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."

Comments

Re:Confused

[complete loony]

There's a big difference between a belief that something is most likely true, and an experiment that removes all doubt.

Re:It will fall down

[thue]

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. :)

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*

:P

Re:I wish it fell upwards

[pla]

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.

Re:I hate "news" like this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean apart from all of the air in-between you and the target?