We may have recently managed to trap anti-atoms, anti-hydrogen to be specific, for the first time. Scientists are excited but what, if anything, would it mean for us?

The arguments of leading scientists Dr Fay Dowker, Professor Graham Thompson, and Sir Martin Rees are summarised below. Do you agree with their views?

Dr Fay Dowker from Queen Mary, University of London :

"As far as my own research area of quantum gravity goes, I hope that this asymmetry between matter and anti-matter that we see, in the fact that we only see matter now, I hope that this will remain a mystery as far as current theories of particle physics and cosmology go. Because I'd like it to be data, that I could use in order to try and explain it using proposals for a theory of quantum gravity."

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Professor Graham Thompson from Queen Mary, University of London:

"I would say that the annihilation processes are perfectly well understood, and, it wasn't that anti-matter disappeared, but it annihilated against the matter to give us the extreme radiation that we see in the universe. We see about a billion times more radiation in the universe, than we see particles, and this could be a signature that an awful lot of the particles of the universe did annihilate very early on in the first second of the universe in fact, thus leaving a very small proportion that we see now."

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Sir Martin Rees from Cambridge University:

"We know that matter and anti-matter were separated very early in the universe, and that the anti-matter had somehow disappeared, and how this happened, is one of the mysteries of the early universe, along with why the universe is expanding the way it is, and why it contains the other ingredients we observe. So, it's a big mystery, why the universe consists of so many atoms but no anti-atoms."

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