What does Harry Cliff say antimatter is, and why didn't it wipe out matter after the Big Bang?

Harry Cliff describes antimatter as a mirror image of ordinary matter with opposite charge. Paul Dirac predicted a positively charged electron in 1928 by combining quantum mechanics with special relativity, and Carl Anderson found the positron in a cloud chamber in 1932. The Standard Model says the Big Bang should have made equal amounts of matter and antimatter that annihilated each other, and nobody knows why it did not. Cliff's LHCb experiment studies particles and antiparticles to find out.

• Dirac spent years trying to eliminate the positive electron from his equation because he thought it must be wrong.
• At CERN, experiments trap thousands of antihydrogen atoms in electromagnetic bottles, since antimatter would annihilate with the walls of any ordinary container.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-22). Read the whole episode summary →

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