Review: Antimatter

Antimatter by Frank Close
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although much of the detail and most of the explanations were over my head, it was good to learn more about Antimatter. I get the impression that a big part of the impetus for writing this book was as a response to everyone getting excited over Antimatter after Dan Brown's novel "Angels and Demons" (anyone remember that?). In fact, the last chapter is pretty much dedicated to debunking all of the "FACTS" from that book. Part of this seems directed at the US military, which seemed to be considering using Antimatter as a weapon, possibly after having read that book.

I think this book's explanation of the theory of relativity finally got through to me, at least in terms of how we can't travel faster than the speed of light:
"In Einstein’s theory of relativity the mass of a body gets larger and larger the faster it travels. As it approaches the speed of light, the mass grows extremely fast, making the object ever more resistant to acceleration. Eventually, as one tries to reach the speed of light, the mass becomes infinite. It is thus impossible to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light; the only things that travel at light speed are things with no mass, such as light itself! (p. 28)

It is also interesting to see how unique earth really is, in terms of all the perfect elements available in one place, as illustrated by this footnote (p. 115): "if you selected at random a volume of the universe that is millions of light years in diameter, atomic elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, iron, silver, and gold would be all but absent"

Regardless, every time I read about physics I seem to understand marginally more. Maybe after a couple hundred more books I'll get it. I do wonder how out of date this book is, however. Maybe a new edition is in order?


Interesting passage about Paul Dirac:
"During a lecture at the University of Toronto a member of the audience asked politely ‘I do not understand how you derived that formula on the board’. There was a long silence, and it was only after being prompted by the chairman to give an answer that Dirac responded ‘It was not a question; it was a statement’." (p.35)

The whole section "Don't shake hands with an Anti-alien" (p. 110) was fascinating

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