Further Contraterrene Notes

[beamjockey]

Adding to my antimatter timeline I have extended my research a bit further, with the kind help of other scholars:


I've learned that Physics Today ran an obituary for Prof. Vladimir Rojansky of Union College on page 76 of the August 1981 issue, along with a photo. I believe Rojansky coined the term "contraterrene" in 1935.

I've established that the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't know this. Perhaps I can help.

I've ascertained that Jack Williamson's manuscript carbons are in the collection at Eastern New Mexico University, where he taught for so many years, but that most of his letters from John Campbell are not.

I've found that CERN has an Antimatter FAQ to deal with questions about Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, an antimatter novel I have not read.

Q. Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?

A. No.

I've wondered how antimatter got into Star Trek. This doesn't seem to be documented, but I suspect Harvey P. Lynn, a physicist at the RAND Corporation, is responsible. I've decided it's not connected to the Seetee stories. Antimatter propulsion for spacecraft was a common idea in the early Sixties, as a browse through my personal astronautics library will reveal.

I have now read the book version of Seetee Ship. The seams of the fix-up really show, especially between the second story and the third, where a formerly supporting character suddenly becomes the point-of-view guy, and vice versa.

The ideas are nicely inventive: Rock rats live on "terraformed" asteroids-- Williamson coined this term in these stories. An energy crisis is forseeable, since supplies of easily-mined fissionables are dwindling. Contraterrene asteroids are a terrifying hazard to be avoided, but a few rock rats dream of manipulating CT and building CT tools. The key is a "bedplate," a way of magnetically supporting a CT machine without touching it, and this is difficult to develop. Some characters want CT technology as a boundless source of energy, others are seeking annihilation weapons; the tension between the two anticipates the dilemma of fission that was about to unfold in our own world.

A review by james_nicoll appears here. (I am pleased to see that I am not the only guy who sometimes recycles his Usenet postings for Livejournal.)


(That's the Antiproton Source in the background, just behind the steam coming from the circular Booster Pond. AP Zero, the building over the antiproton target, is in the upper left corner.)

Comments

[scarfman]

I've wondered how antimatter got into Star Trek. ... Antimatter propulsion for spacecraft was a common idea in the early Sixties ...

Norman Spinrad credited Roddenberry and Star Trek for making the conventions of science fiction mainstream in the 70s, for such as George Lucas to mine.

I am pleased to see that I am not the only guy who sometimes recycles his Usenet postings for Livejournal.

But ... but isn't that what LiveJournal's for? Everything we used to do on Usenet but stopped because everyone moved to LJ?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's amusing that the CERN FAQ seems to be responding to an Angels and Demons-inspired notion that antimatter is some sort of radical new concept.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

The Seetee books are fine stuff; I read them when I was 15 (they were published separately by Lancer in the mid-60s) and still have Seetee Ship. The measure of a book's excellence is how much of it I can recall 35 or 40 years later, and my vision of Rick's magnetic disk skittering around the room--and the marvelous Good-Bye Jane--are still vivid.

Didn't Bob Forward have a scheme for generating antimatter by lasing the solar corona? I like people who can think that big--even if it takes another thousand years for engineering to catch up.

1981 copy of Physics Today

[(Anonymous)]

Next week we should be launching 1985-1999 on the Physics Today web site. We should finish indexing 1975-1984 sometime during the first quarter of 2008. All obituaries are freely accessible on the web site. Regards Paul Guinnessy, Physics Today Online http://physicstoday.org