The British physicist Paul A.M. Dirac was the first person to speculate the existence of antimatter in 1928, four years before antimatter was even seen.  He thought that by taking the mirror image of matter, reversing its coordinates one would have the opposite of matter.  He thought of antimatter as the absence of matter, and when the two would come into contact, they would annihilate one and other, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.

Antimatter was not truly seen however, until 1932 when Caltech physicist Carl Anderson was working on gamma rays.  He was using a device called a cloud chamber, which looks at the debris left over from gamma rays striking the atmosphere, and he was noticing all of the expected debris, protons, electrons, even nuclei. But on August 22, 1932, he saw a particle with the exact mass of an electron, only with a positive charge.  This was the first antimatter seen by human eyes, which he named the positron.  However, it was until 1979 until the scientist Robert Golden discovered the first anti-proton.

Today the search for antimatter continues at CERN and at the Fermilab.  Fermilab is the largest producer of antimatter today, being able to produce roughly 60 billion antiprotons per hour. To impress upon one how precious those antiprotons are, the accelerator uses about 13 megawatt-hours of energy and requires the attention of 20 staff members, which equates to many million trillions of dollars to produce one pound of antimatter.  In fact, if one collected all the antimatter produced in all the labs since humanity knew of its existence, the amount would still only be equivalent to one-millionth of a grain of sand, which in itself contains 600 trillion protons.

CERN and Fermilab are both working on projects which would help us to understand CP “charged parity” violation.  A CP violation basically comes down to that the particle and its corresponding antiparticle behaved differently.  In 1964 a group of physicists led by James Cronin and Val Fitch discovered a slight asymmetry in the behavior of neutral kaons and their antiparticle.  A kaon is a combination of a strange quark and a down quark or their antiquark counterparts.  This original violation is known as a “mixing” violation because it involves “mixing” of the kaon and its antiparticle.  Since 1962, scientists at physics laboratories have been trying to observe an asymmetry in the decay, as opposed to the mixing of the neutral kaon.  In March of 1999, Fermilab's KTeV research team announced they had finally solved the puzzle of "epsilon prime over epsilon" which is a double ratio of different modes of decay of neutral kaons and their antiparticles into pi mesons, or pions. If they found a value different from zero, it would signal a new-direct form of CP violation. In fact, their result was "epsilon prime over epsilon equals 28 plus or minus 4.1 times 10-4". "But what is epsilon?" one may ask. Kaons and anti-kaons are made up of smaller particles labeled K1 and K2. Occasionally, about one time in 500 K2 turns into K1, and that fraction is called epsilon.  This mysterious occurance is beyond explaination of scientists as of yet. Further research must be done to address the reasons why the tiny K2 particle can simply switch to the similar K1.

From this breakthrough in the understanding of antimatter, research has a multiple areas in which to explore. Scientists could try to recreate the beginning of the universe with equal amount of matter and antimatter to try to experimentally demonstrate that there will always be matter left over. Even with equal amounts, the new finding regarding epsilon and kaons shows that some antimatter spontaneously turns into matter, therefore there will always be more matter than antimatter. The bottom line of antimatter research is that it is a huge pool of potential energy, capable of solving all the world's energy shortages. Therefore scientists need to spend more time and effort trying to devise faster, better, cheaper ways (much like NASA) to manufacture antimatter. Once this is accomplished, the boundaries of human existence will be stretched farther than ever thought possible. With unlimited energy, there would be no more hunger, fuel shortages, and very little reason to fight over natural resources. The discovery of an affordable way to manufacture antimatter would possibly be the biggest advancement of humanity since the creation of the wheel. Hopefully, the world's governments will continue to fund such projects.