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New antimatter gravity experiments begin at CERN
- mlindner 8y agoThe title can be misleading if it is not read literally (or your brain tries to fill in extra information). This is testing the effects of gravity on antimatter, NOT antigravity testing.
- nsxwolf 8y agoDoes anyone expect it to behave any differently than matter?
- spenczar5 8y agoAlmost all physicists think it should be no different, but a few think antimatter might gravitationally repel normal matter. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_interaction_of_antimatter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_interaction_of_a....
- jp555 8y agoSo antimatter warps space in opposite way that matter does? Then you’d probably then need a negative-Earth-mass amount to counteract the depth of the earth-mass caused gravity-well we’re in. The antimatter mass equal to our planet is a lot of antimatter. Rockets, even antimatter powered ones, seem a lot better way out of Earth’s well.
- Jyaif 8y ago> Then you’d probably then need a negative-Earth-mass amount Assuming antiparticles are "repulsed" by earth's gravity, 1.01kg of antimatter would be enough to take 1kg of matter to space.
- Pxtl 8y agoThe trick would be to attach them together with causing a nuclear explosion.
- louthy 8y agoOh the humanity!
- jp555 8y agobut wouldn’t the 1.01kg of antimatter have an “inverted gravity well” that propogates in all directions, sitting at the bottom of Earth’s much much larger gravity well? I mean I’m looking at gravity in that it isn’t like electromagnetism; propagating waves of energy through space. Gravity is the bending of space itself; mass’s impression. But maybe I’m using the wrong/incomplete model of gravity here
- singingboyo 8y agoDo you need mass equal to earth, or mass slightly greater than whatever you're launching? (Alternatively, does antimatter experience the opposite force of the same mass of regular matter, or is it something else?) If antimatter has negative mass in the context of the gravitational equation (F = Gm_1m_2/r^2) then you just need more antimatter than matter (by mass). Of course, that also means general relativity is incomplete. That's not to say launching/lifting something on an antimatter platform would be practical anyway. There'd be issues around how you keep the platform and payload together, let alone the difficulty of constructing an antimatter platform in the first place...
- InclinedPlane 8y agoNo, but the point is to check.
- craftyguy 8y agoThe title literally says "antimatter gravity experiments", where's the confusion?
- zlynx 8y agoI saw "antigravity" when I read it the first time too. It's not just the OP.
- cpuguy83 8y agoWishful thinking. :)
- lucb1e 8y agoThat sounded to me as experiments to influence gravity using antimatter. I figured it was either a long shot or clickbait so went to the comments first, but as someone with little clue of these things (the most I know of physics is the half of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking that I understand, and probably half of that half I already forgot again), it wasn't too far fetched.
- rwcarlsen 8y agoWell - part of what they are checking for is that antimatter doesn't experience/produce anti-gravity - since experiments up until the present time have mostly been inconclusive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_interaction_of_antimatter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_interaction_of_a...)
- Asturaz 8y agoHope not Gordon Freeman fails an experiment...
- egfx 8y agoHow do you think UFO's move through earth's atmosphere? They repel matter via real-time manifold dynamics allowing them to move at supersonic speed. I think we already know this.
- ppppppaul 8y agoyes
- pp19dd 8y agoHm. I'm a skeptic and I typically hit all the standard checkmarks on dismissing nutjobs. It's almost a mental stamp worn down to the nubs. But this right here reminded me of the time I scratched my head. Cue the weird release of the NYT pieces on Navy recordings of UFOs released over the past year. Did you happen to see that one? If not, look it up. There were basically two FLIR recordings of something pretty spooky and, wow, it was something else. The videos were followed up by a leaked NIMITZ carrier group report of the incident cataloging and verifying pretty much everything the pilots said in the interview. The pilots were made fun of by their peers. Means of propulsion in the video was nothing like I'd ever seen anywhere before. The Navy basically said "we don't know what this is" and "it demonstrated propulsion capabilities beyond any known means." One of the videos is downright spooky in places. First thing skeptical me did was check the provenance of the videos themselves. They were directly provided to NYT by a weird organization headed by an ex band member from Blink 182. Nutjobs, check. Second thing I checked was who the writers of the article were. One was a general assignment reporter (meh, they have to put someone on it and they were all out of stolen tomato plant stories that day), another was a has-been burnout whose name got used to elevate the story, and last author was a person who wrote books on ghosts and spirituality or some such. Cranks, check. Then WaPo and other orgs released a bunch of regurgitated hashes of the same story. So I sifted through to see if there were any more details. Nope, they were all borrowed from NYT. Nothing original, lazy re-reporting, check. Then just to be sure the guy was just lazy I reached out to a WaPo reporter. Nothing. Then two weeks went by. He got back to me and told me that they got caught with their pants down. They had been working on the story long before NYT published it - in cooperation with the bizarre group with the ex-Blink 182 guy, and WaPo were under the false impression that they had an exclusive story with them. So when NYT's came out, they felt betrayed and buried what work they had and scrambled to get their own GA reporter to finish the deal. Not lazy. They just cut their losses best they could. Here's the kicker. The guy verified the provenance of the flight cameras. They WERE provided by the Pentagon under a FOIA act request. Despite the fact that NYT's videos were provided by the Blink 182 people, WaPo had an independent copy of it obtained from the military. The part that made me scratch my head was that it wasn't just an empty boast. I was given a tip on making a very specific FOIA request to the Pentagon. Goes something like "query seeking cockpit videos cleared for release to Luis Elizondo in the Fall of 2017 (Sep-Oct)." So what of it? Well, our high energy physics people are making discoveries, and while I don't know what to make any of this, for the first time in awhile I'm feeling like we're making some forward progress in science that might make its way to engineering, or our understanding of its limits. Just recently scientists identified 2-3 candidate anomalies as potential new particles (sigh, some reporters kept calling it a ghost particle). Maybe something will come of it, maybe not. But we're trying, and once these are eliminated there will be more observations, more research, more science. We still have a very poor understanding of gravity and how it relates to things we feel we know. But for once in this horrible climate we find ourselves in, both political and social, I'm feeling optimistic that we're even looking. [1] Interview with the pilot: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-... [2] Leaked NIMITZ report (PDF): https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...
- willart4food 8y agoThat's because of No-Nut November!
- wcoenen 8y agoIf anti-matter would be found to be affected differently by gravity, then that would be a big problem for general relativity wouldn't it? If gravity is warped spacetime geometry, then it has to affect the path of all particles in the same way.
- v_lisivka 8y agoPlease, draw line between math and physics. "spacetime" - math, [x,y,z,t]. "geometry" - math "warped" - math (transformation)
- saagarjha 8y agoPhysics uses math heavily–I fail to see the point you're making.
- v_lisivka 8y agoPhysics uses math heavily for calculations. Above math is used to substitute physics. For example, OpenGL is used heavily to calculate pictures, which are looking close to reality, but we cannot use OpenGL to talk about reality. Please, draw the line.
- noonespecial 8y agoFascinating. I believe that what you are saying makes sense to you, but you need to understand that it sounds something like: "raccoons aren't mammals because purple is wet" to the people you are saying it to.
- coldtea 8y agoSee my comment below -- I find what the parent said quite clear, even though his english don't particularly help him make his case.
- 8y ago
- calimac 8y agoCERN Opening CEREMONY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZAQNo9bXwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZAQNo9bXwI
- mrfusion 8y agoIf Antimatter were to have antigravity could you bust up a black hole by filling it with antimatter?
- itsreallyme 8y agoYou won’t get any real answers because this is all pseudoscience nonsense.
- mooman219 8y agoShort answer: No. Long answer: When equal amounts of matter and antimatter collide, they are annihilated. They haven't disappeared or canceled out, they’re converted into pure energy. Both mass and energy are just different aspects of the same thing: you can turn mass into energy, and you can turn energy into mass. Black holes turn everything, both matter and energy, into more black hole. Video citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zw5DuWAyco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zw5DuWAyco
- darawk 8y agoTrue, but they wouldn't necessarily have to collide to exert their gravitational influence on each other.
- bbojan 8y agoBe careful, this is not correct and is a common misconception. You cannot turn mass into energy or energy into mass. This would violate not one, but two fundamental laws of physics - conservation of energy and conservation of mass. A more appropriate way to think about this is simply that all energy has mass, and all mass has energy, and these amounts are related through the famous E=mc2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc...
- jliptzin 8y agoIn that situation wouldn't it be impossible to shove antimatter into a black hole in the first place because the gravity-antigravity force would repel instead of attract?
- bbeonx 8y agoI don't know why people keep posting about this. It really doesn't matter
- aidos 8y agoIs that a pun?
- adamredwoods 8y ago>>At this point, the neutral antiatoms will be released from the trap and allowed to fall from a height of 20 centimetres, during which the researchers will monitor their behaviour. Assuming it falls, and doesn't tear open the time-space continuum.
- markovbot 8y agoOT: Why does CERN need a TLD? I'm not complaining, it just seems like an odd (and expensive) thing to have.
- fermienrico 8y agoPerhaps you can consider it as a marketing expense. Think about all of the communications that CERN deals with external parties. It could be that they justified it as a recruiting tool - “You get your very own name.cern webpage” to attract candidates. Or, they just thought it’s cool :-). Companies spend all kinds of money on things without ROI: fancy decors and furniture, landscaping and fancy buildings.
- krapp 8y agoI assume it has something to do with the World Wide Web having basically started at CERN.
- empath75 8y agoThey sort of invented the www.
- themodelplumber 8y agoAre we sure they have to pay for it? Edit: It appears that they do, though it was at least in the past based on a reallocation of savings on operational expenses. It seems like they might be filing it under "outreach" which makes sense. I'll authorize it. ;-) Source: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1407874/files/fc-e-5578-Budget2012.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/1407874/files/fc-e-5578-Budget201... Ctrl+F "level domain" Edit 2: Additional cool source: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2296678/files/pdf.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/2296678/files/pdf.pdf "3. Motivation for gTLD .cern The motivation for CERN to acquire its own generic top level domain was to be able to better support its Web communication strategy. In addition to the traditional CERN domain .cern.ch, that is used for all IT infrastructure and also for internal Web sites, other benefits of owning its own TLD are in the area of conveying: - Branding - Recognition - Innovation - Trust"
- anyfoo 8y agoGiven that the literally first web server was at CERN, I hope they get a special price for their TLD.
- saagarjha 8y agoForgive me if this sounds presumptuous, but is this experiment literally trying to answer "does antimatter attract normal matter"? To me, this seems like a pretty simple thing to test–why hasn't this been done before?
- mhh__ 8y agoContaining antimatter, let alone doing stuff with it and measuring effects e.g. Just gravity is pretty fucking difficult.
- jessriedel 8y agoThe strength of the gravity between a proton and an (anti-)proton is 30+ orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism. The only reason we are able to notice gravity at all is because the electromagnetic forces between macroscopic amounts of matter (~10^23 protons) cancel out essentially perfectly, leaving only the gravitational force remaining. But the amounts of antimatter we can create and collect is extremely microscopic, so we can't use this canceling trick. Furthermore, we can't keep antimatter from annihilating for long enough to take long detailed measurements.
- saagarjha 8y agoWhy not use neutrons and antineutrons, or any other neutral particle that has mass?
- jessriedel 8y agoAntimatter is generated at extremely high (relativistic) speeds and generally has to be slowed down ("cooled") in order to make careful measurements or to even collect multiple particles together. And that can't be done unless you can steer the particle with electromagnetism. If you just generated individual relativistic anti-neutrons and tried to watch them follow ballistic trajectories in gravity, I suspect they'd just look like perfectly straight lines up to the limits of your detector resolution. Not sure though. (The only other quasi-stable neutral particles are neutrinos, and those are essentially non-interacting with any detector. They leave relativistically and you'll never see them again.)
- imh 8y agoTo be perfectly clear, is this testing how antimatter and matter interact gravitationally, or is it testing how antimatter and antimatter interact gravitationally?
- dustycat 8y agoIt's testing how antimatter and matter interact gravitationally. It isn't possible to test how antimatter and antimatter interact gravitationally, because only single atoms of antimatter can be produced, and single atoms don't exert enough gravitational pull on each other to be measurable.
- throwaway487548 8y agoSimulation (using the tools made according to some mathematical model) is not an experiment by definition, the very same way a cartoon is not reality.
- ionwake 8y agoAssuming anti-matter is discovered - are there any public listed companies which I could invest in right now?
- krapp 8y agoAntimatter was discovered a long time ago... it's used in PET scanners among other things.
- gmueckl 8y agoSo these experiments are about to be ready to run just as their feeding accelerators will be shut down for two years? That timing certainly sucks for all the PhD students involved.