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Antimatter. It's a thing that exists and it's something that I wanna learn more about. Just gonna jump straight into the questions this time around instead of drawing things out with a long-winded introduction.

Question 1: Why is there more matter in the universe than antimatter? Like, you can't make matter without also making an equal amount of antimatter, right? Where did it all go during the period of time right after the big bang (this is the most unreasonable question of the bunch, so if all we have at the moment are theories/guesses as to what the actual answer may be, I'll still accept them)?

Question 2: So matter and antimatter both annihilate each other upon coming into contact with each other, that's something almost everyone who knows antimatter is aware of, but like, how does this work exactly? Antimatter is LITERALLY the same as regular matter in every way, with the only difference being its opposite electric charge. How does this one little thing cause both of them to destroy each other upon contact?

Question 3: In the early stages of the universe right after the big bang, the energy density of space was high enough to support energy's spontaneous transformation into matter, and a watered-down version of this process has been replicated in particle colliders where scientists were able to create matter and antimatter particles. Despite originating from the same place however, matter and antimatter have different properties from each other (the main one of course, being the aforenamed difference in electric charge). How can antimatter have different properties from regular matter if they were both made from the same stuff as each other?

Question 4: Is antimatter a necessity for our universe to exist and be the way it is? Like, what does antimatter do for us that regular matter (or even dark matter) can't? How different would life be if antimatter straight up never existed and the entire universe was made up of only regular matter?

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  • $\begingroup$ Hello! Please only ask one question per post – otherwise it might get closed due to lack of focus. You can always edit your question or ask a new one. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – jng224
    Oct 7, 2021 at 18:58
  • $\begingroup$ But, like, I wanna know more about Antimatter in general and asking four separate questions seems a bit redundant? You're right in saying that this question lacks a clear focus. It doesn't have one. It's literally a list of questions in relation to one primary subject. Is that not allowed on here? $\endgroup$
    – Crystal King
    Oct 7, 2021 at 19:05
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    $\begingroup$ I think you want a book (possibly more than one book). A useful search term for the history of understanding antimatter is the “Dirac electron sea”; beware that the differences between the Dirac sea and our modern understanding of the vacuum are sneaky. $\endgroup$
    – rob ♦
    Oct 7, 2021 at 19:07
  • $\begingroup$ See also (relates to your Q1): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry $\endgroup$
    – Filip Milovanović
    Oct 7, 2021 at 21:12
  • $\begingroup$ "with the only difference being its opposite electric charge. " + all the quantum numbers should be opposite, so they add up to zero. $\endgroup$
    – anna v
    Oct 9, 2021 at 4:11

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1)We don't know.

2)They don't just have opposite electric charge this is a simplified version without taking into consideration quantum properties

3)You can imagine it like the 2 sides of the coin. If we get a coin there are always 2 sides heads and tales. When energy is transformed and particles are created both matter and antimatter particles must be created.

4)We don't know. It is the same as asking how magnetic monopolies if they existed could change the universe and physics doesn't seem to care what if. We perform experiments we get results and we try to fit a theory into the data. Why a particular observant happened is not within the scope of physics, it is more of a subject of philosophy.

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