
The Positive Electron (1933) - viriatus
http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-positive-electron
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kmichaels
Summary for this work in layman terms:

[https://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/anderson.html](https://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/anderson.html)

The positive electron (positron) appears to have been the first anti-particle
identified.

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PaulHoule
There are positrons passing through the room you are in right now...

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hossbeast
Some of us occasionally do go outside

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Dylan16807
If you're taking that as an insult, I think implying that you use HN outdoors
just makes it worse.

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kkylin
One of the consequences of relativistic QM, predicted to exist by Dirac:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Theory)

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delibes
I like that he speculates a positron is an expanded proton. Why not? Probably
less outrageous than antimatter.

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averagewall
There is/was nothing outrageous about antimatter except the name. They could
have called them "complimentary particles" or something more tame sounding.
All particles can interact with other particles and produce reaction products.
There was nothing novel about that either. Just because the reaction products
here happen to be only photons instead of a mixture of photons and other new
particles isn't much of a leap in surprisingness. They already knew about mass
defect and E=mc^2, so the idea of converting part of a particle's mass to
photons was already established.

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rrmm
Indeed, the name and their use in sci-fi settings trips people up into
thinking they are some weird theoretical construct.

Medical imaging is a place where positrons are used in everyday life.
Specifically, PET imaging or positron emission tomography in which a tracer
dye is injected into the body. The tracer is usually biologically active, so
that it is taken up in different amounts by different tissues. The tracer
emits positrons which annihilate when they meet an electron and produce gamma
rays which are then used to image tissue.

