Why is antimatter like an antimacassar?

Factual Questions
1

Here is a puzzle that has been bothering me for many years. I would appreciate any guess, no matter how wild.

Long ago I read a Stanislav Lem SF story where one of the characters asks a riddle, “why is antimatter like an antimacassar?” Unfortunately, Lem never wrote the punchline to the joke, obviously he intended to tease the reader. Or perhaps something was lost in translation, the original book was written in Polish and translated into english. Or maybe it’s a meaningless pun on two similar words.

So… I investigated, an antimacassar is a protective cover for the back of chairs. And that’s as far as I can go with this. Any ideas?

2

Neither is something that you would want to display prominently in your home.

3

Because they’re both like a writing desk. :slight_smile:

[sub]with apologies to Lewis Carroll[/sub]

4

Just to expound on the definition; men used to groom their hair with a greasy concoction known as macassar oil. If they subsequently rested the back of their head against a piece of furniture they’d leave a stain. So antimacassars were intended to cover the spot where someone would rest their head.

Clearly then, antimacassars were not similar to antimatter in the literal sense. Macassar and antimacassar came into regular contact without creating world shattering expolsions.

5

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/795.html
The Perils of Modern Living
Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.

Remote from Fusion’s origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.

One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.

Then, shouting gladly o’er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.

-- Harold P. Furth
6

It never occurred to me that if there was antimacassar, there had to be macassar.

7

So antimatter exists to keep Uncle Harvey from getting matter oil on the back of the chair? Aha!

8

Macassar is hair oil.

I would love to see a literal gloss for some of the original Polish puns as translated into English (Michael Kandel is a god!) There’s great coverage of the translation of “How the World Was Saved” in Hofstadter’s Le Ton beau de Marot.

9

I’ll give you a hint: The answer ends in -gry.

10

IIRC this Lem book, The Cyberiad, was translated was by Kandel, it’s a masterpiece. He preserved a wonderful amount of wordplay from original polish, but I think that was because the root words are all latin anyway. For example, there’s a funny story about quantum draconics, the protagonist embarks on a scientific approach to dragon killing, by setting up dracon particle detectors.

11

Do you think antimatter and antimacassar are anything alike in Polish? Somehow, I doubt that very much!