(Anti)Material World

July 29, 2008

How's this for a Hollywood blockbuster pitch? (cue dramatic voiceover) "In a world of subatomic particles, the forces of the Core and the forces of the Void battle for the fate of the universe...." That's the premise of a new animated 3D feature film, slated for release in September 2009, called Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey -- the first feature film to have its origins within NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Last week's Comic-Con had an entire panel devoted to the film,  which has apparently been 10 years in the making.

At least it's got a star-studded cast. The Core -- as in, the core of the sun, or perhaps all suns -- is a kindly being played by either William Shatner or Michael York (the Interwebs disagree). Christian Slater plays a "solar surfing photon," while Tom Kenny and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander play Ignorance and Fear. (Yeah, it's very high concept.) Samuel L. Jackson plays the Void, intent on destroying the Cassini spacecraft and, apparently, the universe with his armies of antimatter. John Travolta stars as "Dave," a plucky little photon on a mission to save everyone, and Brent "Data" Spiner plays his light coach, who calls in occasionally via cell phone to offer advice. Plus, there are rumors that NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong and former vampire slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar might have voice roles.

Frankly, it's not clear to me what any of this has to do with Cassini, which just wrapped its primary mission to image Saturn on June 30th, and is now engaged in an extended secondary mission to monitor seasonal effects on two of its moons: Titan and Enceladus, both of which may be "potentially habitable." Apparently the Void is trying to destroy Cassini before it brings information about its discoveries back to Earth. I guess we'll have to wait for the film to see what those critical discoveries might be.

But more importantly: why're they hatin' on antimatter? C'mon, it's the fuel source for the starship Enterprise that enables the ship to go into warp drive! Remember that classic episode where the Enterprise gets sucked up by a giant killer amoeba oozing its way through outer space? Kirk and Scotty fill a magnetic bottle with antimatter siphoned from the starship's engine, a kind of makeshift bomb. The amoeba goes kablooey, and antimatter saves the day.

We owe our very existence to antimatter -- or rather, a critical asymmetry between the number of antimatter particles in the early universe and the number of matter particles. The two are mirror images of each other: the same mass but with reversed electrical charges. Whenever antimatter meets matter, the two annihilate, and their combined masses are released as pure energy that spreads outward at the speed of light.

As far as we know (so far), antimatter no longer exists naturally in the universe (except, briefly, in the cores of stars). We can create it artificially in particle accelerators, but in the first 10 billionths of a second after the big bang, when the observable universe was only as large as your living room, there was a lot of antimatter mucking about. The nascent universe was incredibly hot and dense, so that energy and mass were virtually interchangeable. It was a pretty violent environment -- a Thunderdome for subatomic particles. New particles and antiparticles were continually being created and colliding with their polar opposites, annihilating back into energy in a great cosmic war of attrition.

War history buffs will tell you that in such a war, if both sides always have equal numbers of soldiers, neither can ever claim victory. But in the case of the early universe, a small surplus of matter appeared, sufficient to wipe out the antimatter in the universe in about 1 second. (Mark Trodden of Cosmic Variance recently wrote a more extensive summary of this scientific mystery.) Temperatures began to cool as the universe expanded, until it was too cool to create to pairs to replenish the "armies." The smattering of leftover particles of matter is the only thing that survived our kamikaze cosmos, and those make up every last bit of ordinary matter in the universe.

Scientists aren't sure how this asymmetry between matter and antimatter came about, but without it, the universe would be a vast, cold, empty Void, voiced by Samuel Jackson. History is told by the victors -- in this case, the denizens of our material world. But we could just as easily be living in an Anti-Material World, had the scales tipped the other way in those first fractions of a second after the big bang. No wonder the Void is a little bitter.

Photo: Artist's depiction of a matter/antimatter pair. Source: CERN.

Comments

[Jan in CT]

The universe is composed of Matter rather than Antimatter because we, the victors, named it. It would be rather silly to have named the stuff we were made of Antimatter and that all the Matter had been annihilated in the early universe.

Just pointing out that the only difference between Matter and Antimatter is that the victor was declared to be Matter.