The Man Who Accidentally Discovered Antimatter

In 1928, a young man shuffled onto a stage in Germany to present a lecture [music] on his recent work. He had a slightly unusual presentation style. Physicist Eugene Vner described the lecture as detached, almost like a recitation of a technical text. He said the man spoke without giving any sign [music] of enjoying his own lecture.

But the work this strange, unassuming man presented was about to send some of the most famous quantum physicists of the 20th century spiraling. After the lecture, Verer Heisenberg described the man's theory as the saddest chapter in modern physics. Heisenberg also wrote to Neils Bore and said, "I find the present situation quite absurd." And on that account, almost out of despair, I have taken up another field. Legend has it that Wolf Gang Pie even announced that he was abandoning quantum physics and then he started writing a utopian novel.

What had the young man said to disrupt the world of quantum mechanics so profoundly? Well, he had been working on a problem that physicists are still tackling today. The unification of Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics. And his work had revealed something troubling.

A particle unlike any seen in the world. A particle with negative energy. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. It was based on the simple idea that for anyone moving with constant speed, the laws of physics should be the same.

And this includes any measurement of the speed of light. So it doesn't matter how you're moving relative to a beam of light, you should measure its speed [music] to be 300 million meters/s. This means that things that we ordinarily think of as fixed like time and space [music] have to transform so that the speed of light is always measured to have the same value. In making this discovery, Einstein realized that space and time are not really separate dimensions at all.

They're linked in a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime. When Einstein applied this idea to an object emitting light, he found something peculiar. When an object loses energy by emitting photons, its mass must also decrease. And the change in the object's mass is equal to the energy of the photons emitted divided by the speed of light squared.

In other words, he found that energy must be equal to MC^². [music] E= MC². Mass and energy are ...