Is antimatter a theory or does it exist?

[PhysDrew]

Wow, first posted in 2008 and still going strong!
For what it's worth I found Feynman's lecture at the 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures to be a good read on the subject, and explains nicely why there must be anti-particles.

Cheers

 

[FtlIsAwesome]

a group of antimatter that has an equaly negative mass

Antimatter and negative mass are not the same thing.
Antimatter has positive mass.

So anti matter isn't really anti matter at all.

No, antimatter is antimatter.

I wish science would not have such ambiguous misleading terms such as this.

Huh? It isn't misleading or ambiguous. It has the opposite charge that matter has, that's why its called antimatter.

 

[Drakkith]

Antimatter and negative mass are not the same thing.
Antimatter has positive mass.


No, antimatter is antimatter.


Huh? It isn't misleading or ambiguous. It has the opposite charge that matter has, that's why its called antimatter.

Heh, I can see how its misleading. If you instead described matter as having 2 parts, and labeled them as matter A and matter B (corresponding to matter and antimatter respectively) I think less people would be confused. But it's not a big deal. Once you get into science at all you learn the differences.