I gag when I read about CERN. Egotistical scientists that are all about studying the insignificant when you compare it to the needs of the world. How many billions are spent on this scientific trinket while people die of disease and malnutrition? I\'m not against scientific research at all. But the funds should be put to where humanity has its greatest needs, not big toys that promise nothing.

It isn\'t just the opposing charges of matter and antimatter that cause annihilation. Protons and electrons have opposite charges and don\'t annihilate on contact, and neutrons and antineutrons have each no charge but will annihilate.

Every property of a particle\'s corresponding antiparticle is opposite, with the exception of mass.

Hey Australian, Admittedly this is pure science and expensive pure science at that, but it still has merit. Plus, who knows what can come of research like this.

Australian, what would you have Science do? Mass-sterilize the primitive high-birthrate aid-dependent peoples of the Third World?
This Antimatter research is slow and expensive but so was the development of the steam engine. Antimatter might just lead to cheap energy, which in turn could lead to the greening of the Sahara Desert with Antimater-powered Desalinators.

Australian, I\'d suggest you start thinking rather than piping rhetoric. Antimatter, antimatter containment and associated technologies such as fusion reactors are likely to be the source of green power and power storage that get us away from coal and allow centralised load levelling of power grids.

Current \"green\" power \"solutions\" are typically a waste of resources which increase polution, PV Solar being the quintessential example. Because current technologies aren\'t capable of supplying base load and there aren\'t any effective large scale energy storage solutions Nuclear or Coal are the only current and effective solutions. This science may change that.

@ Australian.

Science is a good way to help mankind.
Did you ever saw Star Trek?
They power the Enterprise by using Matter-Antimatter Anihiliation.
I know that is Sci-Fi. But there are many things that we use today that was Sci-Fi a few years ago.

So imagine that one day we can harvest energy from matter-Antimatter reaction. Isn\'t that whorth to be investigated?

Exactly SiGMA. Photon Torpedo\'s are an antimatter warhead. That\'ll please Julian ;)
Lets use science to give us all SUV\'s and die out in a generation.... or lets explore the ultimate question of WHY.... well maybe it\'s little brother HOW :) Fine work chaps

@Australian. I\'d rather buy McMansions and SUVs and bail out banks to the tune of trillions rather than having limitless energy from an antimatter reactor. I love consuming. I earn money and buy a bunch of useless crap and call it an existence.
Humans were created to reason about the universe. There is no other singular purpose for humanity than to strive for understanding. All the poor and disadvantaged people of the world were made that way by greed and cruelty inflicted upon them by other selfish bastards. Perhaps if they embraced science they wouldn\'t behave like total degenerates.

You lost me at "Anyone who's read Angels and Demons...\" Everything else after that just read, blah blah blAh, blah blah, blah blAh blah (a la Charlie Brown\'s teacher). How can you use a non-scientific-based novel to describe a science experiment? Or rather, how dare you? At least you could\'ve mentioned \'One of the things Dan Brown\'s novel got right was the way antimatter could be kept from touching matter...\' etc., etc. Really disappointed.

Don\'t you people see that the collision of matter and anti-matter could cause enough of a reaction to create energy suitable for powering entire cities? If we could find a way to contain the reaction, we could possibly find the next power source for the world. And because the anti-matter can be created, we should have an unlimited supply of power for an eternity. All we need to do is increase our field of studies, to think \"outside the box\", and to chart the unknown possibilities of existence just as we try to chart our own universe.