Does anyone recall the name of a SF first contact story where humans encounter an alien ship, and use the weak force to define left and right. At the very end, as the human and alien space walk out to meet each other, the alien extends its left hand to shake ....
I first read this story in the late 1970's I believe. I recall the style as possibly being similar to Niven's, but cannot swear to that.
Could this be a story within Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe? - it was published in 1987 so too late for your given time frame and is non-fiction.
There is a chapter where they are explaining anti-matter and they are talking to aliens that do not understand clockwise, left and right nor up and down.
The humans on the radio explain north through the electrons of Cobolt-60 attracting to the north pole within a magnetic field. From this they understand the concept of clockwise.
Then they say what if we went to meet the aliens?
When the day comes, we meet and stick out our right hands. Suddenly, we notice that the aliens have stuck out their left tentacles. In a flash we realise that there's been a mistake. The aliens are actually made of anti-matter, who conducted an experiment on ticobolt-60 and measered the spin of anitelectrons that went south.
This story itself is based on a story told by the physicist Richard Feynman at Caltech in the 60s to illustrate a point about anti-matter and charge parity
Imagine you were in two-way contact with some alien species, but only by “telegraph” (i.e., light flashes or radio signals). The well known procedures of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), starting with prime numbers and progressing to pictures, physics, and chemistry information could be used to develop a common language and arrive at a good level of communication.
You could tell the alien how tall you are by expressing your height in mutually understood wavelengths of light. You could tell the alien how old you are as some large number of ticks of a light-frequency clock. Now you want to explain how humans shake hands when they meet, and you describe extending your right hand. “Wait a moment!” says the alien. “What do you mean by ‘right’?”
Feynman also had a punch line to this story.
Suppose, after lots of communication you finally can go into space and meet your alien counterpart. If, as you approach one another, the alien extends its left hand to shake, watch out! He’s made of antimatter!
Here are the full Caltech Lecture Notes from Richard Feynman. Good read if you want to feel really unintelligent.
I cannot find a fiction story based on this story but hope it might point someone to the actual answer for you.
I was looking for a similar (the same?) story, and another user (Mike Stone) helped me identify it. The story I was looking for was "Chance Encounter" by Bertram Chandler. It was first published in New Worlds of Science Fiction #81 (March 1959). I must have come across it in Starships (1983), a short story collection edited by Asimov, et al. In the story, two ships--one made of matter, the other of anti-matter--meet up at the edge of the galaxy, and there's a huge explosion when a shuttle craft from the one ship meets up with a woman in a space suit from the other. But there's nothing in the story about using the weak force to define "left" and "right," so it might not be the one you're looking for. In "Chance Encounter," the two ships communicate by telepathy.
