It should have been called the 'negatron'
Thu 02 Mar 2006 09:30 AM
A propos of Owen Chamberlain's death, the New York Times describes his work in the 50s to experimentally demonstrate the existence of the anti-proton. The story contains this somewhat cryptic passage:
But as a sort of mirror-image of the proton... [the anti-proton] captured the imaginations of physicists, who had already begun envisioning antimatter particles as routine counterparts of their more familiar twins. Scientists began asking things like why the universe ended up being made almost entirely of matter rather than antimatter, a question that has not yet been resolved.Scientists from the mirror-universe responded: "Oh, but your universe is made up mostly of anti-matter. That is why we never come to visit."