Why bother with antimatter?
If it’s not an energy source, why bother with antimatter? Fajans, who is also a professor of physics at the University of Californica, Berkeley, has been making antihydrogen for several years as part of the international ALPHA collaboration at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. He explains that one of the most challenging puzzles in physics is why the universe is made almost entirely of ordinary matter. “Up until the 1960s it was thought that if the sign of a particle was changed”–from the negative charge of an electron, for example, to the positive charge of a positron–”and if the particle was changed into its mirror image, the new antimatter particle would behave identically to the old ordinary particle. This principle was called CP invariance, where C stands for the change in sign and P for the mirror reflection, known in physics jargon as parity inversion.” Fajans says, “Physicists were quite surprised to discover in the 1960s t
