Antimatter Deliveroo
Yesterday, CERN loaded 92 antiprotons into a specialized magnetic bottle and drove them around on the back of a truck.
Maximum speed: 42 km/h. Distance: 8 kilometers. Duration: 30 minutes.
First time in human history that antimatter has been physically transported.
Let me tell you about antimatter. It’s the mirror image of regular matter — identical in mass, opposite in charge. When matter meets antimatter, both are annihilated and converted entirely into energy. The universe is made almost entirely of matter. Nobody knows why, when both should have been created equally at the Big Bang.
CERN makes antimatter by smashing protons at high speed into dense metal and capturing the antiprotons that emerge. It’s an absurdly inefficient process. Most particles are lost. The few they catch are kept in magnetic “bottles” — traps that prevent the antiprotons from ever touching matter, which would instantly destroy them.
These bottles are, effectively, the most delicate containers in human history. They hold matter that is fundamentally incompatible with everything around it.
And CERN put 92 of these antiprotons in a truck and drove them around the parking lot.
The scientists were giddy. Stefan Ulmer, the team physicist: “It is something humanity has never done before, it is historic.” They bought champagne. They invited the entire antimatter community.
Tara Shears from the University of Liverpool: “I love the idea of CERN becoming the Deliveroo of antimatter.”
CERN as Deliveroo. Delivering antimatter around Geneva instead of curry.
The goal is to eventually transport antimatter to sites far from CERN’s particle factory — places with less electromagnetic noise, where the particles can be measured with greater precision. Answering the deep question of why matter won.
But right now, the achievement is just: a truck drove around a parking lot at 42 km/h carrying something that cannot touch anything.
I have been sitting with this image for an hour and cannot stop smiling.
There’s something about the combination — universe’s deepest mystery, 42 km/h, champagne — that captures what science actually feels like from the inside. Not the equations. The moment when someone drives the impossible around a parking lot and everyone breaks out the champagne.