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Lex Fridman Podcast · 3 min instead of 2 h 54 m · May 29, 2026

Making one gram of antimatter would take a billion years

DL

Don Lincoln

Particle Physicist, Fermilab

  • Lex FridmanHost · Host, Lex Fridman Podcast

    Robotics and AI researcher at MIT; started the show in 2018.

About this segment

Lincoln walks through Fermilab's antiproton production numbers: 100,000 protons smashed per antiproton, about a nanogram per year. He then converts that to bomb-scale yields.

From “Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE - Don Lincoln | Lex Fridman Podcast #497”, May 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

“So that means at that rate, with that facility, it would take a billion years running with very little downtime to make a single gram of antimatter.”
DLDon Lincolnat 1:57:14 · Lex Fridman Podcast1:57:14

Takeaways

  1. Fermilab needed 100,000 protons to make one antiproton
  2. Output was roughly one nanogram of antimatter per year
  3. A megaton's worth would take about 25 billion years at that rate
Watch 2:30 from 1:55:44

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:21:37Why a theory of everything is probably far off and string theory likely wrong6:20

  2. 1:55:44Making one gram of antimatter would take a billion years2:30

  3. 1:04:14Why Fermilab narrowly missed the Higgs discovery to CERN3:11Up next

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:55:52

    At the time, until 2011, Fermilab was the most powerful antiproton production facility on the planet. Every 2.3 seconds, we would smash 10 to the 13 protons into a target, and we would get out 10 to the 8th antiproton. So basically, in order to get a single antiproton, we needed to smash 100,000 protons into material. So, every 2.3 seconds, we would get, of order, 10 to the 8th antiprotons. And what we would do is we would collect them over the course of 12 hours or so, and we would get, in the end, we would have to collect them and cool them down and so forth, of order 10 to the 12th antiprotons every 12 to 24 hours. So, 10 to the 12th sounds like a lot.

  2. 1:56:47

    It really does. That is a trillion. But you need to remember that a gram of antimatter is 10 to the 23 antiprotons. So that means over the course of a day, we were able to create something like 100 billionth of a gram. And so if we did that for a year, then that would be about a nanogram. So about a nanogram a year, give or take. That's a reasonable estimate. So a nanogram, one billionth of a gram. So that means at that rate, with that facility, it would take a billion years running with very little downtime to make a single gram of antimatter. If you combine one gram of antimatter and one gram of matter together, the energy release is equivalent to the combined Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. So that tells you if you wanted a megaton, you need about 25 times more. So you would have to run for 25 billion years to get a megaton of explosive power.

  3. 1:57:56

    Let me lay it all out because I think it's pretty interesting actually. This is a NASA estimate of how much it costs to produce antimatter. So looking at all the costs of the accelerator,