Antimatter is matter made the other way round: it is made of antiparticles, the opposite twins of the tiny pieces ordinary things are made of. Each ordinary piece has a matching piece with the opposite electric charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they destroy each other and turn into energy. Scientists can make a little of it in labs, but almost none of it sits around in daily life — if it did, it would vanish the moment it touched ordinary air. In science-fiction stories, people use it as a super fuel or a bomb. That is a stretch of the real thing: the word is serious physics, but films borrow it because anti- sounds powerful. Though actually, the word is older than that film meaning. A British scientist first coined it as a kind of joke; the modern sense — this opposite kind of matter — settled in much later.