Antimatter still has a positive mass. It’s not some exotic negative mass matter.
Well, yes, as far as our theories go. But we also “knew” that light was a wave that traveled through the luminiferous aether, which permiated all of space… Until we tested that theory with the Michelson-Morely experiment, and it turned out our theories were completely wrong and physics as we knew it was completely upended.
Point being, it’s important to actually test our theories instead of assuming they’re completely correct just because most of their predictions are accurate.
Aether was a fudge and pretty sure Einstein knew it. Forgot the exact history, but it was made up from whole cloth to make the math work out.
Well yeah. The concensus at the time was that light is a wave, and waves need a medium to travel through, so they just made up some stuff that must be everywhere and called it the aether. The null result of the interferometer experiment is part of what led to the discovery that light is a particle that acts like a wave, and so doesn’t need a medium.
I’m pretty sure every physicist in existence knows that. It’s just a simple principle that’s really hard to test, so actually testing it is pretty cool. Like dropping a steel ball and a feather on the Moon.
Those are pretty expensive experiments. Are you sure they do them just because they are cool?
We choose to go to the moon and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they make me hard
It is possible to do something cool and something that furthers science at the same time. Deep down, doing cool stuff is probably why most research scientists exist. Because it isn’t for the mad stacks of cash, I can promise you that.
Let the science people do their pew-pew-pew thing with the fancy toys and pretend they’re in Star Trek. At least they’re enjoying themselves while helping the rest of us out!
It makes me sad that dudebro science has become so prevalent that people forget the main reason we do this stuff. Saying you’re into science to discover things and not to blow shit up is like saying you go to a monster truck derby to watch people drive and not run over cars.
It has a positive mass, and in every other way it acts just like normal matter going backwards in time (cpt inversion).
If, despite its positive mass, it was pushed back by gravity, then it would have given even more weight to the theory that antimatter is just matter moving backwards.
Since gravity is such a wonky interaction, I’m not even sure this result disproves the time-reversal theory entirely!
Why would inverting charge make particles go backwards in time? Electrons have opposite charge to protons and they don’t seem to. Positrons have the opposite charge to electrons and as far as I know they don’t go backwards?
I think you’re misinterpreting cpt reversal symmetry, which is if you mirrored the universe in terms of charge, time and parity it would essentially evolve the same
It’s been many years since I was invited with particle physics, so it’s a bit muddled in my memory… i could be wrong on the details here. It could be the CP symmetry instead of the CPT symmetry.
It’s not that positrons go back in time, but more like “if an electron went backwards in time, it would look exactly like a position”. The Feynman diagram of an electron and position annihilaton is the same as that of an electron bouncing on photons, expect the angle is rotated such that the electron bounces backwards in time.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feynman_EP_Annihilation.svg#mw-jump-to-license
If an anti-gravity particle does exist (that expels both normal mass and itself), it would be incredibly hard to find.
They would push away from each other and disperse outside of the solar system.
Like 1 particle per 1000sq km kind of thing.
Which would push all the galaxies away from each other, always accelerating away from each other, but in a decreasing fashion…
It would also press inward on galaxies making it look like mass on the outer rims of galaxies having more gravity than they should.
And there would be a SHIT ton of this matter, that would be dark because it’s so spread out,
…wait a minute …
Dark energy is not galaxies moving away from each other but instead its new space being created in between which makes it appear like they are moving away from each other. That’s why distant redshifts can exceed the speed of light, because they are not really moving, so the speed of light law is not broken.
Could it be a particle that has negative mass ?
In this case it would not appear in the CERN.
I’m way out of my field so please anyone, correct me if I’m wrong.
The CERN is creating particles from pure energy, E=mc² means that if you focus a lot of energy in a single point some of the energy is turned into matter. From my understanding the generated matter is random particles.
Now if we want to create a particle with negative mass we need negative energy. What is negative energy? I have no idea but if we manage to focus a huge amount of negative energy we will get particles with negative mass.
I have a basic understanding of CERN, but if it comes down to it, everything they do there still blows my mind.
Like, imagine being the person who designed that experiment.
“Here is a CERN. Find out how antimatter falls.”
And some one/team was like ok I got this. And then they showed up one day & did it.
“Down. It goes down.”
I know it was much more complex than that, but still…imagine having the brain that stores the information required to do this. It’s so fucking cool.
What you don’t see is the hundreds of people and countless hours of work that went into stuff like this. None of it is one person just showing up and making it happen. Everyone has their specific skill set and role in the project, no one knows everything. We see the result, but the day to day of this work would look mind numbingly boring to most people. It’s not about geniuses having inspiration strike and figuring out something amazing, it’s about months and years of staring at spreadsheets, analyzing data, fixing your mistakes, double checking, running the test again. It’s about not giving up not being wicked smart, though the people working on it are definitely smart. Also this is the expected result. We were sure it fell down not up already, this was a confirmation of that.
It amazes me that people have this much ability and brains to complete such things. Meanwhile look at me. sigh
It is many, many people working together. No one person has this much ability or brains, only by working together do we make big modern scientific discoveries.
Reading stuff like this is super funny when you have absolutely no idea how any of this stuff works.
“Wow, antimatter falls down! Gravity sure do be like that!”
It confirms what pretty much everyone already assumed would happen, but it’s one of those things that should be tested just in case. Plenty of times tests have been performed and unexpected results appeared, leading to advancements in science. So if (on the very off chance) it didn’t interact with gravity as expected, that might have led to improvements in our understanding of general relativity and/or quantum mechanics, since gravity is one of the big problems we have in trying to marry the two theories
My understanding of CERN comes explicitly from Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) and Steins Gate (2011) …and possibly The Backrooms (2022)
I do not have the gumption to mess with shadow companies jimmies.