If any of you are familiar with Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, or if you've been around any physics anything in the past few years, then you might know a little bit about something called antimatter. You get one thing, grab its natural opposite, smash them together, and things explode. But really, what is antimatter? How does that even happen? Well, I'm glad you asked.
As common in almost all of the most interesting physics concepts, the science was predicted before it was discovered. It was no different with antimatter. In 1928, Paul Dirac published a paper outlining the connections between Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which worked on a large scale, and Erwin Schrodinger’s equation of quantum physics, which worked on a small scale. Now, understand: Dirac was freakin’ brilliant. His mathematics was spot-on, and his explanation connecting these two branches of physics made perfect sense if one analyzed his equations.
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| Perfect Sense. |
