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Does Antimatter Fall Up Or Down?
KentuckyFC writes "There are enough loopholes in the general theory of relativity to allow antimatter to fall up rather than down in a gravitational field. We've never been able to make enough of the stuff to do the experiment. But at the European particle physics laboratory at CERN, where scientists have been refining the technique for making antihydrogen, researchers are designing an experiment called AEGIS that will finally settle the matter. The idea is simple — fire a beam of antihydrogen atoms and watch which way they fall — but the details are fiendish (abstract). The answer should help solve a number of important conundrums such as why there is so little antimatter in our part of the universe and what the value of the cosmological constant is."
Or will it settle (or unsettle) the anti-matter?
Professor: And the microwave radiation, combined with the gravitons and graviolis from the supernova, blasted us through time itself.
It doesn't-matter.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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my relativity teacher told his class, is a function of time: At first, it was non-zero, then people said it was zero, then it might be non-zero after all.
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What like http://xkcd.com/417/ ?
I wank in the shower.
Antimatter falls strange.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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Just a few technical details to sort out, first :-)
...and, of course, if your antimatter-powered airship crashes, the phrase "Oh, the Humanity!" is going to be even more applicable. Maybe without the "the".
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It falls sideways, just to screw with those smarmy scientists.
An alternative explanation is of course that the anti-particles are distracted and therefore miss the Earth, as demonstrated in the well-known experiments performed by Arthur Dent.
Why not? This is where I get my IP legal advice!
Women must be made of antimatter. Why else would they levitate away from me?
Publicity is especially important in quantum physics because we don't know if they are working or not working until they are observed.
Layne
...does this mean anti-hydrogen will fall to the ground Yes, because, as everyone knows, the Earth repels normal hydrogen. It all gets pushed out into space where it coalesces to form gas giants.This also explains why cats and babies act so weird. Down where they live they're practically swimming in a sea of anti-hydrogen.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Yeah, like that time this Jesus guy found an overflow in the kill process routine, and was able to resurrect himself after 3 days.
I heard God banned him for 3,000 years.
Heh, Kinda like most shashdot readers.
"... what the value of the cosmological constant is."
Duh... 42. Now we just have to figure out the cosmological question.
You tell if a quantum physicist is working or what he/she is working on. But not both at the same time.
If you detect that a quantum physicist is working, then you won't know what on.
And if you detect what a quantum physicist is working on, then you can't tell if he/she is working.