Antimatter Theory Offers Incredible Probabilities
By James Donahue
Ever
since Paul Dirac theorized the existence of anti-matter in 1928, there has been a sense among world physicists that all things
in the universe must have an opposing counterpart to preserve a necessary symmetry.
The discovery of positrons, the anti-matter equivalent of electrons, and the subsequent discoveries
of anti-protons and other anti-particles since Dirac have not only proven the existence of opposite forces, but opened the
door to quantum physics.
Since Dirac, scientists have dared to consider the possibility
of parallel universes, time travel, teleportation and many of the other things that once fell into the realm of science fiction.
This way of thinking may have been stimulated by science fiction writers, who were quick
to exploit the discovery of antimatter as a story plot. Writers, by-and-large, are creative right-brain users who have a way
of tapping into the human collective for information that may still be a future event waiting to happen. Thus, we should not
be surprised when science fiction plots created by Jules Verne and the many writers who followed start becoming reality.
Remember it was Verne who envisioned submarines, men traveling by rocket to the moon, and time travel. Two out of three of
his predictions, while total fiction in their day, have since come true.
After
Dirac, the sci-fi writers had a field day with visions of anti-worlds, anti-stars and anti-universes, all made of antimatter.
Some envisioned the explosive power of joining antimatter with positive matter as energy to propel starships that could travel
faster than the speed of light.
When Robert Foot, a physics professor at the University of
Melbourne, recently suggested that an anti-matter, or "mirror matter" meteorite caused the 1908 mystery explosion that toppled
trees for miles in Tunguska, Siberia, he opened a new wave of thinking among scientists concerning the probability of parallel
worlds.
Foot claims that mirror matter arises naturally as opposite
symmetries of nature. Thus all matter has its invisible mirror image moving in an opposite direction. There seem to be two
thoughts concerning anti-matter. One is that matter remains unchanged whether it moves forward or backward in time. The second
thought is that nature doesn't distinguish between right and left-handed orientations.
In a UPI story, science writer Mike Martin quoted Foot as saying that he believes space and time are
reversed for mirror matter. "Time moves backward and right-handed spatial coordinates have been interchanged with their left-handed
counterparts."
Thus we have a contemporary scientist not only suggesting
that a parallel universe exists, but saying it is one that is such an extreme opposite of the universe we live in, that even
time is moving in the other direction.
This, of course, leads us into a strange hodge-podge of questions
that, at least for now, have no answer.
For example, if the mirror universe is moving backward in
time, what is happening to the mirror people there? Are they growing from old to young? Is that universe rushing toward a
collapse which would be the opposite of a Big Bang? And if and when this happens, does the mirror universe explode outward
and a forward creation begin again, but on the posi-side? And if we are a mirror of that universe, does our universe then
turn into the negative image, with time running backwards? In that case, what is now seen by us as anti-matter, would suddenly
become positive matter.
If there must be a mirror consisting of anti-matter for all
matter in this universe, then we all should have our exact mirror double on the other side of the mirror.
Lewis Carroll may have been on to something when he created the story of Alice In Wonderland,
and subtitled: Through The Looking Glass.
