Matter Meets Antimatter in Akademgorodok

It is worth traveling halfway round the world to visit the antiworld of Andrei Budker. There, at his Nuclear Physics Institute in Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk, he makes beams of antimatter collide with beams of matter, doing high‐energy physics experiments on a low‐energy physicist's budget. We spent a week in Akademgorodok, the Siberian science town, and had several pleasant visits with Budker and his wife Ludmilla at their home. At the institute we saw his latest venture, a 25‐GeV proton‐antiproton device, being built, toured his factory for mass producing accelerators, and looked at beams of positrons and electrons circling in one of his smaller storage rings.