Everyone wants to break the first law of thermodynamics, but guess what? No one's pulled it off so far, and the interaction between matter and antimatter doesn't change things. According to Einstein, energy and matter are different forms of the same thing, so when matter and antimatter annihilate each other, they actually create energy. Electrons and positrons (antielectrons) produce gamma rays when they collide, and heavier particles such as protons and antiprotons also produce secondary particles that decay into neutrinos. So antimatter and matter don't really destroy each other, but merely transition into another form: energy.

One of the questions physicists have tried to answer about the complex relationship between matter and antimatter has to do with the beginning of the universe. If the incredible energy that was the Big Bang created equal parts of matter and antimatter, what happened to the antimatter? And do all particles have mirror antimatter counterparts?

Researchers at the world's largest atom smasher -- the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland -- might have found an answer in possible evidence of supersymmetric particles. These particles could be created in an instant and disappear during particle decay, which might explain differing decay processes for matter and antimatter [source: Moskowitz]. This also might explain why antimatter already seems to have disappeared from space while matter remains intact.

This finding is an important step in explaining much about matter and antimatter, but is not the first observation of atomic asymmetry. In 2010, physicists from MIT and Los Alamos National Laboratory reported initial findings on differences in "flavor-switching behavior" of neutrinos and antineutrinos. This really means that as neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, traverse the universe and morph between the forms of muons, electrons and taus, many oscillate over short distances. Physicists suspected presence of a fourth type called a sterile neutrino. They confirmed similar behavior in three years of data collection and planned to follow up with 18 months of data collection on antineutrinos in a cyclotron, which allows particles to accelerate in a circle instead of a straight line [source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

So far, the results seem to show that matter and antimatter behave differently -- a premise that goes against conventional theories regarding matter and antimatter. However, the behavior has been seen in quarks before, just not in neutrinos or electrons.