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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."
There's a big difference between a belief that something is most likely true, and an experiment that removes all doubt.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Yes, Silly physicist PhDs doing unneccesary experiments. They could have been told the result of the experiment just by asking a random commenter on Slashdot. :)
:P
Because our understanding of physics is so consistent that it is a waste of time to test the cornercases of our theories *cough*quantum gravity*cough*dark matter*cough*dark energy*cough*
And science is all about the difference between "I think..." and "I've tested..."
If it behaves exactly as predicted, you can make another mark and continue. If not, you've found something potentially very important.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Antimatter *could* be different because the mathematics of GR allow it, and we haven't actually done the experiment before. I wouldn't put much faith in human intuition in these matters, considering how counter-intuitive entire GR is...
;-)
I mean, we see water falling off edges of waterfalls etc. Why should the edge of the world be any different?
Until now I thought that ouside the real of mathematics (where things can be proven and no further revision is possible, save for attacking the logic of the proof), there is no such thing as "an experiment that removes all doubt"?
Ezekiel 23:20
If that were true, while it would have no practical use in the near future
Not necessarily - Merely opening that particular conceptual door would lead to a massive influx of funding and revisited anomalous past results.
Interesting thing about experimentation, even the most honest of researchers tends to throw away "bad" results (in the sense of not publishing them, not in the academically-dishonest sense of omitting them from the data). If the scientific community suddenly accepted the possibility of spooky-effect-X, you can bet that dozens or even hundreds of research groups would dredge up their past efforts to see if effect-X explains their results.
Case in point, l'Acedemie des Sciences and meteorites. Up to the turn of the 19th century, only idiots would dare claim that rocks could fall from space... Until the scientific community decided they could, at which point a huge body of past evidence appeared practically overnight supporting the existance of such falling objects.
You mean apart from all of the air in-between you and the target?