Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror

By Gordon Fraser

Book Overview

In 1928 the physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter in a mirror world, where the electrical charges on particles would be opposite to those of ordinary matter. This mirror world is found, fleetingly, at the quantum level, with positrons the counterpart of electrons, and antiprotons the opposite of protons. This book introduces the world of antimatter without using technical language or equations. The author shows how the quest for symmetry in physics slowly revealed the properties of antimatter. When large particle accelerators came on line, the antimatter debris of collisions provided new clues on its properties. This is a fast-paced and lucid account of how science fiction became fact.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521893097
• ISBN13: 9780521893091
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Science Is Approaching Science Fictions

Antimatter often appears in science fictions. In Gregory Benford's "Eater," for example, a robot made by magnetic copying of the heroine flies to the black hole Eater on a spaceship, carrying an antimatter bomb to change the course of Eater and to prevent its collision with the Earth. In reality, antimatter does not exist naturally on the Earth. Nor has it ever been made in a large quantity in the laboratory.In 1996 Walter...

Interesting and informative

I picked up this book at Tokyo University, and read it on the flight home to Portland, Oregon. It's the sort of book you can read on the airplane - not too mentally exhausting, but not the sort of reading that leaves you feeling guilty about wasting your time, like you might after watching the movie.Fraser's book is primarily a history of the science of antimatter, from its prediction by Dirac to the discovery of the positron...

A pleasant breeze into the concept and history of antimatter

I was embarrassed to find out what "bretk" has written about this book, and the author's rebuttal is just a too decent one! It seems to me that "bretk" has never had any direct relation or connection with theoretical physics. The book is indeed an excellent one, on the subject, and it must be said that, in fundamental physics, how someone found something, including biographical details, is as important as what he found! There...