One example is Jack WIlliamson’s Seetee stories. Seetee is phonetic for C-T which stands for ContraTerrene matter, that being an old alternate term for antimatter.
I remember an old episode of Super Friends in which our heroes were sent hurtling in a space ship towards the anti-matter part of the universe, oh no! That episode also included an answer to the OP’s question:
So that episode didn’t just postulate an anti-matter region of the universe. There were also counterparts to the characters and the spaceship they were in, who not coincidentally have been sent hurtling toward the matter region of the universe. So the answer is clear: Just head that way toward that part of the universe you suspect is actually antimatter, and watch for your antimatter counterparts who have been doing the same exact thing as you coming the opposite way. But of course, you need to stop before you meet, otherwise, kablooey!
I was going to mention those stories as an early example. Some information here.
Well, there is an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but it only shows up at all in the weak interaction, and even then only at around the one part per thousand level. Even for a chemical system with as much finesse as a living organism, it’s hard to imagine that having any detectable chemical effect. It’d be more plausible for someone to get sick from the wrong ratio of chlorine isotopes, or something.
To be honest, I never paid much attention to the topic, beyond noting “there isn’t a consensus”. I’m not, myself, a particle physicist; I was only interested in the question because it impacted on a question of black hole evaporation, which I was interested in, and it was nearly as easy to just publish both sets of numbers as one of them.
But you’ll note that I phrased my statement strictly in terms of what was claimed, not what the experiments actually showed. And since I’ve been out of the field entirely for a decade now, I wasn’t aware that that result had been completely debunked.
Considering this individual was inside a ship made of antimatter, and constantly irradiated by the annihilation of meteoric dust on their hull, the most likely cause of sickness would be gamma rays.
Yeah, I just wanted to correct the statements that there were multiple experiments and that they “claim[ed] to come down extremely confidently on the Majorana side.” There were 0.5 experiment’s worth of claim (since half the team didn’t sign on to the claim of a signal), and the claim was never stated beyond just being possible evidence. Whoever was in your audience that day long ago and insisted on something stronger was misinformed. (Separately, there are some that feel the theoretical advantages of Majorana neutrinos is enough to settle the case. Unfortunately that’s not how empirical science works. Maybe your audience member was cut from this cloth.)
Yeah, setting N_{\nu} to N_{\nu}+3 doesn’t seem too onerous!
I specifically remember the audience member claiming that it was a 6-sigma result, which if true, would be extremely confident. But I have no idea what led him to that level of confidence, whether he was one of the original experimenters himself, or just very convinced by them.
Personally, my feeling is that lepton number is awfully strongly conserved, for something that doesn’t even exist, and so I find Dirac theoretically preferable. But yeah, “theoretically preferable” doesn’t cut it.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says
Antimatter galaxies, or even an entire antimatter universe created in the Big Bang at the same time as our matter universe, have been postulated by physicists, with the enthusiastic support of the sf community. A E van Vogt was one of the first to use this idea, which has since become a cliché of pulp sf. James Blish’s A Clash of Cymbals (1959) climaxes with ultimate holocaust as an anti-universe impinges upon our own. The concept is dealt with more sophisticatedly in Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (1975).
So that’s two more, plus the unnamed van Vogt story. That one might be The Storm, which I haven’t read, but seems to be about the intrusion of antimatter stars into our universe. A preview shows that like Williamson, he also uses the term “seetee” to refer to antimatter. Since the encyclopedia calls it a “cliché”, there must be a number of others.
In the novel Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods it’s mentioned that a challenge to inter-universal travel is that half of all universes are antimatter, and you really don’t want to screw up and arrive in a universe of the wrong polarity.
The Negative Zone in Marvel comics is an antimatter universe, thus the name.
Star Trek’s The Alternative Factor featured an antimatter universe, with about as much scientific accuracy as you’d expect.
This is a tangent probably better suited for a separate thread, but in any case: You are getting effective lepton number conservation “for free” just by having small neutrino masses and a maximally parity-violating weak interaction, so you don’t also need neutrinos to be Dirac in nature.
Maybe 5 episodes of the original Star Trek are more unwatchable than that one. Not that any fiction is actually applicable to the original question, being ficticious.