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Scientists make rare achievement in study of antimatter
- peterburkimsher 9y agotl;dr "The results confirm that the [proton and antiproton] behave exactly the same, as the laws of physics would predict. So the mystery of the imbalance between matter and antimatter remains."
- marcosdumay 9y agoAdditional to the TlDr, what they measured was magnetic momentum. Also, there are no measurement bounds on the article.
- Ericson2314 9y agoMoment, not momentum, like "moment of inertia".
- kwoff 9y agoA similar idea is the muon g-2 magnetic moment measurement: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-muon-g-begun-phantom-particles.html https://phys.org/news/2017-06-muon-g-begun-phantom-particles... It goes back to 1959, with ever more accurate measurements: http://library.cern/archives/CERN_archive/guide/experimental_physics/SC/isamuon http://library.cern/archives/CERN_archive/guide/experimental...
- orclev 9y agoalternate TL;DR: Science was done, no new data was generated that couldn't have been predicted from existing laws, existing mysteries remain. Basically this is the "boring" science, not the exciting "hmm, that's odd" science. It's very important science of course, the sort that you need for science to actually work, but it is rather boring from the perspective of someone outside looking in on the process.
- indubitable 9y agoSomething I'm rather curious about. Are you disinterested in it, because of its nature? Similarly, are you excited by the day in day out 'hot' studies? And by 'hot', I mean things like 'researchers discover amazing new way to destroy cancer cells' given what you know to expect of such a study. It seems to me that so often we apply, in completely good faith, base characteristics to others when considering them as a group, yet simultaneously it seems like few would ever say those characteristics actually apply to themselves. Mostly just a random thought that occurred when reading your post. It's interesting to consider things like all movies becoming explosions and CG because 'everybody else loves that stuff' even though ticket sales have declined by 30% since 2002 (gross receipts are up thanks to substantial increases in price). Or similarly at the same time everybody focuses on 'hot' science, trust and arguably (and paradoxically) even interest seems to be rapidly declining.
- orclev 9y agoWell, mostly disinterested in that it's really just a more precise measurement. The "breakthrough" in this case is a ridiculously precise measurement, which is very impressive, and is a huge step forward for particle physics as a science because it opens the door to measure even more stuff, but in this particular case it hasn't contributed anything "new" in terms of data. There's a famous quote out there that goes something like 'the most exciting words in science aren't "Eureka", they're "that's odd"', and I feel that's highly applicable in this case. There's no "that's odd" event here, everything is exactly as expected, it all worked perfectly and produced exactly the result that was expected. That's great for affirming that all our theories are correct, and as I said this is a breakthrough in the quality of measurements we can achieve, but it's not a new mystery to explore, or an unexpected result that we can use to refine or develop new theories. Basically everything we didn't know before this experiment we still don't know, and we don't have any new data points except for having eliminated an area of uncertainty that new interesting data might have been hiding in.
- Retric 9y agoI would argue that it is odd. We assume there must be something separating matter and anti-matter, but the list of possibilities is getting really short. Sort of like a murder misery where everyone at a party has a reliable alibi. Suggesting something even odder must be going on.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoYep. A negative result is still a result.
- nategri 9y agoToo bad there's still no way to measure how anti-matter couples to gravitons. I know it sounds a little specious, but if anti-matter also had anti-matter it might help explain the asymmetry.
- excalibur 9y ago> “According to our understanding of the Standard Model [of particle physics], the Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and antimatter, but [for the most part] only matter remains,” says BASE Spokesperson Stefan Ulmer. This is strange because when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate one another. Scientists want to know how matter came to dominate our universe. We don't have any evidence that matter DOES dominate the universe. Distant galaxies could easily be composed of antimatter. Since the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of both, you would expect that in the vast majority of cases they would annihilate one another, leading to a universe overwhelmingly dominated by (wait for it) empty space. We have tons of evidence that matter dominates our neck of the woods. Regions where one form is dominant over the other may be in the minority, but you would have to enter such a region to find stars, planets, and galaxies. The fact that we're here means that this must be an area where one type is everywhere and the other is almost completely absent. But as best we can tell, the fact that we're all made of matter rather than antimatter is the result of a very old coin flip. The probability that all of the galaxies we can see landed on the matter side of the coin is infinitesimal.
- dwaltrip 9y agoI'm pretty sure they have very compelling reasons to believe that distant galaxies are NOT made of anti-matter. Here is one I found in a quick search: The boundary between any group of anti-matter galaxies and the region of space where matter is dominant should emit gamma rays, as the intergalactic wind pushes dust particles made of regular matter into one of the anti-matter galaxies. We don't see such gamma ray emissions in our observations of the cosmos. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2016/12/27/could-some-distant-galaxies-be-made-of-antimatter/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2016/12/27/could...
- philipov 9y agoWhat if all the antimatter-dominated regions are outside our cosmological horizon and are no longer in causal contact with matter-dominated regions?
- madengr 9y agoStoring the anti-protons for 400 days; reminds me of the magnetic bottle in Star Trek. Has anti-hydrogen been created?
- rubayeet 9y agoPossibly relevant[0]: What is the difference between Accuracy and Precision?(video) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRAFPdDppzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRAFPdDppzs