Physics is not only in laboratories

Some weeks ago, I was thinking about my life and, in particular, my work.

Being a physicists seems to be one of the most interesting job in the world, apparently. We're studying the world and all the little and hidden laws that allow us to breathe and live in this world. We're the wise and the holders of absolute knowledge. This is what non-physicists think, mostly.

Moreover, some non-physicists (fortunately not so many) think we're working to create some unlikely weapon that will destroy everything is alive and, of course, the whole world. They imagine us recluse in dark offices and suspicious laboratories, intent to manipulate the nature in order to create something strange and apocalyptic. A physicists, indeed, is a very normal person who loves the knowledge, committed to increase the amount of it and to improve how human being could "see" the world all around.

When I began to study physics I didn't even imagine to work, some ages after, in one of the most important and challenging research centre of the world (CERN). I was just a little girl, fascinating by science, knowledge and things I didn't understand. I saw physics like a challenge: I didn't know concepts that did seem very important, I couldn't figure out how this world (and human kind) could work, I didn't understand loads of apparently trivial phenomena happening in my daily life.

So, here my decision: if I had to study, I studied how things work.

Meanwhile, I happened to be in love with photography too. Until now, I have never thought the two things to be bound. What a stupid! They can definitely be bound!

Since my greatest aim is the knowledge and my best way to express is the photography, here I am. I've just decided to express some brilliant, famous, misunderstood, unknown, curious and sometimes frightful concepts of Physics through pictures. I chose some concepts everyone knows (just hearsay, at least), that are extremely important for Physics, both because some of them are the basis of it and others are not yet understood deeply.

At the very start, I chose the concept of the Anti Matter.

Anti matter is a concept very exploited in science fiction. In the book (and film) Angels and Demons, the hero tries to save Vatican City from an anti matter bomb. Star Trek’s starship Enterprise uses matter-anti matter annihilation propulsion for faster-than-light travel. But anti matter is also something really existing. Its existence was postulated by Paul Dirac in 1928, when he studied the behaviour of an electron moving at a relativistic speed. The equation he reached during his studies has two possible solutions, in such a way it needed two particles: an electron with positive energy and another one with negative energy. Since classical physics (and common sense) always said that the energy of a particle must always be a positive number, the idea of an "anti-elecrton" seemed dangerously outsider. But when, in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the positron (actually the anti-electron postulated by Dirac), phycisists started to follow that way of research and discovered that for each particle exists a corresponding anti-particle exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge.

One of the most fightful (see Angel and Demons and the recent discussion on the CERN activity apparently oriented to create a black hole that will destroy the world, that's obviously not true) and interesting feature is that when matter and anti matter come into contact, they annihilate, disappearing in a flash of energy. So in principle, none of us should exist. The reason why we're all here, alive, reading my words, is because during the Big Bang there should be an asymmetry in the matter and anti matter production, so the matter amount was bigger than the anti matter one. We really have not understood this asymmetry yet, but we are happy it happened. Definitely :)