Science: Reversed Matter?

The world's most powerful atom-smasher, as planned at present, will not be in the U.S., but in Switzerland. The machine may be powerful enough (30 billion electron volts) to create new matter—even a new kind of matter—out of energy.

Last spring ten nations (Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, France, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Yugoslavia) organized CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) and agreed to chip in for a nuclear research center. Continental Europe has plenty of big scientific brains, but no big apparatus.

Last week CERN decided to build its center near Geneva. Feature of the place will be a new kind of cosmotron (a super-powerful particle accelerator) made possible by a theory recently developed by scientists at Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. The new machine's principal part, a doughnut-shaped magnet, will be 600 ft. in diameter, ten times the diameter of Brookhaven's 3 billion-volt cosmotron, the largest now in operation.

Said Pierre Auger, head of UNESCO's natural sciences department: "If we knew just what the machine was going to produce, we wouldn't be building it. We're like explorers going out into an ocean. We know something of what lies ahead, but we do not know all that we are going to find." The great machine, Auger thinks, will certainly create protons, neutrons and various types of mesons.

It may even create negative protons, which would be really sensational. Ordinary protons are positively charged. Combined with one or more negative electrons, they form the familiar atoms of ordinary matter. But scientists have already created positive electrons (positrons). This suggests that it may be possible to create negative protons (not yet named nega-tons). Combined with positrons, these should form "reversed matter." An atom of "anti-hydrogen," for instance, would have a negative proton as its nucleus, with a positron instead of an electron revolving around it.

Not all physicists agree that negative protons are possible, but some like to speculate on the properties of reversed matter. It may turn into energy as soon as it encounters atoms of normal matter (when a positron hits an electron, they annihilate each other, leaving gamma rays as an X to mark the spot. All such possibilities, says Auger, are on "the frontiers of science." Only the 30 billion-volt cosmotron can test their reality.