Science Fiction

"[W]e should expect an ordinary electron, with positive energy, to be able to drop into... and fill up this hole, the energy being liberated in the form of . This would mean... an electron and a positron annihilate one another. The converse... creation of an electron and a positron from electromagnetic radiation, should also be able to take place. Such... appear to have been found experimentally, and are... being more closely investigated..."

"[I]t is probable that negative protons can exist, since as far as the theory is yet definite, there is a complete and perfect symmetry between positive and negative electric charge, and if this symmetry is really fundamental in nature, it must be possible to reverse the charge on any kind of particle. ...[N]egative protons would... be much harder to produce... since a much larger energy would be required, corresponding to... larger mass."

"We must regard it rather as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive positrons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about... built up mainly of s and negative protons. ...[T]here may be half the stars of each kind. The two... would both show exactly the same spectra... there would be no way of distinguishing them..."

"It seems probable that the interactions between elementary particles can be completely described by symmetry properties and s and by dimensionless numbers representing interaction strengths. Similarly, we might expect that the elementary particles, as quanta of these interactions, may be described in the same in terms... At the present... however, our description... must also include the , and in some cases, the magnetic moment, although in principle these are probably derivable from interaction strengths and symmetries. ...Symmetries usually result in conservation laws. ...Invariance under space inversion results in ...the conservation of parity. Let us also consider invariance under time reversal, and invariance under charge conjugation, the change of particles to antiparticles."

"Invariance of interactions with respect to space inversion restricts observables to those which do not differentiate between a left-handed and a right-handed coordinate system. Time reversal invariance allows only observables which do not depend on the direction of time, and invariance under charge conjugation restricts observables to those which remain unchanged when all particles are changed to antiparticles."

"Consider a motion picture of a fundamental process, perhaps an elementary particle interaction in the presence of electric and s... If the interactions are invariant under space inversion, it will not be possible... to determine if the film has been reversed in the projector or [equivalently] projected by reflection in a mirror. If... invariant under time reversal, and if entropy is not changed in the process, it will not be possible to tell if the film is run backwards, while if... invariant under charge conjugation, it will not be possible to state whether the picture is that of our universe, or an anti-universe where every particle is replaced by its antiparticle."

"These three invariances are not independent. In the framework of local field theory, invariance under proper leads to the invariance of all interactions under combined operations CPT, where C is the charge conjugation operator, changing particles to antiparticles, P, the parity space inversion operator, changing \overline{r} to -\overline{r}, and T is the time reversal operator, changing t to -t. The equality of the masses and lifetimes of the particles and their antiparticles follows from this theorem."

"It appears that the strong interactions and electromagnetic interactions are invariant with respect to C, P, and T separately, while the weak interactions do not conserve P or C. All experimental results are consistent with the assumption the T invariance holds true for all interactions; consequently, from the CPT theorem, weak interactions must be invariant under CP. One could not, then, determine if the photographed scene were a scene of particles viewed normally, or a scene of antiparticles projected in a mirror."

"The theory of the expanding universe, which presupposes a superdense initial state of matter, apparently excludes the possibility of macroscopic separation of matter from antimatter; it must therefore be assumed that there are no antimatter bodies in nature, i.e., the universe is asymmetrical with respect to the number of particles and antiparticles (С asymmetry). In particular, the absence of antibaryons and the proposed absence of baryonic neutrinos implies a nonzero baryon charge (baryonic asymmetry)."

"We wish to point out a possible explanation of С asymmetry in the hot model of the expanding universe... by making use of effects of CP invariance violation... To explain , we propose in addition an approximate character for the baryon conservation law."

"We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at t < 0 from contracting matter having an excess of antiquarks, that they pass "one through the other" at the instant t = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when t > 0, realizing total of the universe. All the phenomena at t < 0 are assumed in this hypothesis to be CPT reflections of the phenomena at t > 0."

"The strong violation of the baryon charge during the superdense state and the fact that the baryons are stable in practice do not contradict each other. ...The baryon charge is violated if the interaction... is supplemented with a three-boson interaction leading to virtual processes ...we find the decay probability ...The lifetime of the proton turns out to be very large (more than 1050 years), albeit finite."

"After Dirac's publication of the electron wave equation in 1928, many people took up its study."

"I felt that writing this paper on the electron was not so difficult as writing the paper on the physical interpretation."

"It was an imperfection of the theory and I didn't see what could be done about it. It was only later that I got the idea of filling up all the states."

"I felt right at the start that the negative energy electrons would have the same rest mass as the ordinary electrons ...I hoped that there was some lack of symmetry somewhere which would bring in the extra mass for the positively charged ones. I was hoping that in some way the Coulomb interaction might lead to such an extra mass, but I couldn't see how it could be brought about."

"It thus appears that we must abandon the identification of the holes with protons and must find some other interpretation for them. A hole, if there were one [in the world], would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron. We should not expect to find any of them in Nature, on account of the rapid rate of recombination with electrons, but if they could be produced experimentally in high vacuum they would be quite stable and amenable to observation. An encounter between two hard γ-rays (of energy of at least half a million volts) could lead to the creation simultaneously of an electron and anti-electron. This probability [of the creation of a pair] is negligible, however, with the intensities of γ-rays at present available."

"Then on 2 August 1932 there came along the discovery of the by C. Anderson. ...For Dirac it meant the satisfaction that his equation predicted the situation correctly as he had hoped. His work had also provided the first example in the history of physics where the existence of a new particle was predicted on a purely theoretical basis."

"[C]reation and annihilation concepts antedate quantum mechanics. The concept of annihilation of pairs of oppositely charged, elementary particles... dates from the turn of the twentieth century. It became important in astrophysics about 1924... The annihilating pairs were first positive and negative electrons, later protons and electrons, and finally, starting in 1931, electrons and anti-electrons. ...In Dirac's "hole" theory of 1930... pair annihilation was neither novel nor central. Dirac's object was to deal with a difficulty... that the theory allowed electrons to make transitions to . ...interpreting electrons in states of negative energy as unobservable, and empty negative-energy states, or "holes" as protons. As a by-product, when an electron jumped into a vacant negative-energy state, an electron and a proton disappeared together into radiation. Since pair annihilation was already an accepted concept, this... was admissible."

"Dirac's... paper, "A Theory of Electrons and Protons," makes it clear that his primary purpose was to deal with the negative energy difficulty, and his secondary purpose... was to present a theory of protons. ...[T]he chief novelty ...was the identification of the proton with the absence of the electron, whereas the concept of pair annihilation was not a novelty ...He began by stating the difficulty: relativistic theories of the electron all yield solutions in which the electron has a negative total energy, and quantum mechanical relativistic theories... permit the electron to make transitions from states of positive energy to these states of negative energy. He then argued... that these states, and the transistions to them, cannot be disregarded as nonphysical..."

"Since every particle needed to make up atoms has its antiparticle, it is conceivable... to combine s and s to make ... Then one could use s to make heavier forms of antihydrogen such as antideuterium (an antinucleus containing one antiproton and one antineutron, with a positron in orbit) and anti (one antiproton and two antineutrons)."

"A few hundred heavy nuclei of antideuterium, antitritium, and antihelium-3 have been observed... Sadly, they have been unable to keep these antimatter fragments under control long enough to add positrons and make neutral antiatoms..."

"When a matter particle and its mirror antimatter twin are brought into contact, the two annihilate each other. The mass of both is totally converted into energy. The amount of energy... Einstein's E=mc^2... The annihilation of a gram of matter and antimatter would produce the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb, the size... dropped on Japan."

"The word "antimatter"... Strictly speaking, it's not... accurate... Antimatter is not "negative matter." It does not have negative mass, or negative spin, or negative (anti-) gravity (...scientists are... running experiments to see if antiprotons have the same kind of gravity as protons). ...One researcher has suggested replacing the... "anti-" with "co-,"... co-matter, co-protons,... Another... suggested... "exo-"... "Exo" in Greek means "outside." Other suggestions... "ob-" (obmatter, obproton) and "contra-" (contramatter and contraproton). None... ever caught on... Hannes Alfven in... Worlds-Antiworlds... said... let's coin a new word for "ordinary" matter... the word koinomatter... after the Greek word koinos, meaning common or well-known. ..."Matter will remain "matter" and "antimatter"... "antimatter"... However... "mirror matter" is the most accurate and unbiased term."

"Mirror matter is, first and foremost, matter. ...[A]ll mirror matter is still matter."

"Schrödinger's theory was not relativistic. It only applied to systems of particles like electrons... moving at low velocities... not close to the speed of light. It... did not take into account the electron's spin. ...Paul Dirac set out to remedy these shortcomings. ...to combine the Schrödinger equations for quantum mechanics, the Einstein equations for special relativity, the Maxwell equations for electromagnetism, and his own non-relativistic equations for the behavior of the electron into a single set of equations. This... described the relativistic quantum behavior of the spinning electron. ...Dirac's solution ...was a startling paper ...In the classical physics of Newton, the energy of a particle always has a positive value. ...Dirac's new equations ...had two possible solutions: an electron with positive energy, or an electron with . ...Dirac discovered that an electron with negative energy passing through a magnetic field would act exactly like an electron with positive energy—if the electron had positive instead of negative charge. To Dirac, this implied that for every particle that existed there was a corresponding mirror-image particle."

"A positron, Feynman has written, can... be thought of as an electron moving backwards in time! An electron doing such... would be indistinguishable from an electron moving with a positive charge. This would also be essentially true for any other mirror matter particle or object."

"An even more bizarre extension of the Feynman model has been suggested by John Wheeler. ...[A]ll the electrons and positrons in the universe are just one single electron seen at different portions of a single long electron path! This... explains why all electrons have exactly the same charge."

"In 1932 Millikan and Anderson were investigating cosmic rays, and they had built a large '... When subatomic particles passed through... they left ghostly vapor trails in the supersaturated air... They placed powerful magnets around it to blanket the interior... with a magnetic field. ...[[Cosmic ray|[C]osmic rays]] ...were bent by the field ...[T]he direction and thickness of the paths... revealed the mass of the particles—and their charge. Anderson... noticed that some of the trails were... like... electrons, but were curved by the magnetic field in the opposite direction. At this point Anderson was not aware of Dirac's prediction ...After nearly a year of effort ...he ...identified ...pair production of electrons and antielectrons from the impact of cosmic rays."

"The first results from the magnet in 1931 and 1932 were dramatic and completely unexpected. An approximately equal number of particles of positive and negative charge were observed, whereas, according to the theories known at the time, one would expect to see only ordinary electrons (all of negative charge). The presence of such an abundance of particles of positive charge was perplexing—something new and mysterious must be ocurring."

"joined me... and I assigned him to the task of continuing the curvature measurements... As more data accumulated... practically all of the low-velocity cases of positive charge were particles... whose mass seemed to be too small to permit their interpretation as s. The alternative explanations... were that these particles were either ordinary electrons (of negative charge) moving upward, or some unknown lightweight particles of positive charge moving downward. In the spirit of scentific conservatism I tended... toward the former... [[Robert Andrews Millikan|[T]he chief]]... repeatedly pointed out that cosmic ray particles travel downward, and not upward, except in extremely rare circumstances, and that these... must be downward-moving protons. This point of view was difficult for me to accept... since in nearly all cases the density of the... tracks... was too low for particles of proton mass. To resolve this apparent paradox, a plate was inserted across the center of the ... [A] fine example was obtained in which a low-energy lightweight particle of positive charge was observed to traverse the plate... This particle came in from the bottom of the chamber, passed through the lead plate and went out near the top of the chamber. ...[I]ts track... was more curved above the plate... this meant it was going slower... therefore, it must have passed through the plate traveling upward."

"I knew it could not have been a proton. Since a proton is 1800 times as heavy as an electron it would have produced a much thicker line [trail]... [I]t could not have been a neutron since neutrons have no electric charge and, therefore, are incapable of producing any kind of line... [T]he line was exactly what would have been produced by an ordinary electron except that electrons had always been found to have a negative electric charge and, therefore, should have turned to the right. This one turned to the left... an electron with a positive charge ...a positive electron!"

"Ionization and curvature measurements clearly showed this particle to have a mass much smaller than... a proton... a mass entirely consistent with an electron. ...[D]espite the strong admonitions of the Chief that upward-moving cosmic ray particles were very rare, this... was an example..."

"In the early 1950s... attention was focused on two new unstable, electrically neutral particles... tau and theta. ...[T]he tau and theta were 'strange'—they carried Gell-Mann's additional charge. They decayed in different ways, and had different parities... [T]he tau and theta had the same mass. ...Chen Ning ('Frank') Yang and , thought it was bizarre for two apparently different particles to have the same mass, and suspected... two faces of the same particle, despite... different parities. ...[They] had to throw overboard ...apparently solid ...assumptions about quantum behaviour: ...[1] it would not be basically altered by left-right mirror reflection... [2] behaviour would not be altered by a mirror that reflected particles as antiparticles and vice-versa... [They] re-examined the evidence for both mirror symmetries, which everyone had assumed ...watertight ...showing that for particle decays this had never been proved conclusively."

"Lee and Yang... suggested that the particle-antiparticle mirror could be flawed. ...[T]wo experiments—by , Leon Lederman and Marcel Weinrich... and by Jerome Friedman and Val Telegdi...—looked at multiple particle transformations in which a pion decays into a , which in turn decays into an electron. ...[These] found that ...[f]or a positively charged pion, the muon's spin points backwards, against its direction of motion. [When t]he antiparticle... a negatively charged pion... decays, the muon emerges with its spin pointing in the direction of its motion. Looking in a mirror that changes particles into antiparticles, the antismoke comes down the chimney."

"For the subnuclear world, the ordinary mirror has to be replaced by an extended mirror that carries out three reflections simultaneously—switching particle to antiparticle and vice-versa, changing left to right and vice-versa, and reversing the . ...[R]espectively C (for charge), P (for parity) and T (for time). The CPT mirror changes Alice into a mirror-image Anti-Alice going backward in time."

"Sakharov looked wryly at the composition of an average cubic metre of Universe. ...a billion quanta of radiation, one proton and no antiprotons. Tracking... to just after the Big Bang... [we] should have had... a billion antiprotons, and a billion and one protons. ...Why the odd proton? ...[A]ntimatter had slipped off the map of the Universe ...Sakharov put forward a three-point explanation."

"[1] Big Bang... particle-antiparticle creation briefly got out of hand, more pairs being created than were reabsorbed back into radiation. ...[T]he present Universe is much larger than a sphere of light rays which started out from the Big Bang... Sometime in the past, the Universe... expanded faster than light... Most of the Universe we have not yet seen, despite traveling at [c]... not yet having had time to reach us. ...In the first fraction of a second... the Universe must have 'inflated' faster than the speed of light and particle-antiparticle pairs were produced faster than they could be reabsorbed."

"[2] ...some mechanism had to tilt the balance in favor of matter. With Cronin and Fitch's... implications for the , Sakharov thought he had... the answer. But was the tiny subnuclear effect... enough..? Probably not... But... [h]eavier quarks, more exotic than strangeness, could show larger effects. Making B particles containing the 'beauty' (...'bottom') quark and manufacturing enough of them to probe the has become a major focus of... research."

"[3] The proton... has to be slightly unstable... Sitting still, the -filled proton would have to disintegrate into electrons and other light particles. ...But ...the level of ...instability needed was so small as to be almost undetectable. ...[E]xperiments are trying to capture this effect..."

"The Big Bang should have been matter-antimatter symmetric. But the visible Universe... shows little sign of this primordial antimatter."

"Paul Dirac, the spiritual father of antimatter, probably did not yet know very much about the Big Bang picture when he gave his Nobel lecture... and suggested that the Universe could contain both matter and antimatter without us knowing... If Dirac were right, the whole Universe should be a uniform mix... overall the two halves of the Universe should balance. Where is this antimatter?"

"Light antiparticles... as s, are common in cosmic rays. However, such... are usually from particle-antiparticle pairs produced... as primary cosmic ray particles collide with atmospheric gas or interstellar dust. ...'Fountains' of positrons... seen... peering into the center of our Galaxy... can be explained by violent cosmic processes spitting out... radiation..."

"Any antimatter stars... [w]hen such... died in explosions, their... antinuclei would have been flung out... But the cosmic rays arriving... have revealed no signs of antimatter heavier than s."

"[P]erhaps matter and antimatter are separated into distinct domains. Maybe... there is... an antidomain. ...Wherever and whenever the boundaries... briefly touched, pieces... would have mutually annihilated to give powerful bursts of... s. As the Universe... cooled these... would have... produced a dim but uniform... signal all over the sky."

"If the initial Universe had contained widely space clusters of matter and antimatter, these would have left their... imprint on the Cosmic Background Radiation. The tiny ripples seen by COBE and other detectors are not compatible with separate domains of matter and antimatter... The Universe we can see looks to have been eternally free of nuclear antimatter."

"It became apparent that in a hot early epoch of the big bang there would exist a fully mixed dense state of matter and antimatter in the form of ic and ic pairs in thermal equilibrium with radiation. As the universe expanded and cooled this situation would result in an almost complete annihilation of both matter and antimatter."

"Antinucleons "freeze out" of thermal equilibrium when the annihilation rate becomes smaller than the expansion rate of the universe. This would have occurred when the temperature of the universe dropped below ∼20 MeV. The predicted freeze out density of both matter and antimatter is only about 4×10-11 of the closure density of the universe..."

"Sakharov showed that three conditions are necessary in order to create the appropriately significant concentration of s in the early universe. They are: • Violation of Baryon Number, B • Violation of C and CP • Conditions in which Thermodynamic Equilibrium does not Hold"

"If CPV is predetermined, then only matter will remain in the present universe. We can refer to this case as a "global" matter-antimatter asymmetry. If... CPV is the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, domains of positive and negative CPV may result. In the case of spontaneous CPV, the Lagrangian is explicitly CP invariant, but at the symmetry breaking phase transition a CP invariant high temperature vacuum state undergoes a transition to a state where the vacuum solutions break CP either way. This mechanism may be compared to the spontaneous formation of ferromagnetic domains when a piece of unmagnetized iron cools below the critical temperature in the absence of a magnetic field. Although there is no preferred direction of magnetization, individual domains acquire random local directions of magnetization."