaving us holding an empty cup...

Never is this starker than at the cutting edge of physics. This page, for example – and indeed the computer upon which it was typed – shouldn’t exist. Nor, as it happens, should you be here to read it. You are very much testing the known laws of physics simply by having the audacity to exist.

According to current physics, matter and antimatter created at the Big Bang should have long since obliterated each other in a fit of energetic pique. If there were equal amounts of both, as the theories suggest, then everything should be in a perfect state of non-existence. Yet, quite plainly, it is not. Safe to say then there is an asymmetry in the universe – an imbalance between matter and antimatter.

It is odd isn’t it? That the maths used to describe the interactions of, well, everything we have yet described should add up at all.

Why this should be no one quite knows. There are theories of course but they need to be tested – tricky to do when there is so little antimatter on which to do the testing. Yet, those ever-so ingenious particle-pushers at CERN are making inroads. The ALPHA collaboration reports that it has observed something called the Lyman-alpha electronic transition in the antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen, for the first time.

Basically this means that for those studying antimatter, it could enable precision measurements of how antihydrogen responds to light and gravity. And it is this which may allow them to pick apart any slight difference between the behaviour of antimatter and matter which would, in turn, do nothing less than rock the foundations of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Developing even a rudimentary handle on the nuances of matter and antimatter means, in all likelihood, we’ll have to abandon – or at least rethink – the central pillars of current physical law. Once again, a deeper dig will leave us holding an empty cup. This is, of course, incredibly exciting – empty cups can be filled by the brilliant physics minds of CERN and beyond with something new.

Yet, if and when this can be achieved, one can always go deeper and burrow into the mathematical bedrock of the understanding. In the 60’s, physicist Eugene Wigner wrote an essay called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. In it he essentially worries out loud as to why nature is so accurately described by mathematics. It is odd isn’t it? That the maths used to describe the interactions of, well, everything we have yet described should add up at all.

Cosmologist Max Tegmark says he might know why. He thinks that external physical reality is not only described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics. It’s a mind warping idea, and one that I feel woefully inadequate to fully comprehend. This is why I adopt  humility  when I suggest that it seems to me this is particularly relevant to antimatter. Perhaps matter and antimatter are simply signs of the underlying maths. The difference between the two is simply the charge – one positive and one negative. What is that if not the physical embodiment of abstraction? Maths as a physical entity – could that be the ultimate simplicity underlying it all?

Phil Prime, Editor Laboratory News