A Cup of Coffee That Shouldn’t Have Existed

Here I am, sipping my morning coffee while watching the new Veritasium video about antimatter. At school I always loved physics. I wasn’t a physicist or a mathematician, but something about it pulled me in. I even sat the physics exam for fun and got admitted to university for applied physics, although I never pulled it off and changed direction later.

I remember having a tie covered with Einstein and various formulas. I even had to get approval to wear it at the exam so it wouldn’t be treated as a cheat sheet. And of course, E = mc² was there in big font, right on the front. It was fun, no doubt.

But today, while watching this video, something clicked. That simple formula carries a profound meaning. Since $c$ is so huge, even a tiny bit of mass corresponds to a ridiculous amount of energy. One gram of matter contains:

$$E = mc^2 = 0.001\ \text{kg} \times (3 \times 10^8\ \text{m/s})^2$$

$$E = 9 \times 10^{13}\ \text{joules}$$

Convert that into electricity:

$$\text{kWh} = \frac{E}{3.6 \times 10^6} \approx 2.5 \times 10^7\ \text{kWh}$$

And if an electric car uses about $0.2\ \text{kWh/mile}$, then:

$$\frac{25{,}000{,}000}{0.2} \approx 125{,}000{,}000\ \text{miles}$$

Driving non-stop at 60 mph:

$$\frac{125{,}000{,}000}{60} \div 8760 \approx 238\ \text{years}$$

So yes — even one gram of anything holds enough mass-energy to drive a Tesla for almost 240 years without stopping. Every object around us has that kind of energy quietly locked inside it.

But where is this energy? It stays locked, safely and forever, unless matter meets the equal amount of antimatter. That’s when the full $mc^2$ energy comes out. So if my 300 g of coffee ever met 300 g of antimatter, the total mass that disappears is:

$$\Delta m = m_{\text{matter}} + m_{\text{antimatter}} = 0.3 + 0.3 = 0.6\ \text{kg}$$

And the released energy would be:

$$E = \Delta m c^2 = 0.6 \times 9 \times 10^{16} = 5.4 \times 10^{16}\ \text{J}$$

That’s equivalent to roughly 13 megatons of TNT – about a quarter of the Tsar Bomba and nearly a thousand times Hiroshima. It won’t destroy Earth, but it would absolutely ruin your day.

And this pushed me further: did it actually take that much energy to create these 300 g of coffee in the first place? Not during farming, roasting, or brewing — but at the very beginning of everything? The surprising answer is yes. During the first microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was so energetic that matter literally condensed out of pure energy. That initial mass-energy investment was paid once. Everything since then has been simple recycling.

Then came the bigger question. The Big Bang produced both matter and antimatter. In theory, they should have annihilated perfectly, cancelling each other out. Yet clearly we ended up with a universe built almost entirely from matter. Why?

The key point here is that the “equal amounts of matter and antimatter” idea isn’t a guess. It comes from the actual symmetry of the laws of physics. In high-energy conditions, energy always creates pairs — one particle and one antiparticle. This is required by conservation laws and by the symmetry known as C (charge symmetry). If you swap a particle for its antiparticle, the laws behave the same. There’s also CP symmetry, where you swap particle ↔ antiparticle and reflect the system left-to-right. Under these rules, the early universe shouldn’t have favoured matter over antimatter. Both should have been created in matched pairs.

Because of that, almost everything should have annihilated back into pure radiation. But something in the early universe broke that symmetry — very slightly. Experiments today show that CP symmetry isn’t perfect; some particles and their antiparticles behave just a tiny bit differently. In the early universe, this tiny imperfection was enough to produce an imbalance of about one extra matter particle for every billion matter–antimatter pairs.

And after the great annihilation, that leftover one-in-a-billion became every atom in every star, planet, and living thing. That fraction of a fraction is literally the material world.

So the entire physical universe — everything we see — comes from a microscopic asymmetry in the laws of physics. A tiny “error” in perfect symmetry that allowed matter to survive at all.

From now on I’ll look at this formula very differently. The enormous value of $c$ on the right side turns even the tiniest bit of mass into a staggering amount of energy on the left. We may never be able to reverse that process and unlock the full mass-energy inside matter, but it definitely took that exact kind of energy to create the world we know in the first place.

And the wider question still lingers. If all the matter around us — every star, planet, atom, and living thing — is just the one-in-a-billion remainder of the early universe, then what became of everything else? The vast majority of the Big Bang’s energy didn’t disappear; it simply exists today in other forms: the radiation still echoing across the cosmos, the invisible sea of neutrinos, the mysterious dark matter, and the dark energy driving space apart. Matter is the tiny leftover — a thin residue shaped by a small imperfection in perfect symmetry.

It’s hard not to wonder whether that imbalance, that microscopic exception in the universe’s early bookkeeping, carries some deeper significance — a physical clue, a philosophical hint, or something quietly, subtly divine.