The article below is excerpted from The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality, by Dave Goldberg. Dutton, 2013.
It is generally a bad idea to watch science fiction in the hopes of bolstering your understanding of science. Doing so would give you a very distorted impression of, among other things, how explosions sound in deep space (they don’t), how easy it is to blast past the speed of light (you can’t), and the prevalence of English-speaking, vaguely humanoid, but still sexy, aliens (they’re all married). But if we’ve learned one good lesson from Star Warses and Treks, it’s that no one should ever mess with antimatter.
Antimatter is not only no more exotic than ordinary matter but in almost every way that matters, it looks and acts the same. Were every particle in the universe to suddenly be replaced by its antimatter version, you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. To put it bluntly, there is a symmetry between how the laws of physics treat matter and antimatter, and yet they must be at least a little bit different; you and everyone you know are made of matter and not antimatter.
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