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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.
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.
Various ways of creating antimatter have been used in physics. One is to get a photon (particle of light) to convert into an electron and positron (antimatter equivalent of an electron). Another is to smash a proton into a necleus and create various particles of matter and antimatter and filter them by charge and momentum. If you want learn about antimatter in general, Don Lincoln has some introductory videos on YouTube.
This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century...
This "problem" is why we are here. How about not calling the existence of the universe a "problem"?
Different kind of problem. (from Google):
Physics : Mathematics
- an inquiry starting from given conditions to investigate or demonstrate a fact, result, or law.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What's wrong with asking how the universe works?
There is a retired scientist called Jean-Pierre Petit that has some ideas about this question (spoil: this antimater will fall down). This is the Janus cosmological model
. I do not know if he is right or wrong, but the videos are worth a look
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.
Very, very carefully.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've never observed Hawking radiation from a black hole. An analog of Hawking radiation has been observed from model experiments, e.g. where a medium has an area that is supersonic so sound waves can't propagate back out of that region.
That was effectively my point, there's no question that you can mathematically predict what will happen, most of the time. But this thread is about one of the examples where it doesn't appear to work, along with the various other examples mystery coefficients or mystery energy or mass being kludged in to patch things up.
I think that this apparently "statistical" nature is a function of something very fundamental that we don't yet understand, and some day, somebody will find the reality with a slap to the forehead and a loud "D'OH!"
Note that this has *always* been the case in physics and science in general. Phlogiston theory predicted a lot of things correctly for a long time, for a lot of people who were not morons. Then the edges started fraying, people tried various fixes to try to patch it back together, until someone came along with a conceptual advance, then the old way seems ridiculous and obviously wrong. We are in the "fraying edges" point of the cycle (like the late 1800s).
The goatee that antimatter seems to have of course its not an exact mirror image
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
CERN experiments to test the free-fall of antiatoms
https://cerncourier.com/does-a...
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.
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.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Couldn't this be a case of a butterfly flapped its wings...
Short answer: no, assuming you mean some random fluctuation in the early Universe. For the excess of matter over anti-matter in the early universe to be due to such a random fluctuation, there would have to be some process that allows more matter than anti-matter to be created and we have not seen anything that does this yet.
However, we have seen a bias between matter and antimatter in decays of certain types of particles made of quarks and anti-quarks bound together. While this is not enough to create more matter than anti-matter if the same effect exists in the oscillations of neutrinos then there may just be enough to explain the excess of matter over antimatter. However, this would still not be a random fluctuation but rather that the universe has an inbuilt bias in the laws of physics which favours matter over antimatter.
As an interesting aside this difference, called CP violation, is also the only physics we know of that requires three generations of quarks and leptons to exist. If there were only two generations we could not have a difference at least via this mechanism.
Very, very carefully.
If all the antimatter ever made by humans were annihilated at once, the energy produced would be just about enough to make a cup of tea.
Or, at the very least, something almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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."