There are several ground rules one must keep in mind when reading this. The first thing that you need to understand is that "everything you know is wrong." I didn’t just make that up myself. It came from one of societies greatest philosophers, Weird Al Yankovic. Once I’m done telling you what I’ve got to tell you, there is something else you must understand. Everything you know is still wrong. You’ll have just learned some new and different wrong things.

"Then why is it important" one might ask. "Why am I reading this?" The problem is perspective. There are potentially infinite differing perspectives out there that can all describe why a single thing happens. How is it possible for scientists to come up with the right one? The answer to this question is very simple. It isn’t possible. This is a dilemma that most people just can’t accept. In science it is impossible to prove anything. Someone who uses the phrase "It is a scientifically proven fact" can automatically be discredited as spouting meaningless gibberish. I recommend keeping this in mind when listening to politicians or television ads. What a scientist will do is come up with an interesting theory to explain something as of yet unexplained. Once he’s done this it's his job to try to find some reason why his theory doesn’t work. This is what scientists are doing when they experiment. Once the scientist shows that his theory is probably wrong, he’s either got to come up with another theory that explains everything all over again or he’s got to change his old theory a little bit so that it makes sense again. This process goes on forever and it’s the most fun that anyone could ever have. At least that’s what scientists think.

I’ve explained this several times and each time people walk away thinking one of one thing. It’s either that I’m insane or that I’m a genius. I don’t attribute it to this at all. My high school science teacher (I had the same one three times in a row) programmed me and my peers to think this way and we won’t go back. What this means for you is that you’re probably going to be a little uncomfortable and if you can’t stand it, you know now to never again read anything that tries to explain high energy particle physics or quantum mechanics. This is because in quantum physics and high energy particle physics the idea that everything you know is wrong is basic. Anybody trying to explain either of those two sciences to someone who doesn’t know what they are will say something very similar to what I’ve just said. It is one of the most important things to understand if you want to delve in to the weird world of quanta. All good teachers make certain to reprogram their young potential scientists who will be the only ones doing any explaining.

Back to the fact that what you already know is wrong. Quantum physics is a shocker. Heck, you don’t even have to get all the way down to quantum physics to find out that the way the universe works is shockingly counter-intuitive.

Most of the shocking counter-intuitive stuff started with the most famous scientist of them all, Einstein. That’s why he’s so famous. He came up with a new perspective that was so neat that all the scientists decided that he was a really great guy. That’s what they told everyone else and so everyone else decided that if scientists thought Einstein was a great guy he probably was. We all came to this conclusion because we thought scientists knew everything. Most people still think that and all the scientists are giggling in their laboratories because they know that the only thing that makes them special is that they know that they don’t know anything. Actually most of them are only giggling because they just showed that one of their own theories is probably wrong and for a scientist that’s more fun than Magic Mountain or video games, but those scientist aren’t relevant to the point I’m trying to make. Scientists told everybody that Einstein was a really great guy and so, because of that, what we all did is told each other that scientists had proven that Einstein was a great guy, because we still hadn’t figured out that science can’t prove anything. So now when kids go to elementary school they all learn that Einstein is a really great guy and that E=MC². We told each other about that too, even though we didn’t even know what scientists were talking about when they told us that it was true. This all really confuses little kids because they haven’t even learned how to square something yet and they most certainly have no idea what E, M, or C mean. This is why our nations math scores have gone down, because Einstein moved to America and everyone wanted to confuse little kids by telling them that E=MC².

Kids never really get this mess sorted out even when they figure out how to square something and that those letters probably stand for numbers. What does this mean? It means that there’s a very good chance that you don’t know what E=MC² means and so before I go much further I need to tell you.

First of all I should let you know what all the letters mean. E stands for energy of an object, M stands for the mass of an object, and C stands for the speed of light. So now you know that Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Sounds pretty neat doesn’t it? So what does it all mean? Well, the first really weird thing that we’re going to learn is that mass is a form of energy and can be converted into other forms of energy just like heat can be converted into electricity. Einstein’s equation is just a way of finding out how much energy is in an object with a given mass

In reality E=MC² is a simplification. If we wanted to be a little more accurate, we would say that E²=M²C⁴+P²C². Uh oh, it’s almost twice as big, but it’s only got one new variable. I’ll help you with that new variable now by telling you that P is the momentum. E is only equal to MC² when the object isn’t going anywhere because if the momentum is equal to zero then E²=M²C⁴+0²C². Zero squared is zero and zero times anything else is zero, so 0²C²=0, which means that when an object isn’t moving, we can completely ignore that part of the equation. So after ignoring that part of the equation we’re left with E²=M²C⁴. We simply simplify that by finding the square root of both sides. The square root of E² is E and the square root of M²C⁴ is MC². So E=MC². Simple huh? (Gribbin, pgs. 124-125)

Well it sure seemed cut and dry to most physicists, but then, in 1931, came an insane fool (A.K.A. Genius) who thought he saw something kind of neat in Einstein’s equations. This fool was Paul A. M. Dirac and when I say he saw something neat, I mean he saw something that not even Einstein saw and was completely above and beyond the weird stuff that made scientists think Einstein was such a great guy. Therefore it has nothing to do with why we all think Einstein was a great guy. This is something that made Dirac a great guy, but nobody talks about him because he was a mathematician. People don’t like mathematicians because they use a really old alphabet sometimes, which isn’t looked upon as modern.

In any case, Dirac saw something neat. It had something to do with the square root of E²=M²C⁴. The neat thing is that when you find the square root of something it could be either positive or negative. 2*2 is the same as -2*-2, therefore the square root of 4 could be either 2 or -2. Square roots are used a lot in science and math, but normally scientists just assume that the answer is going to be positive, but Dirac, the fool that he was, didn’t do this. Instead he got really excited because acting like a fool is just as much fun as finding out that your wrong in science.

Now let me tell you what all this means. E=MC² can no longer be considered accurate, even as a simplification. Instead E=±MC². You may have noticed the weird little ±. Basically, that strange little symbol means that something can be either positive or negative. What that means is that E, the energy of an object, can be negative. In other words it is possible for an object to have less energy than zero. This sure sounded profound and amazing, but there were still plenty of details left to work out, like what exactly an object with less than no energy is. Dirac had reason to believe that when a particle has a negative energy level, it’s charge reverses, becoming exactly the opposite. Well, an electron is a particle with an electromagnetic charge of -1. Perhaps, thought Dirac, the particle with negative energy is the proton, which has an electromagnetic charge of 1. This didn’t sound too good though, because the proton has a lot more mass than the electron and the mass of the electrons opposite, or antiparticle, should be exactly the same. In case you missed it, I just told you what an antiparticle is. It’s a regular particle’s exact opposite. (Gribbin, pgs. 125-127)

Nobody was quite sure what to think about antiparticles. Especially since the proton just didn’t make sense as the electron's exact opposite. Luckily in 1932, someone found a very strange particle. That someone was Carl Anderson. (Gribbin, p. 126)

Now I suppose I should explain a little bit of how scientists detect particles. The first thing they do is build something called a cloud chamber. A cloud chamber is basically a big tank sitting on a block of dry ice. At the top of this tank is a sponge which has been soaked in alcohol. This sponge is evaporating at room temperature. At the bottom of the tank all the little evaporated water molecules are gathering. It’s cold and depressing down there because of the dry ice. So all of the alcohol molecules are cold and depressed at the bottom of the tank. Not only this, but they really want to hang out together(condense), but they don’t have enough energy because it’s so cold and depressing. This is a cloud chamber, a tank on ice with a bunch of alcohol molecules who are too depressed to hang out with each other.

Cloud chambers are perfect for detecting particles with suit cases full of energy. Imagine a huge room full of adults who are fast asleep. Now imagine a giggling baby crawling across that room. That giggling baby is going to leave a trail of woken up adults. Even if we were deaf and had poor vision, we’d know something was causing a disturbance because there would be a trail of adults standing up to let us know about where the disturbance was.

This is kind of what happens when a high energy particle goes zipping through a cloud chamber. It goes bumping around the cloud chamber, disturbing all of the alcohol molecules, which gives them just enough energy to get out of bed and hang out with their friends. When people look at what’s going on they see a cloudy trail where all the hip alcohol molecules are chillin’ with their buddies. People can see this trail because all of the alcohol molecules are grouped together. This is how scientists can detect a particle.

If you put magnets near the cloud chamber, you can tell how the particles you’re looking at are charged by how their movements change. This is what Carl Anderson was doing when he ran into the antielectron. He was playing around with the cosmic rays, which are the particles that are constantly bombarding earth from space, when he noticed a strange particle that appeared to have the mass of an electron, but the charge of a proton. (Cloud Chamber)

Carl Anderson was working with a man named Robert Millikin at the time. Robert Millikan thought that the strange particle they were detecting might actually be a slow moving proton. Carl Anderson didn’t agree with Millikin on the matter though. A slower moving proton should’ve been able to gather more alcohol molecules together, or as scientists would say, a proton moving more slowly should’ve had a denser ionization trail. Carl Anderson thought that the particle was probably an electron, which had gotten into the cloud chamber from the wrong end. This seemed pretty reasonable and in a way he was right, but the actual answer to the problem wasn’t anything either of them had expected. To settle the dispute Carl Anderson placed a lead plate across the chamber to slow down the particles. If the particle was a slow moving proton than, obviously, the lead plate would slow it down even more. However, if it was an electron that had gotten in from the wrong end of the chamber, then the lead plate wouldn’t seem to have any effect until the electron moved through it and so would appear slower on the side of the lead plate that particles normally entered from.

When the particle went through the chamber Anderson and Milikin found that it had indeed entered using the normal route because the lead slowed the particle down, but it wasn’t a slow moving proton. From what they could tell it was just like an electron except it had the opposite charge. This made both Anderson and Millikin very happy because it meant that they were both wrong. Carl Anderson named his new particle the positron because it was a positively charged electron. However, you might also hear scientists call it the anti-electron. This particle was the very first form of antimatter ever to be discovered. (Particle Explosion)

That was how antimatter was discovered, but there are allot of interesting things about this form of matter that just can’t be gleaned from a discussion of its discovery.

Another very interesting feature of antimatter is how it moves through time. You and me, as well as all inanimate objects you are likely to come in contact with, are made of regular matter. We all think of ourselves as moving fowards through time. I’ve never really questioned it, but if we’re moving forwards in time, then antimatter seems to be moving backwards. Antimatter moves backwards in time. Compared to us at least. It’s kind of like asking the question, "Which way is up?" In reality, up is relative to where you are. People on the opposite side of the world think of up as being a direction completely different from what we would consider up and really up changes for everyone as Earth spins on its axis, as Earth spins around our sun, as our sun spins around the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, and very possibly as the Milky Way spins around something much larger. In any case we could very well be made of antimatter thinking that matter moves the wrong way. Forward is always relative to where you’re trying to get.

Here’s an interesting way to visualize things. These are called Feynman diagrams. What they basically do is take four dimensions, a very difficult thing for one to keep straight in one’s head, and squishes them down to two dimensions. It’s highly simplified and not too complicated, but it works for all of the theoretical work that scientists need to do. In Feynman diagrams there are two axis. The axis that we standardly call the x-axis represents space. The axis that we standardly call the y-axis represents time. From this you can see that scientists make all of this complex stuff easy to think about by only thinking about one dimension of space. I like to think of it as the width, but how you like to think of it doesn’t matter as long as you find what’s easiest for you.

Figure 1: This figure is a good example of a Feynman diagram. You can see the "world line" of particle A. This line goes straight up as the particle moves through time, but the particle isn’t moving in space. You can think of this particle as a ball that’s sitting still. Particle B is moving forward in time and is also moving to the left in space and will bump particle A if nothing stops it. Particle C is moving forward in time and to the right in space. It is moving away from all of the other particles. (Taken from In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat on page 188)

Calling something antimatter merely states that it’s going backwards through time. (Relative to us.) That means that a positron really is an electron. It’s just headed in another direction. Furthermore, matter is just antimatter going the opposite direction in time. It’s a strange thing to think about, but it’s just as true as most other things you know which are also wrong. It is most probable that there is an even more interesting and more accurate description of this reality, but what I have just said is still very true. This is not to say that this description is completely wrong either.

Light is able to play the game a little differently because light is it’s own antiparticle, so light can be thought of as going both directions in time at once.

It is very interesting to note that if what I have said is true than the whole universe in it’s entirety could very well be made out of one single particle that has gone forward and backward through time over and over interacting with itself to form us and all around us. If this were the case then you, I, the paper you are reading, the computer I typed it up on, as well as countless other things including bugs that you stepped on, are all made of one particle. This probably isn’t a very commonly held belief among scientists, but it is very possible, however there is one problem with idea. From what scientists can tell, antimatter is rare. If the universe were made out of one or more particles zipping back and forth through space and time, about half of the matter in the universe would be antimatter.

This is one of the great mysteries of antimatter that still plague science. Why is antimatter so rare? There may very well be galaxies just like ours with people just like you and me, all made out of antimatter, but so far astronomers have found no sign of such antimatter galaxies, though they do look. Though the mystery remains unsolved, the search for the answer goes on and marks one of the interesting areas for advancement in science, which feeds on mysteries yet unsolved.

Another feature of antimatter is that when it collides with it’s regular matter twin, both the matter and the antimatter disappear. As we’ve just learned, antimatter is just matter going the opposite direction through time. When a positron and electron anhialate each other releasing energy, we could just as easily say that the electron was bounced back in time by the energy coming from the future. And so because it was bounced back in time we see two particles, which can actually be thought of as the same one.(Gribbin, pgs. 183-194)

Figure 2: The two figures above are Feynman diagrams of an electron’s movements. e+ is a positron or anti-electron and e- is an electron. Both of these diagrams mean the same thing because e+ moving forward through time is e- moving backward through time. The other symbol you see is a particle carrying the energy released when the electron and the positron bumped hit each other and dissappeared. One could also say that the electron was pushed back in time by the particle of energy. (Taken from In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat on page 188)

I suppose your head may already be swimming with ideas about how particles moving backward through time could be usefull. Time travel is thus far only a part of science fiction. It’s certainly one of the most discredited aspects of science fiction, but if antiparticles can do it why can’t we? There isn’t a very good answer to this question. It’s certainly a possibility, but there are far too many technical difficulties remaining, such as how to push a huge macro-world object into the past without tearing it to pieces. There is also the added problem of keeping a large object, like a person, or even a newspaper, from bumping into itself on the way back through time, since you just existed before yourself you’d get pushed into yourself in any attempt to go back through time. We still aren’t able to create enough antimatter to do anything useful like this anyway, so nothing in this area is likely to happen for decades to come.

Another, more sensible application for antimatter is in the area of fuel. Antimatter could be used as an exremely efficient source of fuel. Antimatter makes for good fuel because when it is collided with regular matter it releases alot of energy. This energy could be used to power vehicles, starships, toasters, etc. (Trek Tech)

So now you have just learned the new inaccuracy. You have been told the honest lie. This is so because no matter how much we learn, we will always be wrong, and no matter how impossible the matter seems the truth is out there. Antimatter is simply matter moving backwards through time. This knowledge has some startling implications, many of which would be despised, but the truth is out there no matter how wrong it is.