Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror

Antimatter is the fuel of science fiction, propelling, for example, Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise, but its study is also a burgeoning branch of modern science. Fraser, a physicist at the CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, here offers a thoughtful, no-nonsense account of the strange world of antimatter. Scenarios of an as-yet-undiscovered antimatter universe that mirrors ours don't hold up to current scientific scrutiny, he reports, but he speculates that huge amounts of antimatter might be locked away in black holes. ""One of the most intellectually challenging theories"" of physics, he notes, is Russian scientist Andrey Sakharov's hypothesis that the universe was initially composed of equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that various forces and asymmetries tilted the balance in favor of matter, making antimatter virtually extinct in the visible universe. Written for the serious layperson, Fraser's absorbing narrative retraces the effort to unravel the structure of subatomic matter--and antimatter--from Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac to Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann; he imparts a keen sense of the colorful personalities involved, and of their thought processes and discoveries, without ever introducing math or burdensome technical detail. In 1996, scientists at CERN made headlines by synthesizing the first atoms of antihydrogen. Antiparticles, once a laboratory curiosity, have become a frontline research tool used in the discovery of new particles, in particle-antiparticle collision experiments that generate temperatures almost as hot as the Big Bang, and in PET (positron emission tomography) scans in medicine, brain research and materials science. And the quest for elusive antimatter out there, explains Fraser in this lucid book, will get a boost when the International Space Station deploys an alpha magnetic spectrometer to search for nuclear cosmic antimatter. Illus. (July)