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I'm a little rusty on my spacial theories, but i'm pretty sure that if one were to actually hold anti-matter, they would explode. Because you see... you are NOT anti-matter, and when matter and anti-matter come into contact, bad things happen...

This guy you're referring to may have accidentally mistaken all the bullshit that was flying out of his mouth as antimatter. First of all, let me explain this just a small bit, in case we're unclear.

What antimatter is, is when you take atoms of well, pretty much anything, it doesn't really matter, and then you remove all heat and motion from each one of those individual atoms completely. You make it where all the protons in the atom's nucleus, and then the electrons rotating the outside of it, completely lose all energy and thus, stop. If this happens, then essentially what occurs next is that all those sub-atomic particles begin collapsing in on themselves (like a solar system whose sun has just died) and you have material that is neither matter, nor energy. Voila, antimatter.

Now, that being said, electricity is energy that requires a medium to travel through. Antimatter is basically, a graveyard of sub-atomic particles. The undead zombies of the world of physics. I could be wrong, believe me I am nowhere near an expert on anything antimatter, but if I understand it correctly, as there is no way for electrical energy, which requires conducive particles to jump between, to travel between atoms that aren't moving, it's my understanding that antimatter would actually be the world's best supressant of electrical energy. In other words, the opposite of a lighting rod.

All that is a moot issue however, as Jon-Oh said, because the moment your little friend with the s**t-covered lighting rod somehow "get's his hands on" any amount of antimatter, he goes away. Once again, I'm no expert as it's pretty much all theory: no one in the history of the world except two of the most powerful mages ever has successfully created antimatter yet. That being said, the idea is that if you did have facilites/ materials to be able to control antimatter long enough to even create it, and then you added a proportional amount of any kind of actual matter (ie: plutonium, lung tissue, a Cheeto) and put any kind of energy to it, the antimatter particles would jump back into "life" and release enough energy in the process to make two or three or ten simultaneous nuclear weapons going off look like those little Karate Poppers that everyone loves to toss down on the sidewalk on the Fourth of July.

...

So, basically, Lightning Rod Guy is a dipshit. Hope that helps.

this is just my kind of vague area of expertise n_n
So I'll give you my thoughts on it as well~

Well, lightning is just an electric charge jumping across an insulator when the difference becomes to great for whatever insulator to hold back and anti matter has changes just as regular matter does-
the problem lies in the particles that make up matter and anti matter- I'm sure we're all somewhat familiar with the ideas of electrons and protons but anti matter consists of positrons and negatrons (I think I got the name wrong- it's doesn't matter though,) so a means by which to carry these charges through the opposite material is missing.
To add to that problem when matter comes in contact with antimatter the two essentially cancel each other out (much like how imposing a copy of a wave over itself but offset by half of a wavelength nullifies all amplitude of both waves leaving silence,) but produce a lot of energy- touching a staff made out of the stuff would disintigrate his hands before blowing his wrists apart and perhaps more of him depending on how much energy is released- though it's generally quite a lot of energy. If his entire hand was cancelled out by parts of the staff I doubt there would be much of him left after the energy that was released had dissapated into the atmosphere.

And Thad is correct about needing forcefields to actually contain anti matter in any way since it would cancle out any physical container-
Archmage on the otherhand has described antimatter in a way that I've never heard before and doesn't fit in with the methods used to create it in laboratory conditions (ya we can do it but we don't have any sort of forcefield that successfully keeps it from fizzing out with some standard matter- and it's a huge waste of energy to make antimatter when you can't even keep the stuff around for more than a few microseconds. So we basically can't make it at this point.)
The nullification this is best explained with anti matter acting as an inverted form of matter and this works out well with the whole big bang area of theory crap as well.
Absolutely halted molecules are the result of absolute zero- well, electrons might still orbit the nucleus at that temperature but I believe it's beyond our ability to measure motion at that point- considderring that much atom movement comes from inter molecular electron shifting (they generally keep atoms apart but when an atom gets close enough it repells the electrons to the other side of the atom somewhat and at that point there's an attractive force-) so they have probably stopped as well.
-and as I recall it antimatter is composed of a different set of quarks (that crap you can break electrons, protons, ect into if you do it just right.)

Anyway, some sort of psychoreactive material would be much better suited to absorbing lightning and potentially emitting it at some later moment as the whole idea of lightning rods is that you connect them to the ground and use the entire earth as a buffer to disperse the charge- which is what lightning aims to do in the first place~

Oh- and you should just attack him with poison gas- no lightning rod would have any effect on that (even if he used lightning to try and knock it away the resulting vacuum would just draw it closer with increased acceleration.)

Yeah. I agree. And if he was Kali, a god of death, the hell would he need machine guns for?

or if you were to play dodge ball and only allow semi-permenate injury?

Kali is a chick. Just thought I'd point that out.

Banshi's Anti-matter online resource. ^_^