In the lab, creating matter entails a reaction called pair production, so called because it converts a photon into a pair of particles: one matter, one antimatter (the reverse of the matter-antimatter annihilation we just mentioned). Matter only came into being as rapid cooling occurred. The big bang consisted entirely of energy. This conversion occurred on a cosmic scale about 13 billion years ago. To manufacture matter in a way that adheres to the first law of thermodynamics, you have to convert energy into matter. Instead, you'd be taking one food product and building a more complicated food out of it. It's like if you took flour and used it to make a cake. An atom is matter as well - and so are the subatomic particles within it. If you were to build a molecule out of atoms, you wouldn't be creating matter. Even when matter and antimatter annihilate each other, they produce energy, in the form of photons, which are quantum units of light. When two protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, they may break apart into subatomic particles called quarks and a mitigating particle force called a gluon.
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