Science News for Kids: Feature: The Mirror Universe of Antimatter

Recommended Web sites:

You can learn more about antimatter at www.livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/ (CERN).

The ATHENA experiment at CERN has a Web site at www.athena.web.cern.ch/athena/ (CERN).

Information about brain scans can be found at www.hhmi.org/senses/e110.html (Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

[book]
The World of Atoms and Quarks — Albert Stwertka
Published by Twenty-First Century Books/Millbrook Press, 1995.
"After two thousand years of searching for the ultimate individual parts of matter, in a search that involved the most brilliant and inventive people in the worlds of chemistry and physics, scientists have now concluded that all matter is made up of three groups of elementary particles. One of those groups is the family of quarks." Delve into the history (and future) of atoms and quarks in this comprehensive book, which goes into radioactivity, the photoelectric effect, quantum numbers, antiparticles, and the strong and weak forces. It also explains some of the different types of particles, including fermions and bosons, hadrons and leptons, and gluons; and elucidates the Standard Model of matter.

From The American Heritage® Student Science Dictionary and The American Heritage® Children's Science Dictionary.

antimatter A form of matter identical to ordinary matter except that its atoms have opposite electrical charges or magnetic characteristics.

big bang The violent explosion of an extremely small, hot, and dense body of matter between 12 and 18 billion years ago. It is viewed as the earliest event in a widely held model of the origin of the universe.

subatomic particle One of the basic units of which atoms and all matter are made. Protons, neutrons and electrons are subatomic particles.