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From: chip@t4test.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: net.bio,net.physics
Subject: Re: A Problem To Reflect Upon
Message-ID: <1177@t4test.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Oct-84 00:59:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: t4test.1177
Posted: Mon Oct 22 00:59:59 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Oct-84 04:54:19 EDT
References: <168@ihnet.UUCP>
Organization: Intel Corp./Santa Clara
Lines: 40
Summary: "How would you like to live in a Looking-Glass House?"

--- REFERENCED ARTICLE ---------------------------------------------

>From: eklhad@ihnet.UUCP (K. A. Dahlke)
>Date: 19 Oct 84 23:45:35 GMT
>
>Any thoughts on this irrelevant and unimportant topic??

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	"It was not until several years after the publication of
_Through the Looking-Glass_ that stereochemistry found positive
evidence that orgainc substances had an asymetric arrangement of
atoms.  Isomers are substances that have molecules composed of exactly
the same atoms, but with these atoms linked together in structures that
are topologically quite different.....

	"Of course a true mirror reflection of milk would also reverse
the structure of the elementary particles themselves.  In 1957 two
Chinese-American physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, received
the Nobel prize for theoretical work that led to the "gay and wonderful
discovery" (in Robert Oppenheimer's happy phrase) that some elementary
particles are assymetric.  It now appears likely that particles and
their antiparticles (that is, identical particles with opposite
charges) are, like stereoisomers, nothing more than mirror-image forms
of the same structure.  If this is true, then looking-glass milk would
be composed of "anti-matter," which would not even be drinkable by
Alice; both milk and Alice would explode as soon as they came into
contact.  Of course, an anti-Alice, on the other side of the
looking-glass would find anti-milk as tasty and nourishing as usual."

	[references follow]

	---The Annotated Alice
	   by Lewis Carrol, notes by Martin Gardner
	   Bramhall House, 1960

-- 

Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara
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