Did Stapledon Describe Antimatter?

[beamjockey]

mmcirvin has suggested that Olaf Stapledon's influential 1930 novel Last and First Men may contain a reference to antimatter. A suggestion worth considering, but I'm not so sure.

Turn to Chapter 2. The scene is an international gathering of scientists at Hartland Point, Devon, England.

It was a bright morning after rain. Eleven miles to the north-west, the cliffs of Lundy Island displayed their markings with unusual detail. Sea-birds wheeled about the heads of the party as they seated themselves on their raincoats in a cluster upon the rabbit-cropped turf. [...]

"Before describing the details of my rather delicate process, I will illustrate its importance by showing what can be done with the finished product. Not only can I initiate the annihilation of matter, but also I can do so at a distance and in a precise direction. Moreover, I can inhibit the process. As a means of destruction, my instrument is perfect. As a source of power for the constructive work of mankind, it has unlimited potentiality." [...]

Turning towards Lundy, he said, "That island is no longer inhabited, and as it is something of a danger to shipping, I will remove it." So saying he aimed his instrument at the distant cliff, but continued speaking. "This trigger will stimulate the ultimate positive and negative charges which constitute the atoms at a certain point on the rock face to annihilate each other. These stimulated atoms will infect their neighbours, and so on indefinitely. This second trigger, however, will stop the actual annihilation. Were I to refrain from using it, the process would indeed continue indefinitely, perhaps until the whole of the planet had disintegrated."

There was an anxious movement among the spectators, but the young man took careful aim, and pressed the two triggers in quick succession. No sound from the instrument. No visible effect upon the smiling face of the island. Laughter began to gurgle from the Englishman, but ceased. For a dazzling point of light appeared on the remote cliff. It increased in size and brilliance, till all eyes were blinded in the effort to continue watching. It lit up the under parts of the clouds and blotted out the sun-cast shadows of gorse bushes beside the spectators. The whole end of the island facing the mainland was now an intolerable scorching sun. Presently, however, its fury was veiled in clouds of steam from the boiling sea. Then suddenly the whole island, three miles of solid granite, leaped asunder; so that a covey of great rocks soared heavenward, and beneath them swelled more slowly a gigantic mushroom of steam and debris. Then the sound arrived. All hands were clapped to ears, while eyes still strained to watch the bay, pocked white with the hail of rocks. Meanwhile a great wall of sea advanced from the centre of turmoil. This was seen to engulf a coasting vessel, and pass on toward Bideford and Barnstaple.

There ensues a discussion about whether the new weapon will end war, or instead raise hate, tyranny, and confusion to new heights. (Many another SF story, before and since, has grappled with this!) Stapledon has it both ways: the gadget is used to destroy an American "air fleet" during a suprise attack on England; then it is deliberately destroyed with all knowledge of its manufacture, and its creator commits suicide. (This being only Chapter Two, the secret is rediscovered in later millenia.)

So, is this an antimatter weapon?

First, it seems unlikely that Stapledon would have known much about Dirac's 1928 work. Stapledon was not a scientist, and not much had yet been written about these new ideas.

Dirac himself was still figuring out what negative-energy solutions to his equation meant. As Laurie Brown recounts in his "Prehistory of the Antiproton Discovery," it was only in 1931 that Dirac abandoned the idea that his positive "holes" were protons, and reluctantly concluded that they must imply a new particle with the same mass as the electron: "We may call such a particle an anti-electron." Fortunately, the anti-electron turned up in laboratories in 1932, which helped spread the notion of antiparticles. By 1933 Dirac was willing to speculate publicly about entire anti-stars in his Nobel Prize speech-- but Last and First Men had been in print for three years already.

Second, the idea of annihilating matter to produce energy derives from Einstein's relativity, and had been explored already in other science fiction stories. Wells's The World Set Free and Čapek's The Absolute at Large come to mind.

On the other hand, "stimulate the ultimate positive and negative charges... to annihilate each other" does sound a little like antimatter. Not enough to satisfy me.

(In Ringworld, Larry Niven's Slaver "digging tool," which disintegrates matter as it "suppresses the charge on the electron" and positive nuclei repel one another, also resembles Stapledon's weapon, but it doesn't involve antimatter.)

Bonus physics points to Stapledon, though,for "These stimulated atoms will infect their neighbours, and so on indefinitely. This second trigger, however, will stop the actual annihilation. Were I to refrain from using it, the process would indeed continue indefinitely, perhaps until the whole of the planet had disintegrated." This "infection" resembles the chain reaction processes in nuclear fission (discovered 1938) and lasers and masers (1953).

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Sure seems like a Known Space digging tool to me, not an antimatter tool.

I wonder how he would explain why it does not trigger this effect in the air, or spread to the air?

IIRC the Niven digging tool actually consists of two beams; one suppresses the positive charge, one the negative. This results in an incredibly powerful energy discharge between the two points where it hits.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

No, that was a development of the digging tool.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, when I'm at a technical presentation where somebody is droning away boringly with some poorly-designed slides, I think "What we really need to pep things up is a demonstration! One that involves a lot of gratuitous explosive earthmoving! And that, if it goes wrong, could Destroy The World!"

Then I wake up.

With the failure rate of prototypes that I've seen, I'd be really, really nervous about some guy casually demonstrating his matter-annhilator beam that takes a *positive effort* to stop. That's just *asking* for trouble. "Whoops, the beam that halts the reaction isn't working. No worries! We've got about ten seconds before the shock wave hits us, plenty of time to fix . . ."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Stapledon wasn't an engineer, nor did he think like one.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

No, it's similar to several matter annihilation beams.

1898
http://www.antimatterenergy.com/antimatter_history.htm

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

My own speculation was probably my own physics training talking. I first read Last and First Men around the same time I was learning quantum field theory, I knew Dirac had initially speculated that the "hole" was the proton shortly before Stapledon wrote his book, so I assumed there was some connection there. But I guess Dirac's early speculations didn't get a lot of publicity.

But it could just as easily have been a simple speculation about how E=mc² could allow total conversion of matter in a world with conserved electric charge.

It's interesting to see that Schuster was speculating about antimatter and anti-worlds even before relativity, though it sounds as if what he was talking about was really more like "negmatter".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I used the words "speculation" and "speculate" a lot in that comment, didn't I?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you suggested this... I read L&FM even longer ago and wouldn't have remembered the death-ray scenes. It was worth investigating. But I'm coming down on the E=mc² side of the question.

You should read the Laurie Brown paper, if you haven't already.

I had not previously heard of Schuster.