The first science fiction story featuring antimatter
October 17, 2008 | 12:57 pm
Writer Scott Edelman stands in the doorway of the shack where Jack Williamson wrote the first science fiction story to feature antimatter. Photo courtesy of Scott Edelman.
Fermilab’s Bill Higgins is an avid science fiction fan and an equally avid researcher. One result is a fascinating pair of articles in the current issue of symmetry: An essay explaining how the concept of antimatter–then known as “contraterrene matter”–made its way into science fiction, and a logbook featuring a yellowed page from the manuscript of a story by Jack Williamson.
His story, “Collision Orbit,” appeared in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the pen name Will Stewart. In it, engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene asteroids by finding a way to manipulate them without touching them, using magnetic fields. (Read the logbook from this issue for more information.)
Williamson followed “Collision Orbit” with three sequels for Astounding that firmly established contraterrene matter—more commonly known as “antimatter”—in the toy box of science fiction, alongside spaceships, ray guns, and time machines.
The accompanying logbook tells how Williamson wrote the story on a secondhand typewriter in a small, unpainted shack he had built on his family’s ranch in New Mexico.
Jack Williamson, then 95, poses with Edelman and a copy of the December 1928 Amazing Stories magazine, which contains his first published story. Photo courtesy of Scott Edelman.
For those who want to see just how small that shack was, here are photos from a 2003 tour of the Williamson homestead, part of the 27th annual Jack Williamson Lectureship at Eastern New Mexico University. Williamson had been a professor of English there. The 2003 event celebrated not only his long career in writing and teaching, but also the 75th anniversary of the sale of his first short science-fiction story. Williamson kept on writing and publishing stories until his death at 98. Here we see him at the age of 95, schmoozing with fans and recalling the early days. Thanks to writer and editor Scott Edelman for this photographic trip back in time.
Glennda Chui
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October 23rd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
There were earlier science fiction stories about anti Matter.
This is from a book I am writing (sorry about the TeX)
In 1884, Charles Howard Hinton described antimatter in terms of the vortex theory of matter. He didn’t get the credit he deserved because antimatter wasn’t discovered until 1932, by which time the vortex theory of matter had been abandoned and his prediction long forgotten. But still his description is clear:
\begin{quotation}
Take a pencil, and round it twist a strip of paper–a flat spill will do. Now, having fastened the ends on to the pencil by two pins, so that it will not untwist, hold the paper thus twisted on the pencil at right angles to the surface of a looking glass; and in the looking-glass you will see its image. Now take another pencil and another piece of paper, and make a model of what you see in the glass. You will be able to twist this second piece of paper in a spiral round this second pencil so that it is and exact copy of what you see in the glass. Now put the two pencils together end to end, as they would be if the first pencil were to approach the glass until it touched it, meeting its image: you have the real copy of the image instead of the image itself. Now pin together the two ends of the pieces of paper, which are near together\ldots hold firmly and pull the other ends\ldots, so as to let each twist exercise its nature on the other.
You will see that the two twists mutually annihilate each other. Without your unwrapping the paper, the twists both go, and nothing is left of them.
This is the mechanical conception I wish you to adopt—there are such things as twists. Suppose by some means to every twist there is produced its image twist. These two, the twist and its image, may exist separately; but suppose that whenever a twist is produced, its image twist is also produced, and that these two when put together annihilate each other.
If we consider a twist and its image, they are but the simplest and most rudimentary type of an organism. What holds good of a twist and its image twist would hold good of a more complicated arrangement also. If a bit of structure apparently very unlike a twist, and with manifold parts and differences in it—if such a structure were to meet its image structure, each of them would instantly unwind the other, and what was before a complex and compound whole, opposite to an image of itself, would at once be resolved into a string of formless particles. A flash, a blaze and all would be over.
To realize what this would mean we must conceive that in our world there were to be for each man somewhere a counter-man, a presentment of himself, a real counterfeit, outwardly fashioned
like himself, but with his right hand opposite his original’s right hand. Exactly like the image of the man in a mirror.
And then when the man and his counterfeit met a sudden whirl, a blaze, a little steam, and the two human beings, having mutually unwound each other, leave nothing but a residuum of formless particles.
\end{quotation}
Hinton was not quite right. At the end, instead of “a residuum of formless particles” there would be a great flash of energy, but I could not improve on the rest of Hinton’s description of antimatter. Which is rather strange, wonderful and most marvelous in that Hinton’s words were published in 1884. Charles Howard Hinton was a mathematician who wrote science fiction and the above description of antimatter appeared in Scientific Romances, Volume 1 (1884).
I didn’t read it there. Because the story of Charles Hinton gets even stranger. Not only did he predict antimatter forty seven years before Dirac received the Nobel prize for predicting it, he talked about topics of current interest: higher dimensions. I read Hinton’s description of antimatter in {\em Speculations on the Fourth Dimension; Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton}, \cite{Rucker1980}. Just a few pages after this remarkable prediction, Hinton described the role of higher dimensions in determining the structure of matter as a vortex in four dimensions.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am
In all candor, I should point out that Jack Williamson’s “Collision Orbit” was not the first story to feature antimatter. I know of at least one very clear prior example, and a couple of others worth arguing about.
The earliest story I know of featuring antimatter is John D. Clark’s “Minus Planet,” in Astounding for April 1937. Astronomers discover an antimatter planet that threatens to collide with the Earth. Using beer-and-slide-rules superscience, they maneuver the Moon into its path to annihilate it.
Doc Smith, that is, Edward Elmer Smith, master of two-fisted space opera, gave his good guys a weapon called a “negasphere,” which annihilates anything it touches. It is something like antimatter, something like a black hole, and something like negative mass– but I am inclined to count it as an instance of antimatter. This first appeared in Gray Lensman, which began serialization in October 1939.
Isaac Asimov called his robotic brains “positronic” in “Reason,” April 1941, but antimatter physics doesn’t figure in his stories and he later admitted that he used the word because it sounded cool.
As a kind of precursor to the Seetee stories, John Campbell got the astronomer Robert S. Richardson to write a nonfiction article, “Inside-Out Matter,” in the November 1941 Astounding.
So Jack Williamson didn’t write the very first story about antimatter. But he did publish a series of four long stories, appearing in the most prominent science fiction magazine, with the properties of antimatter very much in the foreground. So I claim nevertheless that “Colllision Orbit” and its sequels planted antimatter firmly in the landscape of science fiction.
Williamson’s comic strip with artist Lee Elias, “Beyond Mars,” also brought “seetee” to the attention of funnies-reading New Yorkers in the 1950s.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
All very interesting material in the history of ideas! I do believe that Williamson’s Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock became the popularizing works for antimatter.