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One of the newest, weirdest theories in science--the existence of contraterrene or "reverse matter"--was argued pro & con last week when the Society for Research on Meteorites met at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz. While the atoms of normal matter are made up of negatively charged electrons surrounding a positively charged nucleus of protons and neutrons, in contraterrene matter the charges are assumed to be reversed: the electrons are positive (positrons), the nucleus negative.

"Reverse matter" was first proposed last year as a concept of theoretical physics by Physicist Vladimir Rojansky of Union College. Rojansky suggested that some stars may be made of these reversed atoms.

This was just what meteormen were looking for to explain why some meteors apparently smite the earth, then vanish without a trace. If a contraterrene meteorite wandered into the solar system and met up with terrene matter, the respective sub-atomic charges would cancel out in a great burst of energy and both kinds of matter would vanish into nothing--literally nothing at all. This would explain why Soviet scientists with elaborate geophysical equipment could find no fragments of the great meteorite which smacked Central Siberia in 1908, although similar searches around Canyon Diablo, Arizona's famed meteorite crater, were successful. The Siberian meteorite was perhaps contraterrene, the Arizona meteorite of earthlike matter.

Chief pooh-pooher of the theory last week was Astronomer Charles Clayton Wylie of the University of Iowa. His big objection: contraterrene material zooming earthward would unite with air, "releasing energy such that a gram of meteorite and air would produce an explosion equivalent to that of 15,000 tons of nitroglycerin. Obviously a meteorite made of contraterrene material would be blown to bits . . . high in the upper air. So the assumption ... is impossible."

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