Food for Thought but Not Fuel for a Starship

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Like Alice stepping through the looking glass, European physicists have started to explore the mirror image to our everyday world by creating the first atoms on earth composed entirely of "antimatter".

Professor Walter Oelert and his colleagues have made anti-hydrogen at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, near Geneva. Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, it appears identical in every respect to its twin, ordinary hydrogen - the simplest chemical element in the universe.

But the constituents of anti-hydrogen have physical properties that exactly cancel out those of the normal atom, so if one atom touches its antimatter counterpart they annihilate each …