Anti Ice

ISBN 0061054216

A novel by StephenBaxter that took as its premise that sometime in the mid 1800's a large chunk of anti-matter went into Earth Orbit. For some reason, the anti-matter would only interact explosively with normal matter if its temperature went above freezing (something to do with magnetic fields...).

A chunk of AntiIce (as it's called) fell to Earth in the arctic and was exploited by Victorian English engineers as the ultimate power source -- imagine what you can do with a really BIG steam engine and a dewar flask ...

And how did this stuff get from outer space to the arctic without heating up on entry?

Hey, it's only a story. Remember IsaacAsimov 's robots with their PositronicBrains?? He had no idea in hell how they worked!

[Out of print. One "collectable" edition available through Amazon as of 1/24/2001.]

Much better availability and prices (of course! ;-) on HalfDotCom:

http://www.half.com/products/books/detail.cfm?item=18948

I found my copy of this book at a local FleaMarket?. That's the only (good) ScienceFiction book I've found there, but I keep coming back to try to find more. Upon finishing this book, I was shocked to find how little our society today has changed from the Victorian society in AntiIce -- JonathanRosebaugh

PS. Regarding the question in the first section, i think it's sorta like the meteors that fall to earth today. A very large chunk came down very fast, and some of it survived.

Yes, but some of the energy from the parts that did burn would have gone into the rest, heating it in a chain reaction. --DanielKnapp

I don't think so. A few years ago there was a story about a farmer who found a meteorite in his field. It had only landed that night, and something I remember from that - since it struck me as odd - was the statement that "it was so fresh, it was still cold."

Perhaps this is something like the effect where you can float a drop of water on an above-100-degree hotplate. The outerlayer heats up and boils, but the layer of steam it forms insulates the drop against further heating. -- AdamBerger

Nope - doesn't work like that. With a drop of water, or a meteor(ite) on entry, matter that's been boiled off insulates the core - yes - but here we need to insulate matter from anto-matter. That's not possible with either matter or anti-matter - it's only possible with vacuum.

: Upon re-reading the original I observe that we do in fact only need to keep it cold, so it would work. The real nonsense is that the anti-matter only explodes when it gets warm.

Look, folks -- this is Stephen Baxter we're talking about. This author's science is a little, um, loose, y'know? Just dismiss this title as the trivia it is.