1.2. Spark from the Void

Hack: November 2025, Geneva, CERN Press Centre

The press conference hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is packed to capacity. Journalists from leading global publications, science correspondents, camera operators with lenses aimed at the podium bearing the recognisable logo of the accelerator's stylised rings. The tension that usually accompanies announcements of "new particles" or "discoveries that change physics" is today multiplied by rumours circulating in the corridors over recent weeks.
A group of scientists in blue CERN polo shirts steps up to the podium. At the centre is the leader of the ALPHA experiment, Canadian physicist Jeffrey Hangst. Behind them, a schematic image of the apparatus on the screen: a complex interweaving of magnets, laser systems, and detectors, inside which, in a vacuum at temperatures near absolute zero, something is held that only a few decades ago could not even have been imagined.
Hangst pauses, scans the room, and utters words that will, within minutes, be carried by news agencies around the world:
"For the first time in history, we have held stable antihydrogen for three hours. There is enough of it to study. Enough to say: the anti-world exists not only in formulas but in a test tube. We have moved from detection to production."
The reporters exchange glances. This is not a bomb, not a catastrophe, not a sensation in the usual sense. No one explodes, no one falls, no one shouts. But in this silence, in this ordinariness of the announcement, something more is hidden than the discovery of a new particle.
Three hours of antihydrogen confinement. Three hours during which matter composed of positrons and antiprotons exists in laboratory conditions, governed not by the laws of annihilation but by the will of experimenters who have succeeded in creating a magnetic trap, holding antimatter away from the walls, away from contact with ordinary matter, away from instantaneous conversion into pure energy.
Behind these three hours lie decades of research, billions of dollars of investment, the titanic labour of thousands of scientists and engineers. But for the philosophical gaze, tuned to detect ontological shifts, something else is more important: in this hall, in this announcement, in these three hours of antihydrogen confinement, something was said that resonates far beyond the boundaries of physics.
We did not extract matter from the void.
We created the conditions in which it could be held.
We produced not matter — we produced its mode of existence.
To grasp the depth of the shift, the context must be restored. Antimatter ceased to be a theoretical abstraction in 1932, when Carl Anderson discovered the positron — the electron's antiparticle. Since then, physics has grown accustomed to antiparticles existing — in cosmic rays, in decay reactions, in accelerator collisions. But the existence of antiparticles and the existence of stable antihydrogen held in a trap are different ontological regimes.
In 1995, CERN first synthesised nine atoms of antihydrogen. They lived for 40 nanoseconds and immediately annihilated upon colliding with the apparatus walls. This was a discovery in the sense that physicists confirmed: atoms of antimatter can be created. But it was a discovery indistinguishable from detection: we registered traces of something that arose and vanished instantly.
In 2010, the ALPHA group first held 38 atoms of antihydrogen for 0.172 seconds (Andresen et al., 2010). This was already more than detection — it was temporary confinement, a brief prolongation of life for something that, by its nature, is destined for annihilation.
2025 — three hours. Three hours during which antihydrogen exists in the laboratory, governed not by its "natural" inclination toward self-annihilation but by humanly created conditions. Three hours in which spectroscopy can be performed, absorption lines of antimatter compared with ordinary matter, and tests conducted whether antimatter obeys the same laws of physics as matter or violates CPT symmetry (Ahmadi et al., 2018).
What changed? The regime of existence changed. In 1995, antihydrogen existed as an event, as a flash, as a track on a detector. In 2025, it exists as an object, as a sample, as something that can be studied, measured, worked upon.
The shift registered by philosophical vision lies not in the domain of physics (there, everything remains in force) but in the domain of ontology. We have moved from detection to production. Antimatter is no longer something that "occurs" in nature or "arises" in experiments. It becomes something that is produced — purposefully, controllably, reproducibly.

Discovery vs Production

All of classical ontology, from Aristotle to Heidegger, was built upon the distinction between what "is by itself" and what "is made by man." This distinction grounded the very possibility of science as knowledge of an independent reality.
Aristotle in the Physics draws a fundamental distinction between "things that exist by nature" (ta physei onta) and "things that exist by art" (ta apo technēs) (Aristotle, 1930, 192b 8-15). The former have the source of their movement within themselves; the latter, externally, in the craftsman who imposes form upon material. An animal, a plant, an element — exist "by nature." A house, a bed, a cloak — are produced by man. Nature is what we encounter. Technē is what we create.
Modern science inherited this distinction but transformed it. Experiment is no longer pure contemplation of nature, nor is it pure production of artefacts. It is, as Francis Bacon said, "the questioning of nature under torture" (Bacon, 2000, p. 62). The experimenter creates conditions that may not exist in nature in order to compel nature to reveal its secrets. But what is revealed is nonetheless understood as something that was already in nature, merely hidden from view. The electron existed before it was discovered; the law of universal gravitation operated before Newton.
This epistemology persisted until the end of the twentieth century. Even quantum mechanics, with its uncertainty principle and the role of the observer, did not abolish the basic intuition: we study a reality that exists independently of us. We may disturb it, but we do not create it.
The production of antihydrogen on an industrial scale (and three hours of confinement is already a proto-industrial regime) hacks this intuition.
Antihydrogen does not exist in nature. There are no clouds of antimatter in the universe (at least, in the observable part). Every atom of antihydrogen that has ever existed was created by human beings. If humanity were to vanish tomorrow, not a single atom of antihydrogen would remain in the universe. It exists only in the regime of our presence.
This means that the category of "discovery" is insufficient here. We have made stable something that, without us, would vanish instantly. We have given duration to that which had no time.
The classical opposition between natural and artificial collapses. Antihydrogen is artificial in the sense that it is produced. But it is natural in the sense that it obeys the same laws of physics as ordinary matter. It is not an artefact in the sense of "counterfeit." It is authentic being, produced by man.
Here we enter a domain where physics and philosophy cease to be distinct disciplines and become two languages for describing the same thing.
Classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, thought of the vacuum as emptiness — the absence of matter, pure space, a geometric arena in which events unfold. This emptiness was ontologically neutral. It is neither something nor nothing, merely a background.
Quantum field theory radically revised this picture. The vacuum ceased to be emptiness. It became the ground state of the quantum field — a state of minimal energy, but not zero energy. In this state, fluctuations continuously occur: virtual particles are born and vanish, existing for so short a time that they cannot be directly detected, but can be detected through their effects (the Lamb shift, the Casimir effect).
Rudolf Clausius, introducing the concept of entropy, did not suspect that the emptiness he thought of as a thermodynamic limit would turn out to be structured and active (Clausius, 1865). Contemporary cosmology speaks of "dark energy," constituting about 70% of the energy density of the universe and linked to vacuum fluctuations (Rugh & Zinkernagel, 2002).
This discovery has fundamental philosophical consequences. The vacuum is a field of potentiality. It contains virtually all possible particles and fields. The question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", which tormented philosophers from Leibniz to Heidegger, receives an unexpected physical turn: "nothing" (the vacuum) itself turns out to be structured, active, pregnant with being.
But the production of antihydrogen goes even further. We are not merely detecting virtual fluctuations. What exists in the vacuum as a fleeting, undetectable potentiality becomes, in the laboratory, actual, stable, accessible being for investigation.
At the point of this shift, the classical category of "substance" — that which exists by itself and needs nothing other for its existence — loses its applicability.
All of Western metaphysics, from Parmenides to Husserl, sought something that "is" in an absolute sense. Parmenides spoke of being, which "is, and non-being is not" (Parmenides, 1984, p. 290). Aristotle spoke of primary substance, which lies at the foundation of everything. Descartes spoke of substance, which needs nothing but itself. Spinoza spoke of a single substance, which is simultaneously God and nature.
ven when modern philosophy abandoned substantial metaphysics in favour of epistemology, the question of "what is" persisted. Kant's "thing in itself" is precisely that which exists independently of us, albeit unknowably.
Antihydrogen, produced at CERN, calls this category into question. It exists, but its existence is not independent. It is derivative, conditioned, requiring the entire complex infrastructure of the Large Hadron Collider, magnetic traps, human knowledge and will. Remove the human being — and antihydrogen vanishes. Not because it was an illusion, but because its being is produced being, existing in a mode of constant support.
We cannot say of antihydrogen that it "is by itself." But we cannot say that it "is not" either. It is — tangibly, visibly, measurably. But its being is a function, not a substance.
Here we return to intuitions that philosophy rarely dared to think through to the end. Aristotle distinguished between energeia (actuality) and dynamis (potentiality). But for him, potentiality was subordinated to actuality: an acorn is potentially an oak, but the oak is primary. The production of antihydrogen inverts this hierarchy. Here, actuality (an atom of antimatter) arises from pure potentiality (the vacuum) through a complex chain of human actions. Potentiality turns out to be ontologically primary, and actuality — temporary, local, requiring constant effort of holding.
Karl Marx wrote of "humanised nature" — nature transformed by labour and become an extension of the human being (Marx, 1956, p. 92). But he thought this in terms of form: man imposes a new form upon natural material, but the material itself remains natural. The production of antihydrogen goes further: here, man produces the material itself, the substance itself.
Martin Heidegger, in "The Question Concerning Technology," spoke of Gestell (enframing) — a mode of existence in which all that is becomes "standing-reserve," a resource for manipulation (Heidegger, 1977, p. 234). But even this picture presupposes that there is something that can be placed. The production of antihydrogen shows: technology can produce that "something" itself from what is not technological.
The world in which we exist has ceased to be a world of substances. It is becoming a world of functions, processes, relations. To be means to be produced, to be included in a network of production and maintenance, to be the result of a complex cooperation of people, machines, energies, knowledges.

Nothing as Resource

It is impossible here to pass over in silence the figure who made the question of "nothing" central to twentieth-century philosophy.
Martin Heidegger, in "What Is Metaphysics?", asserted: "Nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings" (Heidegger, 1977, p. 95). Nothing is not a being, not an object, not something. It is the condition of possibility for the experience of beings as such. Anxiety (Angst) reveals nothing, showing that beings as a whole slip away, and we remain alone with that which is not.
For Heidegger, nothing is not something that can be worked upon. It is something before which one can only tremble. It is the fundamental limit beyond which thought cannot step without falling into ontological naivety.
The production of antihydrogen demonstrates something directly opposite. Nothing (the vacuum) turns out to be operationalisable. It can be extracted from, condensed in, used as a resource.
This does not mean that Heidegger was "wrong." It means that the world has changed. We live in an era when what for previous philosophy was a limit becomes a domain of technological manipulation. The vacuum no longer frightens us with its abyss. We are turning it into a factory.
And here a new problem opens. If nothing has become a resource, then where does the boundary lie? What remains non-operationalisable? What resists translation into the status of raw material?
Perhaps Heidegger's question itself was the last echo of an era when nothing still preserved its impenetrability. Today, we must ask differently: not "what is nothing?" but "what happens when nothing ceases to be a limit and becomes raw material?"

Being as an Event of Holding

Three hours of antihydrogen confinement is not merely a technical characteristic. It is an ontological category.
The being of produced antihydrogen is not eternity, not duration, but holding. It exists as long as the lasers operate, as long as the magnetic fields hold, as long as energy is supplied. As soon as the maintenance ceases, antihydrogen annihilates, converting into pure energy, returning to that potentiality from which it was extracted.
This is a radically different temporality from that to which we are accustomed. A stone exists until it disintegrates. A tree grows, lives, dies. A human being is born and dies. In all these cases, there is some "natural" cycle, some "natural" duration.
Antihydrogen has no "natural" duration. Its existence is pure effort, pure maintenance. It is only as long as we hold it.
And in this, it turns out to be strangely close to what we call "life" in its contemporary, technologically mediated dimension. A patient in intensive care exists as long as the machines operate. A social media account exists as long as it is maintained. A virtual world exists as long as the servers burn.
Being has ceased to be self-evident. It has come to require effort, energy, infrastructure. It has become a problem, not a given.
And this shift concerns not only antihydrogen. It concerns everything. We increasingly exist in a mode of holding, maintenance, continuous reproduction of the conditions of our own existence.
Let us now attempt to gather together the changes that this hack exposes.
First, the understanding of matter changes. Matter ceases to be that which "is" independently of us. It becomes that which can be produced from energy, from the vacuum, from nothing. Einstein's formula E=mc² ceases to be an abstract relation and becomes a recipe for the production of being.
Second, the understanding of nature changes. Nature ceases to be "that which has the source of its movement in itself." It becomes that which can be reproduced, simulated, improved. The distinction between natural and artificial is erased not because the artificial "counterfeits" the natural, but because the natural itself begins to be understood as one possible mode of production.
Third, the understanding of nothing changes. Nothing ceases to be the limit of thought and becomes a resource. The vacuum is a factory. Emptiness is raw material. What once evoked terror today evokes the interest of an investor.
Fourth, the understanding of being changes. Being ceases to be a given and becomes an achievement. It requires effort, maintenance, infrastructure. To be means to be in a network, to be connected, to be supplied with energy.
Fifth, the understanding of the human being changes. The human being ceases to be an "observer" or "interpreter" of being. He becomes a co-creator, an agent without whom certain modes of existence are simply impossible. Antihydrogen exists only thanks to the human being. Remove the human being — and an entire stratum of reality vanishes.
This is not a triumph of human power (that would be a naive anthropocentric illusion). It is, rather, an imposition of responsibility, the scale of which we have not yet learned to comprehend.

From Contemplation of Being to Participation in Its Production

Today, after we have learned to produce antihydrogen from the vacuum, after we have understood that matter can be created from energy, after the boundary between "natural" and "artificial" has been erased, the question "what is being?" must be reformulated.
We can no longer ask "what is being?" as if being were an object lying before us. We must ask differently: how do we participate in the production of being? What is our role, our responsibility, our freedom in a world where being is no longer given but produced?
And here we encounter a situation analogous to that which opened in the first chapter. There, the issue was the autonomy of language, the production of fictions that become reality. Here, it is the autonomy of production, the creation of matter that would not exist without us.
In both cases, the old ontology that divided the world into "objective" and "subjective," into "natural" and "artificial," into "true" and "illusory," reveals its inadequacy. We live in a world of hybrids, in a world where the produced and the given are so tightly interwoven that they cannot be untangled.
And we face a question for which there is no ready answer: how to think this world? What language is needed to speak of a reality that is simultaneously created by us and independent of us? The question of being becomes a question of participation. Not about how to reflect reality, but about how to co-participate in its continuous production. How to hold it in existence. How to bear responsibility for the worlds we produce, even when those worlds begin to live their own lives.
At this point, it is necessary to indicate a fundamental divergence from those thinkers who seemed to have foreseen this shift but could not sustain its paradoxicality.
Hegel in the Science of Logic described a process in which being and nothing are sublated (aufgehoben) in becoming. For him, becoming is the truth of being and nothing, their resolution in a higher unity. But the production of antihydrogen demonstrates something else: here, being and nothing are not sublated but coexist in tension. The vacuum remains a vacuum (it is not destroyed by the production of particles), but simultaneously something has been extracted from it that exists in a mode of holding. This is not synthesis but a configuration where potentiality and actuality are held together, without fully passing into each other.
Heidegger, as already noted, thought nothing as a limit. For him, the impossibility of operationalising nothing was a condition of authentic philosophising. But today we see: nothing is being operationalised. And this raises the question of whether Heidegger's position was not the last attempt to preserve the sacredness of the limit in the face of advancing technological rationality.
Derrida, in his works on différance, showed how meaning is constantly deferred, how presence is always already mediated by traces and differences. The production of antihydrogen can be read as a radicalisation of this intuition: here, presence itself (of the atom) turns out to be the result of a highly complex network of deferrals, mediations, technical chains. It does not "exist"; it is deferred into its existence through the entire infrastructure of CERN.
Latour, in actor-network theory, insisted on the symmetrical description of humans and non-humans, nature and society. The production of antihydrogen is an ideal illustration of this symmetry: here, people, accelerators, magnetic fields, laws of physics, budgets, scientific articles — all assemble into a single network that produces a new object. But Latour, for all his genius, remained within the framework of description. He showed how reality is assembled, but did not ask what it means to exist in the mode of such an assembly.
What does the production of antihydrogen expose? It exposes that being is not given but produced — and produced through the complex interaction of heterogeneous forces, institutions, practices, laws.
In this production, there is always tension. Tension between what we want to obtain (stable antihydrogen) and what resists (the laws of annihilation). Tension between our will to know and the opacity of matter. Tension between the resources we are willing to expend and the results we obtain.
This tension is irresolvable. It cannot be "sublated" by a final synthesis. It can only be held — in a mode of constant effort, constant maintenance of conditions, constant renegotiation of boundaries.
And here Tristasis proposes not a method for governing this tension (that would be an illusion) but a language for thinking it.
Taxis — the will to order, to structure, to stable existence. In our case, this is the entire infrastructure of CERN directed toward making antihydrogen be.
Hysis — the force of decay, fluidity, annihilation. This is the very nature of antimatter, its built-in inclination toward self-annihilation upon contact with matter.
Diapheresis — not a synthesis resolving this contradiction, but an event in which this contradiction crystallises into a new configuration. Antihydrogen held for three hours is not a resolution of the conflict between Taxis and Hysis, but its temporary, local, fragile crystallisation.
Conflict is primary and ungovernable. No one can "cancel" annihilation. No one can force antimatter to exist eternally. But one can — for three hours — create conditions in which this existence becomes possible.
And in this lies the entire difference between the old and the new ontology. The old sought that which is always and everywhere. The new learns to live with that which is here and now, as long as we hold it.
The production of antihydrogen is not an exception but a symptom. We are entering an era when more and more fragments of reality will exist precisely in this mode: the mode of holding, the mode of maintenance, the mode of continuous effort.
One thing can already be said: the contemplative position is dead. We can no longer be passive observers of reality. In it, we are participants, co-creators, co-producers. And what the world in which we will live looks like depends on how we learn to exist in this new capacity.