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Article: Antimatter matters
- Article from:
- Natural History
- Article date:
- May 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright American Museum of Natural History May 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Particle physics gets my vote as the subject with the most comical jargon in the physical sciences. Where else could a neutral vector boson be exchanged between a negative muon and a muon neutrino? Or how about the gluon that gets exchanged between a strange quark and a charmed quark? Alongside these seemingly countless particles with peculiar names is a parallel universe of antiparticles collectively known as antimatter. In spite of its continued appearance in science fiction stories, antimatter is real. And yes, contact between antimatter and ordinary matter results in the annihilation of both.
The universe reveals a peculiar romance between antiparticles and particles. They can be born ...