Some think that, on the average, every other star in our Milky Way galaxy is antimatter. Others find that setup dangerously crowded - make it every second galaxy. Still others prefer universe - and - anti universe with antimatter in ours only on rare occasions when energetic particles collide so violently that some of the energy forms antiparticles. And some like higher numbers of universes - even an unlimited number.

One advantage of light's finite speed is that we can see several eons of the universe in action, rather than just one frame of a very long moving picture. Today's instruments reach not only far out into space but also far back into time; this permits us to test in some degree a proposed cosmology. The LST (Large Space Telescope), to be placed in orbit by the Space Shuttle in 1983, will have 20 times the resolving power of the best ground - based and atmosphere - distorted conventional telescope - therefore 20 times the reach, or more than enough to see clear back to the "beginning" by one cosmology, the "big bang."

(Q: What happened before the beginning? A: You tell me.)

When we double that reach - someday we will - what will we see? Empty space? Or the backs of our necks?

(Q: What's this to me? A: Patience one moment....)

The star nearest ours is a triplet system; one of the three resembles our sun and may have an Earthlike planet - an inviting target for our first attempt to cross interstellar space. Suppose that system is antimatter - BANG! Scratch one starship.

(Hooray for Zero Population Growth! To hell with space - travel boondoggles!)

Then consider this: June 30, 1908, a meteor struck Siberia, so blindingly bright in broad daylight that people 1,000 miles away saw it. Its roar was "deafening" at 500 miles. Its ground quake brought a train to emergency stop 400 miles from impact. North of Vanavara its air blast killed a herd of 1,500 reindeer.

Trouble and war and revolution - investigation waited 19 years. But still devastated were many hundreds of square miles. How giant trees lay pinpointed impact.

A meteor from inside our Galaxy can strike Earth at 50 miles/second.

But could one hit us from outside our Galaxy?

Yes! The only unlikely (but not impossible) routes are those plowing edgewise or nearly so through the Milky Way; most of the sky is an open road - step outside tonight and look. An antimeteor from an antigalaxy could sneak in through hard vacuum - losing an antiatom whenever it encountered a random atom but nevertheless could strike us massing, say, one pound.

One pound of antimatter at any speed or none would raise as much hell as 28,000 tons of matter striking at 50 miles/second.

Today no one knows how to amass even a gram of antimatter or how to handle and control it either for power or for weaponry. Experts assert that all three are impossible.

However...

Two relevant examples of "expert" predictions:

Robert A. Millikan, Nobel laureate in physics and distinguished second to none by a half - century of re search into charges and properties of atomic particles, in quantum mechanics, and in several other areas, predicted that all the power that could ever be extracted from atoms would no more than blow the whistle on a peanut vendor's cart. (In fairness I must add that most of his colleagues agreed - and the same is true of the next example.)

Forest Ray Moulton, for many years top astronomer of the University of Chicago and foremost authority in ballistics, stated in print (1935) that there was "not the slightest possibility of such a journey" as the one the whole world watched 34 years later: Apollo 11 to the moon.

In 1938, when there was not a pinch of pure uranium - 235 anywhere on Earth and no technology to amass or control it, Lise Meitner devised mathematics that pointed straight to atom bombs. Less than seven years after she did this, the first one blazed "like a thousand suns."

No possible way to amass antimatter?

Or ever to handle it?

Being smugly certain of that (but mistaken) could mean to you ... and me and everyone

The END

AFTERWORD

I am precluded from revising this article because Encyclopaedia Britannica owns the copyright; I wrote it under contract. But in truth it needs no revision but can use some late news flashes.

1) Jonathan V. Post reports (OMNI, May '79) that scientists in Geneva have announced containment of a beam of antiprotons in a circular storage ring for 85 hours. Further deponent sayeth not as today (Nov. '79) I have not yet traced down details. The total mass could not have been large (Geneva is still on the map) as the storage method used is not suited to large masses - or, as in this case, a massive sum total of very small masses.

But I am astonished at any containment even though with dead seriousness I predicted it in the section just above. I did not expect it in the near future but now I learn it happened at least 10 months ago, only 4 years after I wrote the above article.

Too frighteningly soon! A very small (anti) mass to be sure - but when Dr. Lise Meitner wrote the equations that implicitly predicted the A - bomb, there was not enough purified U - 235 anywhere to cause a gnat's eye to water.

How soon will we face a LARGE mass - say about an ounce - planted in Manhattan by someone who doesn't like us very well? If he releases the magnetic container by an alarm - clock timer or nine other simple make - it - in your - own - kitchen devices, he can be in Singapore when it goes off Or in Trenton if he enjoys watching his own little practical jokes - he won't worry about witnesses; they will be dead.

Too big? Too cumbersome? Too expensive? I don't know - and neither does anyone else today. I am not proposing sneaking a CERN particle accelerator past Hoboken customs... but note that the first reacting atomic pile (University of Chicago) was massive - but it was not flown to Hiroshima. The bomb that did go was called "Fat Boy" for good reason. Now we can fire them from 8 - inch guns. As for the "suitcase" bomb - change that to a large briefcase; all the other essentials can be bought off the shelf for cash in any medium - large city, no questions asked as they are commonplace items.

Antimatter, containment and all, might turn out to be even smaller, lighter, simpler.

2) That variable constant: Dr. Van Flandern is still plugging away at Dr. Dirac's 1937 prediction about the "Constant" of Gravitation. The latest figures I have seen show (by his measurements) that the "Constant" is decreasing by 3.6 ± 1.8 parts in 1011 years, a figure surprisingly close to Dirac's 1937 prediction (5.6) in view of the extreme difficulty of making the measurements and of excluding extraneous variables. But all this is based on a universe 18 - 20 billion years old since the "big bang" - an assumption on current best data but still an assumption. If the universe is actually materially older than that (there are reasons to think so, and all the revisions since Abbй LemaItre first formulated the theory have all been upward, never downward), then Dirac's prediction may turn out to be right on the nose of observed data to their limit of accuracy.

The data above are from an article by Dr. Herbert

Friedman of Naval Research Laboratory. Our Baker

Street Irregulars have just established a pipeline to Dr.

Van Flandern; if major new data become available before

this book is closed for press, I will add a line to this.

3) In Where To see prediction number fourteen, page

341: At the Naval Academy I slept my way through the course in physics; nothing had changed since I had covered the same ground in high school. "Little did I dream" that a young man at Cambridge, less than five years older than I, was at that very moment turning the world upside down. This quiet, polite, soft - spoken gentleman was going to turn out to be the enfant terrible of physics. This has been the stormiest century in natural philosophy of all history and the storms are not over. We would not today have over 200 "elementary" particles (an open scandal) if Paul Dirac had not simplified the relation of