In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”

How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it.

Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered – and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years.

The first concerns the fundamentals of our existence. Physics predicts that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of the matter you are made of and something called antimatter. Most particles of matter have an antimatter twin, identical but with the opposite electric charge. When the two meet, they annihilate each other, with all their energy converted into light.

Read more: The Conversation