Simply amazing. I still thought antimatter was a theory. Can anyone recommend a book on this topic for the layman?
It's a bit of a shame that in elementary school and high school, people are taught about "facts" such as Newtonian physics without exploring also some of the weirdness of quantum physics that challenges classic physics. I.e. I had no idea about all the controversy around how gravity "actually" works until I read a book on string theory - I went 25 years just assuming "yup gravity is a thing and we understand 100% how it works."
Sorry, I don't have a book to recommend, just babbling away.
EDIT: Maybe the string theory book I read would be a good place, actually? I can't remember if it delves much into anti matter - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (Paperback) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8049273-the-elegant-univ...
FYI, there seems to be quite a bit of controversy regarding whether string theory is even science:
>'Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science from attack.”'
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philo...
The standard, scientific method version of science is 'guess a model of how the world works, then run an experiment to see if it's true'. This packages (hides, even) a bunch of principles of rational thought inside of it - for instance, that a stance about how the world works had to be able to be wrong, and that you should be picking your opinions about how the world works based on what you can (repeatedly) demonstrate.
But there are other paths to knowledge- and revelation- gaining that are performed by scientists all the time, yet don't fit this model. It's perfectly legitimate to get a grant to run an experiment to just look at something closely, such as a star or a blank patch of sky, or a material, or an organism. 'I want to collect data on X' is perfectly legitimate as a way to learn about the world. After all you need observations about something in order to build the initial model that you use to generate hypotheses in the Scientific Method (tm) anyway. Another example: sometimes experiments are done just to find more accurate readings of numerical constants.
Anyway, mathematicians and the more theoretical physicists aren't really looking to run experiments to test hypotheses. Instead their 'experiments' are finding new models for looking at things and their 'results' are finding new mathematical statements, or finding ways to prove things that were previously hard to prove, or just finding new ways of looking at things that make thinking about them easier. This is 'output', and a net gain in human knowledge, without being a testable hypothesis, and I think that's fine. It's still subject to the underlying rationalism behind science. But validation is entirely theoretical: a good theory makes things make sense, and doesn't make things not make sense in ways that disagree with physical experiments, and makes things simpler and better. And it's fine that these criteria are abstract and to an extent subjective.
Of course it's still necessary to have a way to say if theorists are failing, or wasting their time, or producing too little or too quality output, and I don't know how that's done or it ought to be done. But it doesn't bother me that they don't produce physically testable results.
What other theories might become testable if we could reach 130 TeV, analyzed by a computing grid with 1 trillion processors and 1 yottabyte of storage?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...
[2]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-b...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_LHC_Computing_Grid
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_7600
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersecting_Storage_Rings
For example: One of the most important higgs signals was the Higgs -> 2 Z boson -> 2 electron + 2 anti-electron decay chain. Or in particle physics jargon H -> ZZ, Z -> e+e-. The important thing is that e+ is an anti-particle, one of the few that was discovered early enough to get its own name (the "positron" was discovered in 1932 [1]).
Since the positron discovery we've discovered so many anti-particles that we stopped giving them special names. We just call them e+, mu+, tau+, p-, etc, to say nothing of the composite particles that are composed of both matter and antimatter.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Experimental_clues_an...
For example, PET Scans use positrons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
It's the building atoms out of it that's tricky, but antimatter is nothing new.
The general idea: You get injected with a tracer containing a β+ emitter. This produces positrons (antimatter) through radioactive decay. When the antimatter collides with regular matter inside your body, it annihilates, producing a pair of gamma rays moving in opposite directions. Those gamma rays can be detected and used to triangulate where the annihilation occured, generating a 3D image of where the tracer has accumulated in your body.
Typically, the tracer will be something that looks like glucose to the body, so it's accumulated in areas of high metabolic activity. This allows us to see what parts of your body are active. (For example, seeing which neurons in your brain are firing.)
More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
Antimatter, then, predates the discovery of quarks.
Your use of the word "theory" here seems to be a misnomer akin to the common statement "But X is just a theory."