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Einstein's equation and the Dirac process give the recipe for creating particles out of energy. Any particle can be produced....as long as there is sufficient energy to boost it from a negative energy state (which can be an enormous amount of energy), and a particle is always accompanied by its antiparticle. These particle-antiparticle pairs typically do not last long enough to be measured; when they collide, they burst back into energy (when an electron and a positron- its antiparticle- collide, two photons are produced). As every particle has an antiparticle counterpart (though some particles, like photons, are their own antiparticles), it is conceivable that the whole periodic table, and therefore the whole universe, can be reconstructed using antiparticles. In 1996, physicists at CERN ( a particle physics laboratory near Geneva) produced antihydrogen atoms by pairing a positron with an antiproton in one of the first manifestations of antimatter. Lucky for us, the antimatter only lasted for a few nanoseconds: any collision between matter and antimatter would produce a tremendous explosion. In fact, physicists can assert that our universe is composed mainly of matter because our skies are not filled with the many explosions which would result in the presence of antimatter.
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