Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

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.)