The existence of antimatter | Lee Smolin, Sabine Hossenfelder and Tara Shears

Lee Smolin, Sabine Hossenfelder and Tara Shears debate the existence of dark matter.

Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/the-anti-universe?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description

From Star Trek to Dan Brown novels, Doctor Who to Marvel Comics, antimatter has fascinated since it was proposed by Dirac in the 1920s and confirmed with the discovery of the positron a few years later. Heisenberg - the father of modern physics - referred to its discovery as "the biggest jumps of all the big jumps in physics". But there's a fundamental problem. The theory predicts the disappearance of the universe within moments of its inception as matter and antimatter destroy each other in a huge cataclysm. Yet 14 billion years later our universe exists, and scientists still uphold the antimatter theory.

Is it time to give up the idea that for every particle there is an anti-particle or would this be a threat to quantum mechanics itself? Is it right to overlook fundamental flaws in a theory in favour of neatness and buzzwords? Or nearly a century on from its inception, should we stand by the theory confident that a solution will be found?

Founding member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Lee Smolin, professor of Physics at Liverpool University, Tara Shears and leader of the Superfluid Dark Matter group at the Frankfurt Institute, Sabine Hossenfelder battle over the very fabric of the universe. Hosted by Hilary Lawson.

#SabineHossenfelder #LeeSmolin #TaraShears

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Superfluid Dark Matter group.

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a member of the graduate faculty of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto.

Tara Shears is a particle physicist and the first female physics professor at Liverpool. Shears is “rapidly becoming the go-to scientist to explain all things CERN” (WIRED).

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