Antimatter Explained

Half of the universe is missing. You're living in the half that won.

Every particle of matter has a mirror twin - identical in mass, opposite in charge, and annihilating on contact in a flash of pure energy. The Big Bang should have made both halves in equal measure. It didn't, or at least it doesn't look that way, and the question of why is one of the deepest unsolved mysteries in science.

Floyd Ellington tells the full story of the antiworld: predicted on paper by a shy genius, caught in a photograph, bottled by the gram-fraction at CERN, and quietly saving lives in hospitals every day.

Inside, you will discover:

• Dirac's beautiful equation - how antimatter fell out of pure mathematics before anyone had seen it
• The photograph that changed physics - Anderson's cloud chamber and the track that curved the wrong way
• Annihilation - E=mc² in its purest form, and why a gram of antimatter rivals an atomic bomb
• The most expensive substance on Earth - how CERN makes and traps atoms of antihydrogen
• The missing antimatter universe - baryogenesis, CP violation, and the crack in nature's mirror
• Antimatter in nature - thunderstorms, bananas, radioactive decay, and cosmic rays
• Antimatter in the hospital - the elegant physics of the PET scan, explained properly
• Starships and science fiction - the honest verdict on antimatter propulsion and weapons

Rigorous, vivid, and refreshingly hype-free, this is the definitive tour of the substance physicists call the mirror of creation.

The mirror twin of everything is real. Meet the other half.