# Mineral X *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Aug 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *11 Aug 1999, 06:43* Mitchell A. Bailey, To step back and state the obvious: this is a case where the medieval/rennaisance vocabulary of Commonwealth science has Wolfean ambiguities when describing post-twentieth century technology. The term "antimaterial" hints at antimatter, a hint reinforced by the degradation of the substance in contact with normal Urth matter (as you noted before). The term "iron" is slippery, because while it might have been only used in the sense of "a heavy metal," it is long known for having magnetic properties (so "lead" would have been a case of a very heavy metal with no magnetic properties). So there are antimatter-like effects, and antigravity effects, with just a hint of magnetic forces at play. Call Doctor Utonium--this is a job for the Powerpuff Girls! =mantis= ---