Angels & Demons: The Science Revealed (pt. 3 of 4)

it also happens in in in radioactive elements they create positrons um certain elements that have so-called beta decay give off positrons anti-electrons and you know an example of something that gives off positrons is potassium like in the banana okay so every banana you have you know i'll put these further away i guess every banana you have has a certain amount of radioactivity to it and so if i if i watch this banana it just it's just streaming out of positrons or streaming out of this banana okay so i i don't put this up there for

you to be afraid of bananas but more to try to and and you also have potassium 40 in your body for most people the most radiation they will they will uh suffer through in their whole life comes from their own body there's absolutely nothing you can do about it okay and as i said it's it's part of evolution and we seem to have survived it uh can we make antimatter as i said we do in accelerators all over the world uh including uh slack the accelerator at stanford uh triumph the accelerator in uh in vancouver

the lhc fermilab et cetera et cetera so in the film this anti-matter is is in this canister which is filmed and you know it's the big you know it's a typical thriller thing where the the clock is ticking down and there's only so many seconds left um so it's suspended in this vacuum and the question is so why why go to all that trouble i mean uh why not just you know carry it on the plane and you know stick it in the vacuum the vatican anywhere well i would i would argue that that we

already know why we just have to go back to that if i looked at that picture i said that i had a i had a photon light coming in from the from the right creating antimatter matter i could equally all the laws of physics are symmetric under time in other words they're the same whether you flip time backwards or forwards i can equally look at that picture and say i have an electron and a positron come together and they annihilate into pure energy again e equals m c squared and so we would think as i

said all of our laws of physics are symmetric in other words they're the same for the antimatter side as the matter side okay so an ante tom hanks would look very actually even this doesn't do it he looks exactly the same actually okay i mean you know here they put different coloring to make them look sort of evil on the ante side but um but if tom and his auntie tom were to meet uh that would not be good uh and again e equals mt squared that's that's that's the key point the point is i've

converted in this case i've converted mass to energy and our world is a constant fluctuation of going back and forth energy to mass mass to energy energy to mass okay um is this annihilation necessarily a bad thing uh it's certainly a bad thing on the subatomic talk show here where uh um the the mu maison show uh where matt and his long-lost brother auntie matt meet and of course you know you don't want to be there the next second when they actually hug because that's the end of the show um but in fact we use

we use matter antimatter annihilation in medical imaging if i take something that has say for example potassium 40 and i put it in the blood and i put it in the brain for example what's going to happen well it's going to emit this positron and the positron is going to very quickly because since we're basically made up of electrons and protons it's going to very quickly find an electron and it's going to annihilate so this is this is the basic process okay it's going to annihilate two gamma rays these two photons these two light rays

we call gamma rays okay so that's e equals mz squared so that's the basic idea of a pet scanner i don't know if anybody's had a pet scan but you know i'm not sure how many people were aware the fact that p in pet stands for positron as an anti-electron okay so we're using antimatter to do medical imaging and here's the idea you you as i said you put some some radioactive source in a person's brain usually you inject it in and so they have it in the blood and then it annihilates giving off these

photons and we have these these these gamma-ray detectors that we just detect all these photons and we image that part of the brain where this is happening okay so the idea being that you know antimatter is not necessarily uh you know a bad thing we and even more important it's from the the years of study of it to understand it that allows for something like a pet scan okay um to go back to angels and demons the in in the movie they had a quarter gram of antimatter now that doesn't sound like a whole lot

a quarter gram is the equivalent of 11 grains of rice and i got i got this 11 grains of rice from my colleague from berkeley and i just i just actually today counted them there's actually 10 there um so okay 11 or 10 grains of rice um is about a quarter gram of matter okay so if you had 11 anti-grains um when you when you do the calculation of what e that is it is equivalent of something on the order of 5 to 10 kilotons so it is it is equivalent to a nuclear explosion okay

so i mean that science is actually correct in the movie in the sense of that amount of antimatter really is a problem um and again i got this from my colleague from i just thought it was kind of a neat movie this is this is saint peter's square in the vatican and we're resuming out and then kaboom the explosion happens and that's how much the area of rome and the vatican city would be destroyed by that okay so it no it's it's a if it was possible it'd be a serious thing and and luckily for

us it's not possible um we although we even at framilab which is a proton antiproton collider the amount of antiprotons we make is two nanograms two billionths of a gram a year and that's using a lot of energy to make those two billionths of a gram okay so to make my quarter gram bomb which the equivalent of a nuclear bomb would take 100 million years okay so it's it's really something you know if you're gonna take away message is don't be afraid of an antimatter bomb okay um unfortunately it's also really probably not useful for

an energy source it's a it's a beautifully clean energy source if you could have it but unfortunately it's just it's just not in the in the books to use it and the reason being is it takes far more energy to make the sample of antimatter that you'll ever get out of it okay okay fine also in angel and demons they they have they have it suspended in this in this in this what did she say she goes in an electromagnetic trap or whatever she says um it's in a bottle and and of course the main

thing is we have to make sure that it doesn't hit the walls of the bottle because as we've just discussed it'll annihilate okay so we that is what we are doing uh myself and um as i said a bunch of collaborators from from across canada and and across the us and brazil and the united states and and the uk are trying to make anti-hydrogen an anti-proton and an anti-electron and make the equivalent of hydrogen but the antiversion and but we can't just make it and say oh you know hallelujah we have to make sure that

we trap it in a bottle because otherwise if it hits the walls it'll just annihilate and of course we can't do much with it