There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them." Inspector Clouseau
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| Science & Technology |
| Physicists Zoom in on Antimatter Behavior |
| 2013-05-01 |
| [An Nahar] Physicists announced a breakthrough Tuesday in their quest to answer one of science's great questions: do the same laws of gravity apply to antimatter -- the obscure counterpart of matter as we know it? Though antimatter is thought to have existed in equal quantities to matter at the moment of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, it is rare today and scientists who wish to study antimatter particles have to manufacture them. In the Universe, antimatter particles are thought to exist mainly around black holes and in cosmic rays. For more than 50 years, scientists have debated whether gravity would attract or repel antimatter particles -- whether they would fall down like conventional matter or "up" due to a kind of antigravity. While the question remains unsolved for now, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Communications they had developed the beginnings of a test that should lead to a conclusive answer. "This is the first word, not the last," said Joel Fajans, a member of the research team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Alpha experiment. "We've taken the first steps toward a direct experimental test of questions physicists and non-physicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years." Antimatter particles have opposite properties to ordinary matter particles, including their electric charge. A positively-charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle equivalent of the negatively-charged electron. When an opposing pair meets, particles and anti-particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy, which means that if an even balance had continued to persist after the Big Bang, the Universe would never have come into being. But how this imbalance came about is a great riddle for particle physics. Scientists also scratch their heads over whether antimatter would respond in the same way as matter to gravity, or whether it would move in an different direction at a different speed. Some believe the fact the Universe is comprised almost entirely of matter could be explained if antimatter did indeed "fall" up. But others assume it would behave the same as matter in reaction to gravity. No proof exists for either theory. "We certainly expect antimatter to fall down, but just maybe we will be surprised," said Fajans, a University of Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, physics professor. "In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works." |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 Obviously you've never had a stormy marriage that ended in divorce, Rob, or you would've known that. ;) |
| Posted by: RandomJD 2013-05-01 17:54 |
#3 Scientists also scratch their heads over whether antimatter would respond in the same way as matter to gravity, or whether it would move in an different direction at a different speed. Had a college prof who had his own grand unified theory of matter, and that model predicted matter with "negative mass". It wasn't antimatter, it just had a negative sign in front of the mass; you could have -2kg of it. I wrote a simple gravity simulation to see how negative masses react to regular masses. The two end up chasing each other through space... |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2013-05-01 15:21 |
| #2 Why not two kinds of anti-matter - one that falls down and the other that falls up? As well as two kinds of matter? Since we don't (or at least I don't) understand just what makes gravity work on normal matter, I don't see that it has to have anything to do with the 'anti-ness' of matter at all. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2013-05-01 12:25 |
| #1 There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them." Inspector Clouseau |
| Posted by: Angolutle Jusolet4879 2013-05-01 07:25 |