3 ms·
>Do they mean literally mirror images Almost! To be more specific, the laws of physics are CP-symmetric[1] - if you take any interaction involving matter and/o
by MrEldritch 8y ago
>Do they mean literally mirror images
Almost! To be more specific, the laws of physics are CP-symmetric[1] - if you take any interaction involving matter and/or antimatter, and you swap all the positively charged particles with their negatively charged antiparticles and vice versa, and then you invert the coordinate system (swapping left-handed and right-handed chirality, aka "literally mirror image") it should now behave exactly the same.
Basically, antimatter is matter with the charges reversed and the handedness mirrored.
[1]techically it's only CPT symmetric - you're only guaranteed perfect symmetry under simultaneous reversal of charge, parity (handedness), and time. But almost all processes (anything mediated by gravity, electromagnetism, or - as far as we can tell - the strong nuclear force) are perfectly CP-symmetric; As far as we can tell, CP symmetry violation only shows up in rare scenarios involving the weak nuclear force, where some particles can take slightly longer to decay than their antiparticles.
- amelius 8y agoThanks! This makes me wonder, since we've obviously never actually mirrored any particle, is there any chance that charge will (ultimately) also turn out to be a geometric concept? (By analogy to magnetism, where changing the orientation of the current flips the polarity of the magnetic effect).
- MrEldritch 8y agoDepending on what you mean by "geometric", maybe - there's been attempts at constructing theories where the electromagnetic field is also, like gravity, a product of spacetime geometry; these generally involve adding extra dimensions to give spacetime enough freedom to hold those behaviors, and then curling up the extra dimensions small enough to explain why we hadn't noticed them yet. (String theory is one of the distant descendants of these attempts.)
- antidesitter 8y agoThis is probably referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza–Klein_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza–Klein_theory.