from the and-hummingbirds-should-not-fly dept.
The apparent symmetry between matter and antimatter is puzzling scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN):
One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time.
To explain it, physicists suppose there must be some difference between matter and antimatter – apart from electric charge. Whatever that difference is, it's not in their magnetism, it seems.
Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign. The work is described in Nature [open, DOI: 10.1038/nature24048] [DX].
"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist," says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN's Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. "An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is."
Previously: Evidence Mounts that Neutrinos are the Key to the Universe's Existence
Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Confirmed in Baryons
LHCb Observes an Exceptionally Large Group of Particles
Possible Explanation for the Dominance of Matter Over Antimatter in the Universe
Related Stories
Evidence mounts that neutrinos are the key to the universe's existence.
New experimental results show a difference in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos behave, which could explain why matter persists over antimatter.
The results, from the T2K experiment in Japan, show that the degree to which neutrinos change their type differs from their antineutrino counterparts. This is important because if all types of matter and antimatter behave the same way, they should have obliterated each other shortly after the Big Bang.
So far, when scientists have looked at matter-antimatter pairs of particles, no differences have been large enough to explain why the universe is made up of matter — and exists — rather than being annihilated by antimatter. Neutrinos and antineutrinos are one of the last matter-antimatter pairs to be investigated since they are difficult to produce and measure, but their strange behaviour hints that they could be the key to the mystery.
Neutrinos (and antineutrinos) come in three 'flavours' of tau, muon and electron, each of which can spontaneously change into the other as the neutrinos travel over long distances. The latest results, announced today by a team of researchers including physicists from Imperial College London, show more muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos than muon antineutrinos changing into electron antineutrinos.
This difference in muon-to-electron changing behaviour between neutrinos and antineutrinos means they would have different properties, which could have prevented them from destroying each other and allow the universe to exist.
[...] The latest results were concluded from relatively few data points, meaning there is still a one in 20 chance that the results are due to random chance, rather than a true difference in behaviour. However, the result is still exciting for the scientists involved.
Dr Morgan Wascko, international co-spokesperson for the T2K experiment from the Department of Physics at Imperial said: "This is an important first step towards potentially solving one of the biggest mysteries in science. T2K is the first experiment that is able to study neutrino and antineutrino oscillation under the same conditions, and the disparity we have observed is, while not yet statistically significant, very intriguing."
The results were presented at the 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago. More detailed information is available at the T2K website and in the presentation (pdf).
Why is there a Universe, and why is it filled with matter, and not equal amounts of matter and antimatter? The last question is a puzzle that has gainfully occupied the minds of and employed physicists for many years. The time spent pondering such questions has not been wasted, as it turns out, as researchers from the Large Hadron Collider b detector report that one of the theoretical paths that allows matter to outnumber antimatter is open for business....Researchers at the LHCb have shown that baryons (along with mesons) also violate Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry, thus making it statistically possible for more matter to be created than antimatter.
(Caveat: Dataset currently provides "only" a 3.3 sigma confidence level.)
The full article, Measurement of matter–antimatter differences in beauty baryon decays which appears in the journal Nature Physics is available at: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
Other coverage:
Ars Technica
phys.org
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
The LHCb experiment at CERN is a hotbed of new and outstanding physics results. In just the last few months, the collaboration has announced the measurement of a very rare particle decay and evidence of a new manifestation of matter-antimatter asymmetry, to name just two examples.
In a paper released today, the LHCb collaboration announced the discovery of a new system of five particles all in a single analysis. The exceptionality of this discovery is that observing five new states all at once is a rather unique event.
The particles were found to be excited states – a particle state that has a higher energy than the absolute minimum configuration (or ground state) – of a particle called "Omega-c-zero", Ωc0. This Ωc0 is a baryon, a particle with three quarks, containing two "strange" and one "charm" quark. Ωc0 decays via the strong force into another baryon, called "Xi-c-plus", Ξc+ (containing a "charm", a "strange" and an "up" quark) and a kaon K-. Then the Ξc+ particle decays in turn into a proton p, a kaon K- and a pion π+.
From the analysis of the trajectories and the energy left in the detector by all the particles in this final configuration, the LHCb collaboration could trace back the initial event – the decay of the Ωc0 – and its excited states. These particle states are named, according to the standard convention, Ωc(3000)0, Ωc(3050)0, Ωc(3066)0, Ωc(3090)0 and Ωc(3119)0. The numbers indicate their masses in megaelectronvolts (MeV), as measured by LHCb.
Significant results, if a bit quarky.
Paper available online at arxiv.org.
Neutrinos and antineutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles because [they are so] difficult to detect, can transform from one type to another. The international T2K Collaboration announces a first indication that the dominance of matter over antimatter may originate from the fact that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently during those oscillations. This is an important milestone towards the understanding of our Universe. A team of particle physicists from the University of Bern provided important contributions to the experiment.
The Universe is primarily made of matter and the apparent lack of antimatter is one of the most intriguing questions of today's science. The T2K collaboration, with participation of the group of the University of Bern, announced today in a colloquium held at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, that it found indication that the symmetry between matter and antimatter (so called "CP-Symmetry") is violated for neutrinos with 95% probability.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Informative) by crafoo on Thursday October 26 2017, @01:54PM (1 child)
If there is one thing I've learned from physicists it's that they take their symmetries very seriously. The twinkle in the eye, the pure joy when they realize they can exploit some symmetry to vastly simplify some problem they're working on.
(Score: 5, Funny) by fishybell on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:18PM
Symmetry wasn't enough for them. They had to go and invent supersymmetry [wikipedia.org].
The nerve of those guys.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:16PM (28 children)
I have a few stupid questions if anybody wants to entertain them.
Can we do chemistry with anti-matter? If I have some positrons, anti-protons, and anti-neutrons, can I make anti-oxygen? (For that matter, can I make oxygen with current tech if I just have a bunch of random electrons, protons, and neutrons?) What about an anti-water molecule? Will it have the same properties as water? I'm guessing a mol of the stuff is way too much to expect to be able to make, but what about measuring the 104.5° bond angle?
I guess where I'm going with this is wondering if perhaps it's possible that certain regions of space are entirely anti-matter, in a more serious sense than bad 60s sci-fi. Because a photon is its own anti-particle, would we even be able tell from Earth? Would the spectral lines be the same?
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:36PM
Good questions, actually. AFAIK it's prohibitevly expensive to produce any chemistry-measurable amount of antimatter. And the produced is mostly anti-protons, I am not aware if anything heavier was ever made. First thing first if they manage to do that, they will measure does it has gravity or anti-gravity.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:40PM (2 children)
I was just looking at the wikipedia page regarding anti-hydrogen and it seems many characteristics are the same as normal hydrogen (it even mentions anti-water).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihydrogen [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:38PM (1 child)
Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source. I really doubt that anti-Oxygen has ever been created, and I'm sure it hasn't been created on Earth.
Now I didn't read the article, and you only said "them mentioned anti-water", so the article *could* be speculation. Or it could be wrong. But don't trust Wikipedia as a primary source. It's best use it to point you at primary sources. Or to confirm details that you already pretty much know. Or that don't matter.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Thursday October 26 2017, @07:21PM
"Or that don't matter."
You mean "that anti-matter"?
;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Interesting) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:40PM (15 children)
My limited understanding is that the current theory is antimatter is repelled by gravity instead of attracted to it, but that this has not been proven conclusively, and many (most?) scientists suspect it will be attracted by gravity the same way matter is. If it is repelled that might explain the difference though - all of the antimatter was fired off into the void, only periodically intersecting with matter, while gravity pulled most matter together.
If it IS repelled, it doesn't seem like it would be practical to have large amounts of the stuff collected together without some kind of containment, so things like a naturally occurring "anti-matter planet" wouldn't be very likely.
That might all be totally wrong and irrelevant though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:57PM
Those CERN (and other) scientists have been working on it [web.cern.ch].
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:10PM (3 children)
In current theory, antimatter has the usual mass and usual attraction of gravity.
There's a couple of problems with that approach. Why wouldn't it attract to itself? And if it does get fired off into the void, why don't we see it in the voids? They're far less dense than if they had a bunch of antimatter present.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Thursday October 26 2017, @07:56PM (2 children)
... and therefore this speculation is rather pointless, but to jump in on it:
If antimatter attracted to antimatter but repelled matter, we would absolutely expect to see very quick separation, much like drops of grease in you soup. Then, why shouldn't the observable universe be drop of matter in a soup of antimatter, or vice versa? (Also, any remaining "small" droplet of antimatter inside our observable drop of matter could be expected to be annihilated over time.)
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday October 26 2017, @09:28PM
Do we know that other galaxies are matter, not antimatter?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:36PM
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:00PM (1 child)
We don't know for sure because it's a hard thing to measure, but the consensus is that gravity is expected to affect antimatter in the same way as matter.
As a curvature of spacetime, gravity is different to other forces like electromagnetism. It's literally the shape of the universe, and there's no reason to expect antimatter to behave any differently.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @07:16AM
I believe we are "seeing" only an illusion of spacetime as normality, coming from our macroscopic point of view, but maybe the distances themselves are interactions.
QM "spooky action at distance" is a hint at it. Perhaps Dark Matter and Dark Energy are hints to it as well.
Perhaps we'll never find graviton, but a "distanton" instead. In other words, maybe gravity is not a fundamental force, a primary interaction, but results from this other more basic interaction which generates the spacetime.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:24PM
Is antimatter attracted to other antimatter, or repelled?
Could antimatter's repelling force explain the acceleration of the expanding universe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_expansion_of_the_universe [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:45PM (5 children)
I think you're confusing anti-matter with negative matter...a very different thing. Anti-matter exists, and is expected to have normal mass and gravity (though have haven't kept a large enough piece long enough to be sure). Negative matter may not exist, but if it does it would have negative energy. It would also annihilate matter on contact, but without a release of energy, since the theory that predicts it also predicts it would have a negative amount of energy, and the annihilation would be balancing the equation.
I really doubt that negative matter exists, but if it does, then it would have negative gravity. I don't think many people believe it exists, but Dr. Forward used it in one of his science fiction stories, TimeMaster, and he was careful to use acceptable, even if unlikely, physics.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @08:10AM
So you say, Mr. HiThere, if that is your real name! Dr. Reverso, in a science fiction series he never wrote, posited the exact opposite! So this proves that your confusion of Anti-matter, Negative Matter, and Null matter is fictional.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday October 27 2017, @09:10AM (3 children)
So, if you could have negative matter, presumably you could also have negative antimatter. Would matter and negative antimatter also annihilate on contact? What would be released?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday October 27 2017, @09:37AM (1 child)
If the answer were "negative", would it matter?
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Friday October 27 2017, @01:15PM
I wish I could give you something material, but this whole debate is charged with negativity. I don't think people really appreciate the gravity of the situation and they miss the force of the argument completely.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday October 27 2017, @05:44PM
First we need to find some negative matter of ANY persuasion. If we did, and we could handle it, it would be useful for such things as stabilizing the mouths of wormholes so they wouldn't collapse. At that point it would make sense to talk about details of how it worked. Currently it's a theory that's consistent with current physics, but isn't implied by it. I don't even know if the theory constrains it to be built out of protons and electrons in some not-yet-detected state. I suspect it doesn't, but that's well out of my field. I'd say ask Dr. Forward, but you'd need a seance.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:48PM
general relativity implies that only "negative energy" leads to anti-gravity effects.
it is well known (in the sense of experimental evidence) that anti-matter has positive rest mass, and should therefore be subject to regular gravitational effects.
that being said, it is true that nobody has yet "weighed" anti-matter, since we do not have enough of it to measure anything significant.
but inertial effects for anti-matter are the same as for regular matter (and in general relativity inertia is what makes gravity work).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Taibhsear on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:44PM
So far, it looks to be so. They've done so with anti-hydrogen. Research shows it behaves just as hydrogen does. So theoretically all other atoms should be as such. I don't believe they've made molecules of antimatter yet though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihydrogen [wikipedia.org]
There's even weirder stuff like excitons that are an electron orbiting an electron hole which has a relative positive charge so the electron orbits it and as a whole acts as if it were a hydrogen atom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exciton [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by dwilson on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:53PM (2 children)
As I recall, this has been considered and dismissed. If certain regions of space (within our observable universe) were entirely anti-matter, we would definitely know. The interface boundary between regions of anti-matter and regions of matter would be... energetic, to put it mildly. We'd see that, if nothing else. I want to say I know that because xkcd covered it in a what-if, but I really don't remember where I read it.
- D
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:06PM
XKCD What If: Antimatter [xkcd.com], which links to Antimatter in the Universe : Constraints from Gamma-Ray Astronomy [arxiv.org] and When Clusters Collide: Constraints On Antimatter On The Largest Scales [researchgate.net].
It sounds like my conjecture about anti-matter regions probably isn't the case, but more sensitive instruments are always desired.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:56PM
It would also have sharp peaks at the annihilation energy of electrons (and protons, neutrons, etc). That is incidentally how we know that minute amounts of antimatter are created by lightning [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @06:17PM (3 children)
anti-hydrogen has been created, and we cannot distinguish it from regular hydrogen (except in obvious ways like "the nucleus is negatively charged").
anti-oxygen is unlikely to ever be created in a lab: it is in fact unlikely that we will ever create regular oxygen.
some details: in order to create oxygen, you would need to convince anti-protons and anti-neutrons to form a nucleus.
we are able to use tritium and hydrogen to generate helium, but for that we use naturally occurring deuterium as fuel (google "tokamak" and "nuclear fusion" if you're interested).
I don't know if anyone created lithium (next thing after helium on the periodic table) in the lab, but it's harder to do than helium, and oxygen would be much harder than that.
when you talk about doing all of this for anti-matter, you also need to take into account the much harder constraints on storage of anti-matter.
so I'd say it's unlikely.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @07:21AM (1 child)
Can protons and anti-neutrons form nuclei?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @10:38AM
here's a link for you:
http://schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Nuclear%20physics/Nuclear%20structure/text/Quarks_/index.html [schoolphysics.co.uk]
second image on that page shows that protons are 2 up quarks plus 1 down quark, and the antineutron is 2 anti-down quarks plus 1 anti-up quark.
I'm not sure, but I think that if you tried to put them together, four out of the six quarks would anihilate; I'm not sure what would happen with the up and anti-down left afterwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @08:16AM
This should not be difficult. Anti-protons are very naive, and anti-neutrons are extremely gullible. We should be able to talk them right into it, quicker than you can say "409".
(Score: 4, Funny) by pkrasimirov on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:16PM (3 children)
Don't be materialsist, the phrase "anti-matter" is offensive. Why would you think your matter is pro- and the other is anti-? Use the term Alternative matter. Or just Matter because it is all the same, just with minor differences. Which makes it unique and precious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:05PM
Or may be neo-matter? We all know neo-anything are invented to create chaos, run by the system to control dissent. Like the government-funded and government-run and double-agent-led neo-nazis?
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:43PM
Grow a pair snowflake :)
Personally I am matter fluid. I haven't decided which I am yet.
(Score: 5, Funny) by inertnet on Thursday October 26 2017, @08:13PM
All Matter Lives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:59PM (3 children)
As Brown VS. Board of Education showed, "opposite but equal" is not equal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:37PM (2 children)
What... the... fuck?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:49PM (1 child)
It appears to be a joke banking on the modern socio-political divide to push through with the comparison of "equal but not equal" as seen with matter / antimatter. It is a nerdy political troll joke, I believe we call that the troll trifecta.
Oh wait, they forgot gender. Keep working on that hat trick!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @02:12AM
Damn, Poe's law gets more difficult every day.
(Score: 2) by LVDOVICVS on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:05PM (3 children)
Does the possibility exist that there are parts of the universe made of antimatter, which could account for some of the "missing matter"? And would we be able to see anti-stars emitting anti-light?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:43PM
There is no anti-light, the photon is its own anti-particle, so photons emmited by matter or anti-matter are equal.
See here [illinois.edu]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 26 2017, @07:58PM
At least in the observable universe, it is extremely unlikely, because otherwise we'd see some places with a lot of matter-antimatter-annihilation. Outside the observable part of the universe, we can only guess. The standard guess is that the universe looks everywhere the same.
Only recently we had a story here on SN that the missing baryonic matter has been found, and it was ordinary matter, not antimatter,
Baryonic antimatter is not a candidate for dark matter, not for dark energy, as its properties are not right.
Yes. Since "anti-light" is just light (a photon is its own antiparticle), they would look exactly like normal stars emitting light. Except that somewhere around it where its antimatter stellar wind hits the matter interstellar medium, hard gamma rays would be produced.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @08:58PM
You mean like darkness? There are a lot of things that emit darkness, like my ass.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:47PM (2 children)
This reminds me of the L-protein versus R-protein question.
Which is is life predominantly expressing / using Left chirality folding versus being a mix or being Right chirality dominated life.
It make one wonder what would be different in a universe made of anti-matter and Right chirality.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:53PM
That actually is a reasonably reasonable conjecture.
IIRC, it was shown that a part of the reason that we ended up with the chirality we did was because of an instability caused by a non-symmetric effect from beta radiation. I never understood the argument, but it did seem to imply that if anti-matter dominated we would have evolved with the opposite chirality. And I believe that observations of molecular clouds seem to show that Earth has the normal chirality. But, of course, the gas clouds were of matter rather than of anti-matter, or we'd have been seeing large numbers of annihilations between electrons and positrons, that we don't see.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday October 27 2017, @07:08AM
It's a bit dated now*, but the book 'The Left Hand of the Electron' [wikipedia.org] written by the science popularizer and Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov [wikipedia.org] covers this topic in the first 5 chapters.
It's worth a read.
If you are not familiar with Asimov, I think this xkcd [xkcd.com] might apply.
*Published in the 1970s, I think.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by linkdude64 on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:26PM (2 children)
The thought occurred to me that clickbait headlines like this may be one reason "Anti-Science" agendas are allegedly being pushed.
From where I'm sitting, "The Universe shouldn't exist," translates to, "We don't know why the universe exists, but we won't admit that."
I would normally be skeptical that an educated person would be so arrogant as to say something of the sort, and that it MUST be the "journalist" (glorified blogger) or sensationalist editor who is responsible for such a headline, but then, I have met many sophomoric engineers and other degreed persons who are so clearly arrogant and holier-than-thou, that it really makes me wonder. Maybe the "science popularizers" are doing more harm than good, past a certain point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:59PM (1 child)
The same asinine headline is all over the net. It's the way of media - it's not like they pay science reporters any better than sportswriters. At least sportswriters get to go on radio shows/espn for extra bucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:35PM
I know! I know! Pick me! God did it! Ha! Science! What a bunch of quacks.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Tara Li on Thursday October 26 2017, @04:39PM (7 children)
There are, already, in fact a few particles known whose antimatter partner acts differently. Kaons violate Charge/Parity conservation, as well as B mesons and strange B mesons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:40PM (1 child)
This is precisely the reason I don't understand why any reasonable physicist would accept that such an idiotic idea ("the universe shouldn't exist") should be associated with them.
Why would they want to confuse the public even more about these things?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @06:06PM
Don't confuse what a scientist thinks and what an editor writes. It wasn't Leon Lederman's idea to call the Higgs "the God particle", it was his book publisher. He was actually against the idea, and he came to regret it more and more as the name caught on.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:56PM (4 children)
While I believe this to be true, I can't see how this could translate into the dominance of matter over anti-matter.
OTOH, the quote
doesn't make much sense.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Tara Li on Thursday October 26 2017, @06:24PM (3 children)
As the Wikipedia article mentions, these three processes are not sufficient to explain the entire disparity necessary for the current universe to be in existence. There is much left to be discovered. But they do point in at least one direction where more information might be found. But the physicists would dearly love find something else different - antimatter falling away from matter would be wonderful, since it would open whole new realms of questions. As far as I know, none of the current theories suggest that antimatter would act that way, so a lot of new work would need to be added to the current theories of gravitation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @06:37PM (2 children)
photons are their own anti-particle.
photons are affected by gravity just like Einstein predicted.
anti-matter reacts with matter, and the resulting energy is twice the rest-mass of the matter.
therefore anti-matter has positive rest-energy (or rest-mass), and it will be affected by gravity just like Einstein predicted.
while no experiment has confirmed this, and it's hard to imagine when we will have experimental confirmation, I really don't see why we should speculate before the results are in, especially since nothing else hints at anti-gravity effects.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:53PM (1 child)
Actually, IIRC anti-protons kept in storage rings need to compensate for gravity to avoid losing them via collisions with the bottom of the storage ring...which is fairly direct evidence.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @07:15AM
oh, thank you. I didn't know about that.
I always assumed that whatever anti-matter is confined is too hot for these kind of effects to be measured.
(i.e. " magnetic field required to control brownian motion is much stronger than magnetic field needed to compensate Earth's pull").
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:51PM
Soo, just how massive does an anti-blackhole need to be to suck in the (non-hawking) emissions from matter interaction?
(Yup, tounge placed firmly in cheek)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @09:44PM (3 children)
God also realized that and put Trump in to correct it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @11:55PM (1 child)
Massive Anti-Black A-hole? Trump? Oh, now I see it! (And wish I had not.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @06:06AM
Orange Hole
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @02:25AM
Just the result of the equation trying to balance itself out--cumulative effect of man's nature, which is far from angelic. Man accumulates debt, not in the simple money-lending sense, yet he hasn't yet learned to keep a spare gas can for when the debt catches up with him on the side of the road.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday October 27 2017, @07:52AM (2 children)
When God said "let there be light", creating the big bang (which is as good an explanation as any), couldn't 50±ε % of the resulting universe have been matter, and the remaining 50∓ε % antimatter? If so, 100-2×ε % of the whole lot was mutually annihilated, resulting in a universe containing the statistically insignificant 2×ε % that remained. Where does it say that ε should be 0? It happened to be positive, so we ended up in a universe of matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @06:03PM (1 child)
the amount of matter in the universe is much bigger than any reasonable value of epsilon.
that doesn't prove anything, of course, but it's the kind of situation where "the many world interpretation says that there is a universe where marilyn monroe will materialize 5 seconds from now in my room, out of thin air, so I'm cleaning up" is not an unreasonable thought.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday October 30 2017, @08:53AM
Define "reasonable".
Just because the universe is much bigger than us, doesn't mean that what was initially created by the big bang wasn't even bigger.
What if the universe is infinite? Annihilating 99.9999999999% of it in a matter-antimatter reaction would still leave us with an infinite universe.