Antimatter's Historic Truck Ride

0:00On March 14th, scientists at CERN near Geneva are gearing up for a historic test. Later this month, they'll load a one-tun device filled with antimatter into a truck for a 20-minute drive around the campus. This marks the first time anyone has tried moving antimatter outside its lab, a material that vanishes in a flash of energy when it touches regular. Matter. Antimatter has puzzled researchers since the Big Bang, when equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have formed. Yet our universe is almost all-matter, leaving scientists hunting for tiny differences that explain why antimatter mostly disappeared. Shipping it to other labs will let teams run precise tests to crack that mystery. The idea dates back to 1928, when physicists Paul Dirac predicted antiparticles, earning a Nobel Prize. Four years later, Karl Anderson spotted the first one, an anti-electron, called a positron, and won his own Nobel. Today, full anti-atoms exist, but keeping them stable is tricky, fueling both real science and sci-fi dreams like Starship engines.

1:05At CERN's anti-matter factory, they smash protons into targets to produce anti-protons, then slow and trap them in ultra-cold vacuum chambers using magnetic fields. The transport device chills to nearly absolute zero and holds particles away from any walls, surviving hours without annihilation. If this short run succeeds, it opens the door to longer halls, like a 500 mile trip to labs in Germany, that could speed up discoveries about our matter-dominated cosmos.