What's the matter with Anti-matter?

Well they finally did it.   The large hadron collider in Switzerland has produce significant quantities of anti-matter.  By significant it is meant 32 particles that were kept "alive" for fractions of a second.  But that is a long time in particle physics.  What this anti-matter particle is ... think of a hydrogen atom with a plus charge as regular matter called a proton.  Then a hydrogen atom with a negative charge is called an anti-proton or in other words a positron.  So you can see.. that when a proton and an anti-proton get together they cancel each other out or annihilate with a resulting large release of energy.  The implications of this experiment are huge.

If we are capable of making even more anti-matter than was made in this experiment then we would have unbelievably large amounts of energy at our disposal.  Michio Kaku, who is the developer of String Theory and the host on the Discovery Science channel, has proposed two uses for ainti-matter in his book "Physics of the Impossible".  One is to use the virtually 100% energy release from this process of annihilating matter and anti-matter to produce rocket power to take us to the stars at considerably higher speeds than we can attain with conventional fuels.  And the use of anti-matter to keep wormholes open as a passage to parallel worlds.  After all, we wouldn't want to be going thru a wormhole and have it collapse on us.  Also the ideal passage to a parallet world would include the ability to return to this one if we should choose to do so.

This would also have implications to time travel.  According to Kaku time travel can be accomplished in a number of ways.  (1.) by traveling at speeds close to that of light and by (2.) traveling to other dimensions, other worlds and the like by tunneling thru a wormhole.  As an example if you were able to travel backward in time and like the fly on the wall see how you handled a certain situation.  Then observe other ways to change your attitude back in the future.  You could then operate more successfully in your current reality.  I have talked about how to change your attitude in a previous blog post.