Seetee Unleashed!

[beamjockey]

Comments

[kevinnickerson]

Did you get your p-bar to work?

[beamjockey]

There is no elegant solution. There are multiple inelegant solutions, though.

[del_c]

That is even truer of Microsoft products than it is of life in general.

[tanac]

You're so cool! :) Wish I could be there.

[stickmaker]

Don't forget to mention Dr. John D. Clark's _Minus Planet_.

[beamjockey]

I won't. You know how fond I am of Clark. Wasn't room to mention it in the article, though.

[samwinolj]

Didn't Kimball Kinnison annihilate a whole planet with another planet made of something like antimatter? Seemed excessive.

I'm not sure which of the books it was... Gray Lensman? What year was that?

[beamjockey]

Yes. Four-part serial, starting in October 1939, in Astounding.

The properties of the Lensmen's Negasphere are something like antimatter, something like a black hole, and something like "negative mass" (attraction turns into repulsion). But it probably counts for the purposes of this discussion.

[mmcirvin]

Yes, and as I said in beamjockey's previous discussion about this, Olaf Stapledon actually riffed in 1930 on Dirac's speculation that the electron's antiparticle was the proton, and wrote about a ray weapon in Last and First Men that made them annihilate to produce total conversion of matter (the neutron hadn't been discovered yet). That's not quite antimatter as we know it, but it's got to be the earliest reference to something like it that I can think of. Still, it's not in the mainstream of SF treatment of antimatter the way Jack Williamson's stories were.

[forestweather]

Great article, Bill! Always enjoy explanations that make sense to this non-scientific SF-reader.