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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (46305)	9/23/2002 12:05:33 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

What I want to know is who decides who is left and who is right. newsflash! we have just gained access to a different mathematical universe, in which positive is negative and left is right. More Sci- Than Fi, Physicists Create Antimatter By DENNIS OVERBYE hysicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature. . . . In science fiction, antimatter, with its perfect convertibility to energy, is the ultimate rocket fuel, but the CERN scientists see their antihydrogen atoms as a ticket not across the galaxy but in effect to a different mathematical universe, in which positive is negative and left is right. According to the standard theories of physics, the antimatter universe should look identical to our own. Antihydrogen and hydrogen atoms should have the same properties, emitting the exact same frequencies of light, for example. But some theorists have speculated that the symmetry between matter and antimatter might be violated in some versions of theories that seek to unite Einstein's theories on gravity with the weird rules of quantum mechanics. The most ambitious such "theory of everything," which portrays particles as strings wriggling in 10-dimensional space-time, seems to preserve the matter-antimatter symmetry, but theorists do not really understand why. nytimes.com