Last week, the announcement that scientists working at CERN had finally made 38 anti-hydrogen atoms and kept them bottled up for almost one-tenth of a second was major news.
Echoes of Scotty calling the bridge and telling Kirk that the "anti-matter containment field is disintegrating and she's going to blow" wandered across my mind.
Perhaps fittingly, because a suitable containment field has been the major stumbling block to making large quantities of anti-hydrogen.
But anti-matter is not the realm of science fiction or "Star Trek." You don't need a di-lithium or tri-lithium crystal, just a lot of energy.
In the early part of the 1900s, many great physicists were working in an area of research that we now call "quantum mechanics." In the world of the sub-atomic particles, quantum mechanics rules. It is the best possible explanation that we have for the way things are.
While working on quantum mechanics and sub-atomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, the British physicist Paul Dirac realized that his equations were telling him that each particle must have a partner. "Anti-particles" they were named because they should be just like our ordinary particles in almost every way.
The one way that they are different is important. The positron is just like an electron - with the same mass and spin - but the opposite charge. This means that when an electron and a positron meet, they annihilate one another resulting in a massive burst of energy. Two gamma ray photons are emitted that are sent in exactly opposite directions. We have been able to take advantage of this with a scanning technique called "positron emission tomography" or PET scanning.
Dirac announced the existence of anti-matter in1931 and it only took two years before positrons were discovered by Carl Anderson in the debris left over by the collision of cosmic rays with gases in the upper atmosphere. Positrons are quite plentiful if you know where to look.
All of the other sub-atomic particles have their corresponding anti-particles. Each has been discovered over time. There are anti-protons, anti-neutrons, and even anti-muons and other more esoteric particles.
But actual matter made up of anti-particles? It was nowhere to be found.
This has caused physicists no end of problems. The reason is that the big bang shouldn't have played favourites. That is, the energy that was released and generated the universe by the actions of the big bang should have created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter. There is no reason why one should predominate.
But it did.
The universe around us - all of the matter that there is - is due to a very small difference in the amount of matter and anti-matter that was created in that original explosive burst.
Most of the original anti-matter and matter annihilated billions of years ago. You can still see the after-effects of some of that process in the form of the cosmic microwave background. Energy left over from the big bang is now found as microwaves. And they help to generate some of the static that you can see on your television screen.
The question that has bothered our understanding of the physics of particles, though, has remained. We know that matter dominates the universe. We just don't know why.
Skip forward to the research being carried out at CERN by an international team of scientists including many from the University of Victoria. They have been trying to make actual anti-atoms - hydrogen atoms composed of positrons (or anti-electrons) orbiting anti-protons.
These anti-hydrogen atoms might help explain why the universe violated symmetry and produced only one type of particles.
Anti-hydrogen atoms aren't actually new. They were first reported about 15 years ago. Combining the streams of anti-protons generated at CERN with positrons is not particularly difficult. However, the resulting atoms still had the velocity of the particles from which they were made.
They were moving fairly close to the speed of light. They quickly collide with matter and annihilate.
The trick has been to slow them down to speeds where we can study them.
To trap the newly-formed atoms in a "containment" field that would prevent them from coming in contact with ordinary matter because as soon as they touch anything from our world, they annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.
This past week, Nature reported that the team at CERN was able to trap 38 anti-hydrogen atoms and hold onto them for about one tenth of a second. Not a long time in our world, but an eternity for an atom. Or, at least, long enough that we can now start to study anti-matter.
Who knows what answers will be revealed?
Maybe there actually are "anti-matter" galaxies somewhere in the universe.
And maybe someday, some future Captain Kirk will be able to say "Ahead, warp factor 9."
