The Strange World of Antimatter
The early twentieth century was an exciting time to be in physics. The staid and predictable world of Newton’s physics had just been overthrown by two new ideas — relativity and quantum mechanics. Physicists were busy sketching out the new theories, discovering new laws of reality, and getting famous doing it. As experiments probing the new world of physics revealed bizarre and almost unbelievable phenomena, the universe was revealed to be far stranger than anyone could have imagined.
Around 1912 scientists began to find streams of energetic particles bombarding the Earth from outer space. Physicists soon started to investigate these mysterious particles with the help of cloud chambers, a device which used strong magnetic fields and a fine mist to reveal the path, mass and electric charge of fast moving sub-atomic particles. The scientists using cloud chambers would occasionally find traces that couldn’t be explained by the handful of particles known at the time, but the experimental apparatus just wasn’t accurate enough to provide real evidence of something new. That would change in 1931, when Carl Anderson, working at the California Institute of Technology, built an improved cloud chamber. The evidence of a new particle could no longer be ignored, and after spending a year trying to definitively prove his discovery, Anderson announced the discovery of the positive electron in 1932.
