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If Antimatter were to have antigravity could you bust up a black hole by filling it with antimatter?

itsreallyme 8y ago
You won’t get any real answers because this is all pseudoscience nonsense.
mooman219 8y ago
Short 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 ago
  True, but they wouldn't necessarily have to collide to exert their gravitational influence on each other.
- bbojan 8y ago
  Be 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 ago
In 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?
qubex 8y ago
A black hole is a creature of pure self-sustaining curvature — the field itself has enough energy in it to maintain the warpage (as the singularity presumably at the core is beyond the event horizon and gravity, like everything else, cannot escape it’s own grip and emanate from the singularity to the event horizon where we observe the effects). So tossing in antimatter would not do much. It would never cross the horizon in an external observer’s reference frame and thus would never interact with anything and thus would produce no effects. Besides we know that when matter and antimatter react, they emit energy that has positive sign, not zero... twice the value of any particle’s mass. That in turn implies that matter and antimatter have the same sign of energy despite opposite charge. Furthermore by coupling attractive matter and repulsive antimatter one could create a perpetually-accelerating device as the repulsive antimatter would try to escape the matter and the matter would chase after it. This obviously is cause for concern (but in general General Relativity does not conserve energy, so it’s not incompatible with the theory per se — just very dubious). I’m expecting the antimatter to fall downwards just as matter would. But the whole point of science is to check that what you expect conforms to what the universe actually does. So this is definitely not a waste of resources: much the contrary, it’s a vitally important measurement to make.
- krohling 8y ago
  I don't this is exactly accurate. Hawking radiation for example, causes black holes to evaporate over time. While the radiation that is detected outside the black hole has positive mass/energy the in-falling anti-particles have negative mass/energy which results in the net reduction of the black hole's mass/size. Does it not then make sense that in-falling anti-matter would have an evaporating effect?
  - qubex 8y ago
    The “one of the virtual particles of the pair created in the vicinity of the black hole’s horizon falling in leaving the other one to escape to infinity as radiation whose mass-energy must be subtracted from that of the black hole” view of Hawking radiation is a pedagogical construct thought up by Hawking himself after calculating the effect by other means for the sake of public promulgation. In reality it has to do with the restriction of the resonant modes of quantum fields imposed by having a border (horizon). Case in point: if the full truth were that of infalling versus escaping virtual particles there’d be a definite trajectory associated with the escaping particle that would convey information about where, approximately, the virtual particle/antiparticle pair popped into existence, violating Heisenberg uncertainty. In reality, Hawking radiation has wavelengths comparable to the diameter of the black hole that make it impossible even in theory to resolve where the supposed particle/antiparticle pair “popped” into existence, preserving the uncertainty principle. This is also why radiation becomes more energetic as the hole shrinks in size: that’s because the associated diameter shrinks and allows wavelengths of emitted radiation to contract, packing more energy into those waves. If it really were particle/antiparticle being shorn apart by the hole’s gravitational attraction you’d expect more radiation to be emitted by a big hole (vacuum activity per volume area being constant, and thus a bigger hole would border more unit volumes and allow for greater interaction with the quantum vacuum that would slow down as it shrank).
meowface 8y ago
Every commenter gave a different answer to this question and I have no idea which of them are right, if any.
Pxtl 8y ago
Black holes destroy information don't they - they would be neither matter nor antimatter. Nor energy, for that matter. They're just point mass. Which implies that both matter and antimatter would be attracted to the black hole equally, but that kind of breaks the idea that antimatter reverse-curves spacetime, doesn't it? So anti-black-holes would have to exist in a "antimatter has antigravity" universe, wouldn't it? Which contradicts the idea of black holes destroying all information.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  Black holes should have every quantum number that normal matter has, including barionic number.
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Wait, really? So does that mean the Kugelblitz is possible?
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      It means they are a thing that physics can describe and look for. It does not mean that they exist.
- simen 8y ago
  This is called the black hole information paradox. Today most physicists believe that hawking radiation preserves quantum information. Hawking himself made a bet that it doesn’t, but by 2004 he had become convinced and conceded the bet. But as far as I know this is still an open question - we’ve never detected hawking radiation experimentally.
labster 8y ago
I like the way you think, and think that a full-scale experiment would be the best way to answer this question.
marcosdumay 8y ago
That anti-gravity matter would need to be traveling faster than light to reach the black hole. It's the reverse problem of getting normal matter out of one. But, it would mean that if you created a nuclear reactor inside a black hole, you would be able to communicate with the external world. That is problematic enough by itself.

You won’t get any real answers because this is all pseudoscience nonsense.

Short 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 ago
True, but they wouldn't necessarily have to collide to exert their gravitational influence on each other.
bbojan 8y ago
Be 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 ago

In 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?

qubex 8y ago

A black hole is a creature of pure self-sustaining curvature — the field itself has enough energy in it to maintain the warpage (as the singularity presumably at the core is beyond the event horizon and gravity, like everything else, cannot escape it’s own grip and emanate from the singularity to the event horizon where we observe the effects). So tossing in antimatter would not do much. It would never cross the horizon in an external observer’s reference frame and thus would never interact with anything and thus would produce no effects. Besides we know that when matter and antimatter react, they emit energy that has positive sign, not zero... twice the value of any particle’s mass. That in turn implies that matter and antimatter have the same sign of energy despite opposite charge. Furthermore by coupling attractive matter and repulsive antimatter one could create a perpetually-accelerating device as the repulsive antimatter would try to escape the matter and the matter would chase after it. This obviously is cause for concern (but in general General Relativity does not conserve energy, so it’s not incompatible with the theory per se — just very dubious). I’m expecting the antimatter to fall downwards just as matter would. But the whole point of science is to check that what you expect conforms to what the universe actually does. So this is definitely not a waste of resources: much the contrary, it’s a vitally important measurement to make.

krohling 8y ago
I don't this is exactly accurate. Hawking radiation for example, causes black holes to evaporate over time. While the radiation that is detected outside the black hole has positive mass/energy the in-falling anti-particles have negative mass/energy which results in the net reduction of the black hole's mass/size. Does it not then make sense that in-falling anti-matter would have an evaporating effect?
- qubex 8y ago
  The “one of the virtual particles of the pair created in the vicinity of the black hole’s horizon falling in leaving the other one to escape to infinity as radiation whose mass-energy must be subtracted from that of the black hole” view of Hawking radiation is a pedagogical construct thought up by Hawking himself after calculating the effect by other means for the sake of public promulgation. In reality it has to do with the restriction of the resonant modes of quantum fields imposed by having a border (horizon). Case in point: if the full truth were that of infalling versus escaping virtual particles there’d be a definite trajectory associated with the escaping particle that would convey information about where, approximately, the virtual particle/antiparticle pair popped into existence, violating Heisenberg uncertainty. In reality, Hawking radiation has wavelengths comparable to the diameter of the black hole that make it impossible even in theory to resolve where the supposed particle/antiparticle pair “popped” into existence, preserving the uncertainty principle. This is also why radiation becomes more energetic as the hole shrinks in size: that’s because the associated diameter shrinks and allows wavelengths of emitted radiation to contract, packing more energy into those waves. If it really were particle/antiparticle being shorn apart by the hole’s gravitational attraction you’d expect more radiation to be emitted by a big hole (vacuum activity per volume area being constant, and thus a bigger hole would border more unit volumes and allow for greater interaction with the quantum vacuum that would slow down as it shrank).

meowface 8y ago

Every commenter gave a different answer to this question and I have no idea which of them are right, if any.

Pxtl 8y ago

Black holes destroy information don't they - they would be neither matter nor antimatter. Nor energy, for that matter. They're just point mass. Which implies that both matter and antimatter would be attracted to the black hole equally, but that kind of breaks the idea that antimatter reverse-curves spacetime, doesn't it? So anti-black-holes would have to exist in a "antimatter has antigravity" universe, wouldn't it? Which contradicts the idea of black holes destroying all information.

marcosdumay 8y ago
Black holes should have every quantum number that normal matter has, including barionic number.
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Wait, really? So does that mean the Kugelblitz is possible?
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    It means they are a thing that physics can describe and look for. It does not mean that they exist.
simen 8y ago
This is called the black hole information paradox. Today most physicists believe that hawking radiation preserves quantum information. Hawking himself made a bet that it doesn’t, but by 2004 he had become convinced and conceded the bet. But as far as I know this is still an open question - we’ve never detected hawking radiation experimentally.

labster 8y ago

I like the way you think, and think that a full-scale experiment would be the best way to answer this question.

marcosdumay 8y ago

That anti-gravity matter would need to be traveling faster than light to reach the black hole. It's the reverse problem of getting normal matter out of one. But, it would mean that if you created a nuclear reactor inside a black hole, you would be able to communicate with the external world. That is problematic enough by itself.