Antimatter source of infinite energy but too expensive

Imagine there is a planet identical to the Earth that has aliens looking exactly like us. In the moment we meet them and shake hands with them, an enormous explosion and light exceeding the power of a nuclear explosion will be generated. It is because their bodies are composed of antimatters – the opposite of the matters that comprise our bodies.

Those who studied a little bit about antimatters are prone to imagine such a situation. The protons of the atom, the basic unit of matter, have positive charge and electrons have negative charge. In antimatter, protons (antiproton) have negative charge, while electron (positron) has positive charge. Therefore, when matter and antimatter meet, they completely annihilate each other, generating an enormous amount of energy. Usually, the amount of energy that we take from food is just one-billionth of its mass. Through a nuclear reaction, we can turn one-hundredth of the mass into energy. If we use antimatter, the entire mass can be turned into energy. Just half a gram of antimatter can produce the power of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

As antimatter is the source of such great energy, many sci-fi writers and military industrialists have been fascinated by it. In Dan Brown`s best-selling novel "Angels & Demons," a group of scientists, who were oppressed by the Catholic Church since the days of Galileo Galilei, used an antimatter bomb to threaten the Vatican. In "Star Trek," a science fiction TV series, the spaceship Enterprise`s propulsion systems are energized by a matter-antimatter power plant.

The author, a professor of physics at Oxford University, dismisses such scenarios as "nonsensical." While antimatters were created when space was born 13.8 billion years ago, most of them were gone after colliding with matters. This can be put into a witty poem: Cain (matter) and Abel (antimatter) were brothers / Their parents were the first parents (the Big Bang) / And one child killed the other."

Of course, antimatters are not completely gone. The cosmic microwave background has some remnants of antimatter. The Sun also creates antimatter. As soon as positrons are created at the center of the Sun, they collide with electrons, releasing the gamma rays. The gamma rays become X-rays as they reach the Sun`s surface for 100,000 years, before becoming ultraviolet rays. As they reach the surface of the Earth, they become the rainbow colors.

It is possible to create antimatter on the Earth. However, the cost for the energy used to artificially create antimatter is far greater than the value of the energy gained from the destruction of antimatter. According to the author`s study, one gram of antimatter is valued at some 66.1 trillion U.S. dollars, compared with 58,500 dollars for the same amount of diamond. With the current technology, however, men can produce a mere one nano-gram (one-billionth of a gram) a year, spending tens of millions of dollars. Therefore, it takes hundreds of millions of years and more than 900 trillion dollars to obtain one gram of antimatter.

This book naturally introduces readers to the world of quantum dynamics. Also interesting is the author`s dramatic explanation that Paul Dirac (1902-1984), an English theoretical physicist, was first one to prove the theoretical existence of antimatter by integrating the Schrödinger equation and Albert Einstein`s relativity equation (E = mc2).