Antimatter: The explosive mirror of reality

Imagine you have an identical twin. Exactly like you: same face, same eyes, same voice. But there's a small detail: it's made of something completely opposite. And when you shake hands... both of you disappear in an explosion that makes a nuclear bomb look like a firecracker.

That's not science fiction. That's exactly what happens with antimatter.

In 1932, American physicist Carl Anderson was looking at cosmic ray images in a bubble chamber (a kind of camera that freezes particles so they can be photographed). And he saw something strange: a particle curving in the wrong direction. As if it came from the other side of a mirror. "That's impossible," he must have thought. But it wasn't.

He had found it: antimatter. The mirror twin of every particle that exists.

Every particle of matter has its antimatter twin: the electron has its positron, the proton has its antiproton, the neutron has its antineutron. They're exactly alike in everything, except for one thing: their electric charge is inverted.

• Electron = negative charge
• Positron = positive charge

Now, here's the mind-blowing part: when matter and antimatter meet... they annihilate. Completely. All their mass turns into pure energy. Einstein's famous formula E=mc² goes crazy and converts one gram of antimatter into the energy equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT.

What would happen if one gram of antimatter touched your hand?

The answer will blow your mind. Or won't it?