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What is mass destruction?

The more precise term for mass destruction is "annihilation."


One of our consistent observations of the nature of the universe is that most particles have an antiparticle—something that has the same properties but the opposite electric charge. For electrons, the antiparticle is the positron, which is identical in all respects except that it has a +1 charge instead of a -1. If you combine an electron with a positron, they will annihilate and release (in a basic, simplified version of the possible reactions) two photons that conserve both the energy and momentum of the original electrons. 


The same thing can happen for protons as well, except, in their case, they are composite particles, so the possible reactions and vector physics become more complicated because it's possible for two of the six quarks to annihilate and eject the other two, which undergo subsequent transformations that may or may not result in annihilation.


Annihilation is one of the essential tools of particle physics because it's one of the only ways we can reliably create and investigate the properties of exotic forms of matter not normally encountered in the everyday world. For example, one of the persistent questions surrounding particle annihilation is an explanation for why there appears to be so little naturally-occurring antimatter when the two forms hypothetically should have been in roughly equal proportions during the formation of the universe.

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