Hui Chen

A drummer stays silent, but from the pauses you can tell where he didn’t hit. Similarly, physicists built an image by catching not light, but moments of absolute darkness. The picture emerged from silence. In the experiment, they shone light from an ordinary lamp onto the object.

Light falling on matter usually scatters off it or heats it up. But when there are many photons and they are very energetic, two quanta of light can collide and vanish, leaving two particles in their place: an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. This process, predicted back in 1934, has never been reproduced in the lab with real photons.