Science and Society | What's the Matter with Antimatter?

• Tuesday, September 15 @ 5:00 pm
• Lewes Public Library, Lewes, DE

Antimatter is one of the most fascinating discoveries in modern physics. First predicted theoretically by Paul Dirac in 1928 and experimentally discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932, antimatter revealed that every particle of ordinary matter has a mirror-image partner with opposite electric charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate and release enormous amounts of energy according to Einstein’s famous relation E=mc2. Antimatter has become central to modern physics, helping scientists test the foundations of quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology. It also plays an important practical role in medicine through Positron Emission Tomography (PET), one of the most powerful imaging techniques in modern healthcare. This lecture explores the discovery of antimatter, its strange physical properties, how it is produced and studied in laboratories such as CERN in Geneva, and why the mystery of the universe’s missing antimatter remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in science.

During his career Fred Dylla has spent 55 years as an enquiring physicist helping to design and build scientific facilities for fusion energy, nuclear physics, medical and materials research. He spent eight years at MIT earning three degrees in physics followed by research and teaching ventures at Princeton University, the College of William and Mary and two Department of Energy National Laboratories. Fred is currently the Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics, a federation of ten scientific societies representing over 120,000 scientists. 

The library's “Science and Society - Making Sense of the World Around Us” lecture series is co-organized and moderated by Fred Dylla, Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics and author of Scientific Journeys, Linda Dylla, former public information officer at the Jefferson Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy, and Colin Norman, the former News Editor at Science.

NOTE: this meeting is being conducted through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER to receive instructions for joining the meeting.

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