The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons.
Real-life professors and scientists are grappling with real antimatter -- the particle physicists' "mirror image" of ordinary matter -- in today's laboratories to create the weapons and space cruisers of tommorrow.
Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature.
Scientists are looking into a futuristic technology that could lead to interplanetary missions and significantly improve cancer treatments to boot.
Antimatter researchers argue that given the rate of technological innovation and unanticipated ingenuity, radical breakthroughs in antimatter technology and near-term applications may be closer at hand than even advocates dare hope.
NASA scientists say that spacecraft fueled by antimatter engines could be only decades away.
An antimatter-aided space drive might bring deep-space missions within our grasp. Engineers at NASA and Pennsylvania State University say that by the end of the century, spacecraft could reach the edges of the Solar System and beyond. They believe an antimatter drive could lead to a one-year round trip to Jupiter, a five-year trek to the heliopause--the boundary separating the Solar System from interstellar space--and, in a 50-year trip, the Oort Cloud, source of the comets.