From Star Trek to Dan Brown novels, Doctor Who to Marvel Comics, antimatter has fascinated since it was proposed by Dirac in the 1920s and confirmed with the discovery of the positron a few years later. Heisenberg - the father of modern physics - referred to its discovery as "the biggest jumps of all the big jumps in physics".

But there's a fundamental problem. The theory predicts the disappearance of the universe within moments of its inception as matter and antimatter destroy each other in a huge cataclysm. Yet 14 billion years later our universe exists, and scientists still uphold the the antimatter theory.

Is it time to give up the idea that for every particle there is an anti-particle or would this be a threat to quantum mechanics itself? Is it right to overlook fundamental flaws in a theory in favour of neatness and buzzwords? Or nearly a century on from its inception, should we stand by the theory confident that a solution will be found?

Founding member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Lee Smolin, professor of Physics at Liverpool University, Tara Shears and leader of the Superfluid Dark Matter group at the Frankfurt Institute, Sabine Hossenfelder do battle over the very fabric of the universe. Hosted by Hilary Lawson.

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