Physicists Turned Pure Light Into Matter... How Is That Even Possible?

Physicists Turned Pure Light Into Matter... How Is That Even Possible? Light has no mass. And yet in 2021, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory smashed light into light and watched it turn into real particles of matter. How can something with no mass become something that has it? The answer runs from Einstein's E = mc² (read backwards), through antimatter, cancer treatment machines and thunderstorms that fire antimatter into space, all the way back to the first seconds after the Big Bang, when light and matter were constantly turning into each other. In this video you'll learn: - Why E = mc² works in both directions - Why light has no mass but can still push (solar sails!) - The three rules for turning light into matter: energy, charge and momentum - Antimatter: Dirac's prediction and Anderson's discovery - Pair production in hospitals, PET scans, and even bananas - The Breit–Wheeler process: light hitting light (1934 → 2021) - How gold nuclei at 99.995% of light speed became light colliders - Pulsars, thunderstorm antimatter and the "fog" of gamma rays across the universe - Why there's matter at all: the 1-in-a-billion leftover - Ripping matter from empty space with lasers (the Schwinger limit) Before you watch: do YOU think light and matter are really different things? Tell us in the comments! If this blew your mind, hit LIKE and SUBSCRIBE for more everyday mysteries explained with real science. 0:00 Light into matter 0:59 The equation works both ways 2:37 Massless, but not nothing 3:27 The rules of the trade 4:55 The first light turned into matter 7:01 Light hitting light 8:37 The 2021 experiment 10:23 It's happening above you 11:47 Where all matter came from 13:39 Ripping matter from empty space 14:39 So what is matter? 15:31 Light becomes stuff