I raced Daddy up the slope from the parking lot. I was tired half way up the slope and Daddy ran at top speed taking the lead. But, I finally won the race when Daddy was three quarters up the slope. I ran up the stairs into the Smithwick Theater. The lecture didn't start yet.
Dr. Andrew Fraknoi was giving his formal introduction and finally Dr. Helen Quinn, the lecturer came up to the stage and started talking. Her slides were plain white and she said that chemistry doesn't produce nearly as good slides as astronomy does.
She talked about the three mysteries of anti matter and one of them was the mystery of the missing antimatter.
In the beginning of the universe, the amount of matter and anti-matter were equal. But now, there is much more matter than antimatter. How this happened is a mystery that physicists are trying to solve.
Dr. Quinn is working at SLAC so she told us how they make antimatter there. They shoot an electron beam at a block of tungsten (atomic number 74) and the beam gets separated into matter and antimatter. After her talk, I also asked her a question about how they can make antihydrogen.
Antimatter is made out of antiparticles. An example is antihydrogen. Hydrogen is made out of one proton and one electron and antihydrogen is made out of one antiproton and one antielectron.
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