Antimatter and why we exist with Tara Shears #shorts #antimatter #science #whyweexist #physics

According to Dirac's equation, matter and antimatter should behave exactly identically. But, we've realized that's not the case. And we know that because if you go back to the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, we think that half of it half of the universe at that point was made of antimatter, half of normal matter. And if you can picture it in your mind, this very early universe was a seething mass of matter and antimatter fundamental particles meeting, annihilating, releasing photons of light that then split into new pairs of matter and antimatter particles that met, annihilated, and so forth. And this whole process continued as the universe expanded and cooled until eventually, maybe a few seconds after the Big Bang, the universe had expanded and cooled so much that it was no longer possible for these photons from the annihilations to make new pairs of matter and antimatter particles. And that whole process of annihilation stopped at that point. And what remains in the universe now, anywhere we look out in space, any direction, is a consequence of a very, very tiny difference that existed between the amount of matter and antimatter that we had at that time. I mean, very, very tiny. Something like one part in a billion. But that tiny difference is the reason why we're here. We are the leftovers from those collisions. Because if there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter at that time, they would all have annihilated, and the universe now would just be full of light.