Physicists Investigate Why Matter and Antimatter Are Not Mirror Images (economist.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: As mismatches go, it's a big one. When physicists bring the Standard Model of particle physics and Einstein's general theory of relativity together they get a clear prediction. In the very early universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have come into being. Since the one famously annihilates the other, the result should be a universe full of radiation, but without the stars, planets and nebulae that make up galaxies. Yet stars, planets and nebulae do exist. The inference is that matter and antimatter are not quite as equal and opposite as the models predict.

This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century, but it may now be approaching resolution. At CERN, a particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, three teams of researchers are applying different methods to answer the same question: does antimatter fall down, or up? Relativity predicts "down", just like matter. If it falls up, that could hint at a difference between the two that allowed a matter-dominated universe to form.

Comments

chaos?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't this be a case of a butterfly flapped its wings billions and billions of years ago, and now we have more matter than anti-matter?

Re:chaos?

[Brett Buck]

Quantum physics is ultimately very unsatisfying, no matter how well it works. You always have the feeling that it's a working kludge, but has to the results of us just not understanding something very basic.

Re:chaos?

[werepants]

Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.

Read some context... literally the next line from your quoted article: "However, since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real."

Schrödinger was very much trying to show that QM theory, which was in its infancy at the time, was absurd and therefore must have been incomplete or flawed . Just as Einstein was trying to do with EPR and when he questioned if the moon was there when nobody looks. They were trying to falsify their own theories by showing how fundamentally ridiculous they were. Of course a cat cannot be alive and dead at the same time. Of course things must continue to exist when nobody is looking at them.

However, they failed in falsifying the theory - instead, they just created excellent examples of how utterly bonkers QM really is. That QM theory (and later experimental evidence) shows that these absurd rules are in fact the ones that govern our reality.

In the words of Niels Bohr: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word."

Re:Problem?

[viperidaenz]

What's wrong with asking how the universe works?

Re:I put my money on

[ShanghaiBill]

We observe hawking radiation

No we don't. Hawking Radiation is conjecture at this point. The closest known black hole is 2800 LY away, has 11 solar masses, and emits about one particle of hawking radiation every 10 Billion years. That is roughly a googoleth of a watt.

Re:I put my money on

[ShanghaiBill]

Wouldn't "falling up" mean that the anti-matter somehow breaks out of the curvature of the space and lays waste of Newton and Einstein?

Yes. If anti-matter "falls up", then that blows a major hole in General Relativity. It is extremely unlikely that "falls up" will be the outcome of these experiments.

Look at it this way: Matter falls down, so if anti-matter falls up, and matter and anti-matter annihilate to form a photon (which is its own anti-particle), then the photon should be neutral in a gravitational field. But it isn't. Photons "fall down", which was measured during a solar eclipse in 1919, as the first experimental confirmation of General Relativity.

It will fall down

[little1973]

This is almost duplicate since I remember a similar article which talked about some experiment by Italian scientists a few years ago.

But again, our current understanding is that gravity is the curvature of space and time. The anti-matter has no choice but to follow that curvature. It cannot pretend that curvature does not exist.

So, if anti-matter were actually fallen up you can throw general relativity out of the window. I do not expect that will happen.