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Briefing room (continued)

Imagine a hot metal sheet in a coin factory ('energy'). When you stamp out a coin from a metal sheet, you are left with a coin and a hole in the sheet.You could call this hole an "anticoin".

This is similar to what happens when energy transforms into matter. Many experiments have shown that you can only produce a pair of particle and its mirror image, called 'antiparticle', at the same time. Nobody has ever observed the production of only particles, or only antiparticles.

That example also shows another feature observed with particles and antiparticles. To create them, it takes energy, and when you bring them back together ('annihilation', because they disappear into a flash of energy), this energy is released. It is like putting the coin back into the hole, leaving the original metal sheet.

(Briefing room - page 4 of 4)
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