An antimatter road trip

一个反物质之旅

Babbage from The Economist

2026-04-15

39 分钟
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The universe—and everything inside it—shouldn’t exist. The big bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and their mutual annihilation should have resulted in nothing more than a sprawling ball of energy. But, in fact, the universe is dominated by matter, while antimatter is vanishingly rare. To try to understand why, physicists have taken antimatter on a road trip—for the first time in history. Guests and hosts: - Sam Wikeley, The Economist’s science correspondent - April Cridland of CERN’s antimatter factory - Stefan Ulmer of HHU Düsseldorf and CERN’s BASE experiment - Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor Topics covered: - Antimatter - The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) - Particle physics Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts. Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.
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  • The Economist.

  • We started at six o'clock in the morning to do all the preparations.

  • Stefan Olmer is an experimental physicist at CERN,

  • the enormous particle physics laboratory on the border between France and Switzerland.

  • We prepared on our side, you know, like disconnecting the device from its infrastructure, recooling the particles.

  • Took about three hours, then the transport service arrived and put it onto a crane.

  • And craning the thing out of the facility took about 20 minutes.

  • Then we were putting it onto a truck.

  • That truck, which looks like the kind of small lorry you might expect to be carrying parcels down your street,

  • went on to trundle around the laboratory's campus.

  • I was actually driving behind the transport truck in my car,

  • measuring the velocity explicitly, and I have seen 43 kilometres per hour as maximum speed.

  • But what was particularly intriguing about that vehicle was what was written on the side.

  • Antimatter in motion.

  • That's right, antimatter.

  • The exceedingly rare, volatile and poorly understood particles

  • that have caused a century of head scratching for physicists.

  • CERN has been routinely creating antimatter for decades.

  • In recent years, they've figured out how to capture and store antiparticles for long enough to run experiments on them.

  • But this is the first time that trapped antimatter has ever been taken on the road.