How Antimatter Got into Science Fiction

[beamjockey]

Did you ever wonder how Jack Williamson came to write a series of science fiction stories about antimatter?

1928 Paul Dirac's relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics shows that the positron may exist.

1932 Carl Anderson discovers the positron in cloud-chamber photographs. Physicists speculate about other anti-particles (what we now call antimatter).

1933: Dirac concludes his Nobel Prize lecture by saying: "If we accept the view of complete symmetry between positive and negative electric charge so far as concerns the fundamental laws of Nature, we must regard it rather as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive protons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about, these stars being built up mainly of positrons and negative protons. In fact, there may be half the stars of each kind. The two kinds of stars would both show exactly the same spectra, and there would be no way of distinguishing them by present astronomical methods."

1935: Vladimir Rojansky speculates that negative-energy "hole" counterparts of protons and neutrons may exist, forming "contraterrene matter." (It seems probable that Rojansky coined this term.)

1937: George Gamow speculates further in his book on nuclear structure.

1940: Rojansky speculates that contraterrene bodies may exist elsewhere in space, possibly including some comets and meteors. Later he suggests looking for an increase in cosmic rays when a comet passes near the Earth.

September 1940: Boaters witness a screaming sound and a mysterious explosion in Long Island Sound. No artillery can be found to account for this.

February 1941: Lincoln LaPaz suggests that contraterrene meteors might explain terrestrial craters where no meteoritic debris is found. Samuel Herrick immediately suggests that the September "Phantom Bertha" event may be an instance of CT impact.

3 March 1941: James Stokely writes "Exploding Atoms Dig Craters?" for Science Service and pop-science readers become aware of the controversy.

April 1941: H.H. Nininger doubts LaPaz. They wrestle.

April 1941: "Reason," Isaac Asimov's second robot story, describes robots as having "positronic" brains, because it sounds cool.

8 April 1941: John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, writes a four-page letter to Robert Heinlein. He describes contraterrene physics, then sketches the background to a story about asteroid miners who gather CT material for an energy source.

10 April 1941: Heinlein interested in writing CT story, but, uncomfortable about his ignorance, requests more physics information.

14 April 1941: Campbell cites references for contraterrene matter, offers further speculation about methods of mining CT.

26 April 1941: Heinlein informs Campbell that he has trouble finding a story to fit the CT background, and may drop the project.

May 1941: Heinlein huddles with his atomic physics guru, Robert Cornog of Berkeley, regarding contraterrene matter.



Mid-1941: R.S. Richardson writes article "Inside Out Matter" for the December issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

August 1941: C.C. Wylie weighs in against the CT hypothesis for "Phantom Bertha."

21 November 1941: Campbell writes Jack Williamson "a long letter about CT physics. He outlines a story idea he had offered Heinlein, who isn't going to use it because he has 'more on hand than he wants to write anyway.'"



July 1942: Williamson, writing as "Will Stewart," publishes "Collision Orbit" in Astounding.



November 1942: Stewart's "Minus Sign" in Astounding.



January 1943: "Opposites--React!" in Astounding.

February 1949: First installment of "Seetee Shock" in Astounding.



1951: Setee stories collected in fixup book, "Seetee Ship" from Gnome Press.

Once Williamson had written stories around the idea, antimatter became firmly established in the prop-box of science fiction.

Comments

[whl.livejournal.com]

Ok, now explain why E. E. "Doc" Smith decided to use Platinum waste solution in Skylark of Space.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

That'll be harder, won't it? It's not a real concept entering science fiction and being widely used, so there'll be less information around to find.

I'd say Smith was using the known stable heavy metals, and then implying there are heavier ones with even more unusual properties, and that what little of those there is on Earth will be most likely found mixed with the things chemically like it.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

There had been a lot of work done recently (at the time the story was originally written) separating noble metals in the platinum group. Chemists just kept _finding_ new stuff, the closer they looked at platinum, iridium, etc. So, yeah, a logical place to find something new.

[whl.livejournal.com]

Kind of like setting the action in Ytterby, Sweden would have similarly established a basis for finding a new element, right.

That makes sense.

[whl.livejournal.com]

True, but occasionally in an old story, you will come upon the hulk of an old scientific controversy, or something the "New Scientist" of the age tried to puff up into one, or a mistake (widely reported at the time, but now forgotten), entombed far past its "sell by" date.

I'm too distracted at the moment to come up with an example, except of courseJourney to the Center of the Earth, and maybe Velikovsky.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A good one is "memory RNA". This one is still going strong, despite being long obsolete--it even shows up in the new videogame Assassin's Creed, as part of the science-fictional frame story that (probably unwisely) attempts to give logical explanations to all the basic game tropes.

I think Star Trek: TNG gave it a new lease on life in the 1990s.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Very nice summary, especially including the cover images. Thanks for doing this!

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! I well remember reading Seetee Ship when I was young - i.e. about 40 years after it was written. Ah, the asteroid belt was more fun those days, with great lumps of antimatter floating around. Might have made the end of the NEAR mission more interesting though!

[whthorse.livejournal.com]

That's an incredible history Bill. Thanks for bringing it all together. I'd never even thought about the description of a "positronic" brain as something that doesn't really make sense. A head full of anti-matter...there's enough to blow up the ship. And you certainly couldn't go rooting around with a tool to fix it.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

If stories like that were being written today, I suppose they'd be set in the Kuiper Belt.

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

Great little article!

[hradzka.livejournal.com]

Very cool. When Campbell was doing his thing, he was amazing.

(Of course, there was also the time he got into Dianetics. At one point, he took Alfred Bester to lunch, and during the meal attempted to regress Bester to memories in utero. Bester had to hide his face to keep from laughing, and prayed for a way out. A light bulb went on over Bester's head, and he told Campbell that he could see early memories, but they were traumatic, and he didn't want to remember any more. Campbell, mistaking Bester's shaking with suppressed laughter for sobs, bought it.

Best part of the story: in Campbell's office, before their meal, Bester, skeptical of Dianetics, asked if traumatic memories could really be created in utero. Campbell's reply was glorious: "Yes. The fetus remembers. Come have lunch.")

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Very cool. When Campbell was doing his thing, he was amazing.

I don't think that's quite the right adjective.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Was the Negasphere in the original serialized version of Gray Lensman? That was 1939-1940, and the thing was clearly inspired by antimatter though it wasn't 100% accurate.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Was the Negasphere in the original serialized version of Gray Lensman? That was 1939-1940, and the thing was clearly inspired by antimatter though it wasn't 100% accurate.

You're on to something there.

I don't think I can manage a comprehensive account of antimatter in SF, but I would like to hear of any other early instances. Maybe I can turn this timeline into a nice article.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I have a paperback of Blish's The Triumph of Time whose back-cover copy plays up its revolutionary treatment of the amazing new phenomenon of anti-matter, but that's actually much later than these books (and the blurb seems hardly appropriate to the cosmic, elegiac content of the novel anyway).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I thought of an even earlier, more oddball one! Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, 1930.

Dirac originally speculated in 1928 that his holes were protons. The idea didn't really work out, but Stapledon ran with it. In his near-ish future, people develop atomic energy, which consists of a total-conversion ray; when trained on ordinary matter, it causes the electrons and protons to annihilate.

If I recall correctly, there's a confrontation between the evil American bomber fleet and European scientists with a prototype annihilation ray; the ray blows up a whole mountain, but the Americans win anyway and the secret is lost. Much later, people rediscover it and blow up their whole civilization. A lot of that sort of thing goes on.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I was trying to remember what he had happening to the neutrons, but of course: the neutron hadn't been discovered yet. The nucleus was supposed to have protons and electrons in it. That's how far back this was.

This was quite interesting

[techgrrl.livejournal.com]

These posts about the history/etymology/origin of a word, concept or meme are really interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to post.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

Adding to the chorus of "great post."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Further notes on my Seetee researches here.

In his 1980 essay "The Word I Invented: Robotics," Isaac Asimov wrote:

When I first began writing science fiction stories, the positron had been discovered only six years before as a particle with all the properties of an electron except for an opposite charge. It was the first (and, at that time, still the only) bit of antimatter that had been discovered, and it carried a kind of science fictional flavor about it.

That meant that if I spoke of positronic robots rather than electronic robots, I would have something exotic and futuristic instead of something conventional.

"Reason," in the April 1941 Astounding, was the story in which Asimov introduced the word "positronic."

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

The years from about 1928 to 1932 were sort of an uncomfortable interval in the development of atomic/nuclear physics. The physicists concerned knew something else had to be going on in the nucleus. The idea of having the electrons serve to counter the mutual repulsion of the protons didn't really work out well in detail. By 1928, a calculation with the Uncertainty Principle was telling them that electrons couldn't be confined in a volume that small anyway. And the model of beta-decay as an ejection of a "nuclear electron" had interesting problems, one of which led to the proposal of the neutrino. It came as something of a relief to find the neutron soon after this (though how that helped would take a while longer to understand...).

So perhaps it's not surprising that writers were using all sorts of ideas, while feeling the ground of scientific theory continually shifting under them.