8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and informative, July 19, 2001
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 by Carl Anderson and the fabrication of the first atoms of chemical antimatter by Walter Oelert's team at CERN. The book is also useful for understanding some essential and basic notions about antimatter - especially in the context in which these notions led to important experiments and theories regarding the stuff.
Fraser describes Dirac's development of four-by-four matrices to represent the electron, and the implication of particles with negative energy, from symmetry in these equations. This led to Dirac's view of the vacuum, which "could no longer be thought of as a void where nothing happened. In the new Dirac picture, the vacuum was in fact a bottomless pit of negative energy particles, each carrying negative charge." [page 61]. Initially resistant to the idea of a new particle, Dirac finally accepted the implications of his equations and wrote: "A hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron." [page 62].
One of the nice things about this book is the way it shows how science works - often in fits and starts, with plenty of blind alleys. Fraser also leaves the reader with a better appreciation for the difficulty of certain experimental observations. He gives, for example, a good description of what the tracks of elementary particles look like in a cloud chamber, and the difficulty of unambiguously identifying particles that streak through them. For example, a positron traveling upward through the cloud chamber can look just like an electron traveling downward through the chamber. How do you tell which is which? This was just one of the issues that Carl Anderson had to sort out before confirming the first identified observation of the positron.
Throughout the book Fraser reflects back on a principal theme - one of symmetry. A deep belief in symmetry has played an important role in the development of many theories in physics, and is deeply involved in our understanding of anti-matter. Richard Feynman brought a deeper understanding of antimatter through the realization that particles of anti-matter can be thought of as their normal-matter counter parts traveling backward in time (this is a key element of many "Feynman" diagrams).
I have noticed a trend among popular science authors to use poetic language, sometimes to the point of obstructing the meaning of the science. Fraser uses his share of such language, with subatomic particles in "electrical wedlock," "kissing," "dancing," etc. Sometimes it's just a little too much. My only other complaint is that the index is too brief. It has, for example, entries in the index for the Dirac equation and Dirac matrices, but nothing for the man, Dirac, for whom there is far more text than for either of the other two. Other than that, this is a pretty good book, overall. I'd wanted something that dealt more with the actual physics of antimatter, rather than a book that deals mostly with the scientific history of the stuff, but that's my personal preference. The history is interesting, too. If you have even a passing interest in antimatter, I think this book belongs on your shelf.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Science Is Approaching Science Fictions, April 30, 2003
This review is from: Antimatter: The Ultimate Mirror (Paperback)
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 Oelert and coworkers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva produced antihydrogen atoms, the first-step thing towards antimatter. Gordon Fraser's "Antimatter" describes the history of physics about the mirror world, in which antimatter has one of the deepest mysteries. First the success of Oelert's team is shortly described. Then the story starts from Galileo Galilei's work and comes to that of Oelert's team again through Paul Dirac's theoretical prediction of the existence of antiparticles and many discoveries by other physicists.
Fraser lucidly narrates to laypersons using neither technical jargons nor equations. A story about kaons in the chapter of "Broken mirrors" is possibly a little difficult to many readers, but this is a small flaw. Not only laypersons but also physicists can enjoy this book reading anecdotes of many great physicists and exciting episodes of finding antiparticles and producing antihydrogen atoms. In the last chapters the author describes the applications of antiparticles, the riddle of missing antimatter in the Universe and a program to search cosmic antimatter, concluding by the following words that might stimulate would-be scientists: "Our understanding of cosmology and the origin of the Universe would require a major rethink, a Copernican revolution for the twenty-first century."
Antihydrogen atoms of Oelert's team were flying so speedily that they were of no use for measuring their physical nature. In 2002, however, the ATHENA collaboration at CERN reported the success in the production of many "cold" antihydrogen atoms that move very slowly. Though it is yet quite far from the production of a massive quantity of antimatter, science gradually approaches the science fiction. I wish that this book be revised in the near future by adding the latest advances in antimatter science and by correcting the error of the Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka's first name (now it strangely reads "Hatari" on page 39) as well as a few typos.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A pleasant breeze into the concept and history of antimatter, October 9, 2000
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 aren't many true discoverers in theoretical physics, and most of those which existed in the last century usually got the Nobel prize. Their lives and personalities are as important as their discoveries themselves, up to the point that it's hard to truly understand correctly a fundamental discovery without knowing more about life and philosophy of the person who did it. Whoever doesn't understand that should better put back on the shelf any book about discoveries and discoverers in physics.
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