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The 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
by mlindner 8y ago
The 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...)