Why make antimatter?
The tiny amount of antihydrogen this experiment produced might give you a clue as to why antimatter power is likely to remain science fiction. Antimatter can’t be an energy source because it is not found naturally in the universe: it has to be made, and it is impossible to get more energy out of something than it took to make it. To use it to store energy – as spaceship fuel, for example – we would need to make it a lot more efficiently: all the antimatter CERN has ever produced could only produce enough energy to power an electric light bulb for a few minutes. What the scientists are really interested in is getting a closer look at the antimatter itself. This could help to answer some of the great unanswered questions of physics, such as “why are we made from matter and not antimatter?” It is believed that at the beginning of the universe equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created – yet the universe around us contains only matter. Getting a detailed look at antimatter atoms c
