Did Stapledon Describe Antimatter?

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).

Zeusaphone vs. Hasselblad

Here's the picture of me that ran with my article in Symmetry:

This was cropped down.

It came from a photo shoot where typical shots looked more like this:
Back in June, when the magazine needed a portrait, I got a call from Reidar Hahn, our photographer from Fermilab's Visual Media Services.

I figured Reidar was going to pose me in front of an equipment rack or something. Instead he suggested that, since we were both planning to attend a performance by Zeusaphones, he could snap pictures there. Jeff Larson and Steve Ward set up their musical Tesla coils in the parking lot of the Naperville hotel where Duckon 17 was taking place.

Reidar needed to use a combination of flash (to illuminate me in the foreground) with a long exposure time (to capture the arcs of the Zeusaphones). I think it was four seconds. I tried to be still. His remote-controlled flash setup was unhappy in the presence of powerful radiofrequency emitters, but he coped. I'm sure he's faced tougher challenges in a lifetime of superscience photography.

While I was posing, Terry Blake donned his chainmail suit and chicken-wire helmet, becoming "Doctor Zeus." He strode between the coils and began to brandish a pair of fluorescent tubes amid a storm of purple lightning. The crowd loved it. The music buzzed. Reidar snapped away.

So I was recorded for posterity by a Hasselblad with 36 megapixels. There is more detail in this photo than you wanted to see.

Here's my General Technics pin.
Here are half of my eyelashes.

All in all, given that I am quite vain, I am very glad to have these pictures (even if their full glory did not find its way into the magazine). You can never have too many photos of yourself posing in front of Tesla coils, I always say.