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CERN Begins New Antimatter Gravity Experiments (phys.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the ready-set-go dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: We learn it at high school: Release two objects of different masses in the absence of friction forces and they fall down at the same rate in Earth's gravity. What we haven't learned, because it hasn't been directly measured in experiments, is whether antimatter falls down at the same rate as ordinary matter or if it might behave differently. Two new experiments at CERN, ALPHA-g and GBAR, have now started their journey towards answering this question.

After months of round-the-clock work by researchers and engineers to put together the experiments, ALPHA-g and GBAR have received the first beams of antiprotons, marking the beginning of both experiments. ALPHA-g began taking beam on October 30, after receiving the necessary safety approvals. ELENA sent its first beam to GBAR on July 20, and since then the decelerator and GBAR researchers have been trying to perfect the delivery of the beam. The ALPHA-g and GBAR teams are now racing to commission their experiments before CERN's accelerators shut down in a few weeks for a two-year period of maintenance work.

90 comments

  1. Or maybe by jimtheowl · · Score: 2

    ".. whether antimatter falls down .."

    Or maybe it falls up?

    1. Re:Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ".. whether antimatter falls down .."

      Or maybe it falls up?

      You mean, the possibility of "anti-gravitational force" ?

    2. Re:Or maybe by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or maybe it falls up?

      This experiment will check this but it is overwhelmingly likely to find that anti-matter falls just like matter. If it doesn't then things as fundamental as special relativity and quantum mechanics are in for a very significant rewrite.

    3. Re:Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 1

      Photons fall down. Their antiparticle (photons) falls down. It would confuse the crap out of people if we started seeing anything fall up, and GR would need rethinking.

    4. Re:Or maybe by Zorpheus · · Score: 2

      Why? Quantum mechanics says nothing about gravity. And special relativity is so simple, it shouldn't really bea problem to extend it.
      I guess Newton's law of gravity would just work with negative masses. And special relativity? Maybe an absolute value of the mass has to be taken somewhere, otherwise I don't seea problem?

    5. Re:Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Photons are massless, so don't fall at all. You appear to have rethought GR all by yourself.

    6. Re:Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Gravity doesn't come into special relativity anywhere. General relativity is the most accurate model for gravity we have. If we're modelling the path of a small particle (which antimatter is in our experience) in free fall then its mass isn't really important in GR. It follows the same geodesic through curved spacetime regardless. Massive objects like the sun and earth significantly curve spacetime, but the mass of the antiparticle will have negligible effect whatever sign you choose to put on it if it is small in magnitude. If the sign of the mass mattered then photons and photons have zero mass, then which way would they fall? In practice they fall down, following the geodesic GR describes.

    7. Re:Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 1

      Try typing "light falls" into google and see what comes up. For me first on the list, it's Professor Brian Greene's website explaining how light falls in GR. It even has "light falls" in the title so you don't have to read very far. Why didn't you do at least this before posting?

    8. Re: Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The fact that photons do fall in a gravitational field was one of the main observations that verified General Relativity as more accurate than Newtonian mechanics. Google "solar eclipse general relativity" or something like that for the details.

    9. Re: Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In more modern times, you might also want to google "Einstein ring".

    10. Re: Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Light does not fall, but travels at a constant velocity in a straight line - that is the basis of General Relativity, everything follows from that. If you could somehow influence a beam of light to travel in a circle parallel to the Earths surface, its height would not decay over time, which is what we refer to as "falling".

    11. Re: Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 2

      A major result of GR is that spacetime is curved around massive objects, so there are no straight lines to follow. Light follows a geodesic like any other body not acted on by a force. Perhaps you're confusing it with special relativity? Light's path is bent toward the earth in GR. Obviously it travels way above the earth's escape velocity, so you won't see the beam of a torch flop onto the ground following a similar path to a slow moving tennis ball. If you were to instead consider a black hole, then light can be much more severely bent and fall into the black hole.

    12. Re:Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't say nothing. But what it does say isn't directly compatible with GR.

    13. Re: Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We're talking about gravity, so no, this isn't the special case of Special Relativity.

      Light's path is bent toward the earth in GR

      No, absolutely back to front. Light travels in a straight line, it is the space it travels through that is non-Euclidean. Light experiences no acceleration whatsoever.

      Obviously it travels way above the earth's escape velocity, so you won't see the beam of a torch flop onto the ground following a similar path to a slow moving tennis ball.

      Again, light experiences no acceleration. The speed of a torch beam leaving the Earth is unaffected by gravity, it still travels at the speed of light. What it does get is red shift - it's emerging from a slower well of time.

      If you were to instead consider a black hole, then light can be much more severely bent and fall into the black hole.

      Consider a beam attempting to escape exactly perpendicular from the surface of a black holes event horizon - it isn't going to be bent to one side. It also isn't quite going to escape, but it also 100% does not fall back in on itself, or experience acceleration. Its speed is fixed. If its inside the event horizon, just on the surface, it is frozen in time. Inside the event horizon, all bets of talking about it are off.

      Everything you've described feels to me like you're attempting to shoehorn the concepts of relativity into a classical understanding and way of thinking. However, it is possible we're talking in circles in what we believe "falling" to mean (I'm quite happy with gravitational lensing and you describing the light path being "bent") but what I consider "falling" to be is an acceleration due to gravity, which light does not experience.

    14. Re: Or maybe by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      Then what the fuck is gravitational lensing??

    15. Re: Or maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Non-Euclidean geometry! How does light travel in a straight line if almost all the lines are curved?

    16. Re: Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure we're using different definitions of falling. I'm not claiming light experiences anything at all, let alone acceleration. We do not regard a free fall frame as an accelerating frame, so I don't define falling in terms of acceleration.

    17. Re:Or maybe by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Photons don't have an anti particle.
      It might be a neat trick to somehow says: a photon is its own anti particle, but in the long run it makes no sense at all.
      Suddenly in nuclear physics we have anti gamma decay ... wow, never heard about that in school ...
      A photon hits an electron and it "quantum leaps" into a higher "orbit" ... now it drops down and emits an anti photon ... oops. Or was it the other way around? Sorry, no idea which modern school suddenly uses this model of "a photon is its own anti matter particle" ... I must have missed lots in school and university!!

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    18. Re:Or maybe by SqueakyMouse · · Score: 1

      Why does it upset you so much? If I said zero was its own additive inverse, would this anger you? When we talk about particle-antiparticle pairs generally do you think it's more convenient or less convenient to include photons pairs?

    19. Re:Or maybe by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      When we talk about particle-antiparticle pairs generally do you think it's more convenient or less convenient to include photons pairs?
      No idea. Why would it be a question of convenience?

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    20. Re:Or maybe by Koen+Lefever · · Score: 3, Informative

      ".. whether antimatter falls down .." Or maybe it falls up?

      There does exist an hypothesis by Marcoen Cabbolet that antimatter will fall up (in an environment of matter such as on earth, antimatter would fall down in an antimatter environment according to this theory) which will be tested by those CERN experiments :

      https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/andp.201000063.

      --
      /. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
    21. Re:Or maybe by Plus1Entropy · · Score: 1

      Yeah but photons only have zero rest mass, they still have relativistic mass.

      Also anti-matter does not have negative mass. Matter with negative mass is called exotic matter, and may or may not exist at all.

      --
      Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
    22. Re:Or maybe by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

      No, photons have no mass. "Relativistic mass" is a non-physical concept that is extremely misleading so much so that even Einstein himself warned against it.

      As for anti-particles falling up you really have two choices. If they have a negative mass then we break special relativity because we know that matter+antimatter release energy proportional to their mass but with a negative mass this would be zero. The alternative is that they have a positive mass but fall up because antimatter couples differently to gravity in which case you have now broken general relativity which requires that gravity couple to the 4-momentum of particles and anti-particles alike.

      None of these are trivial changes.

  2. Boo! CERN is biased! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I happen to be pro-matter, you insensitive clod!

    1. Re:Boo! CERN is biased! by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

      Uhm, actually...

      We did not have enough pro-matter for the job, so we had to make you out of protomatter instead.

      Sorrrrreeeeeee...

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
  3. Yes it does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Positrons show the same e/m charge ratio as the electrons.

    Tested in the lab.

    1. Re:Yes it does by mark-t · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What they measured there was the mass, which for masses that small can be measured by applying a known force while it is moving (typically through an orthogonal magnetic field) and measuring how quickly its trajectory is altered. How much inertia it has, however, does not necessarily mean that it reacts to gravity the same way as normal matter.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    2. Re: Yes it does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      lol.

    3. Re:Yes it does by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      How much inertia it has, however, does not necessarily mean that it reacts to gravity the same way as normal matter.

      General Relativity is based on the assumption that inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent. IM=GM is one of those things, like P!=NP, "No FTL", and the Riemann Hypothesis, that everyone assumes, so a confirmation will have little effect. However if the answer is IM!=GM, physics will be turned upside down.

      Which would be pretty cool.

    4. Re:Yes it does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So far, the equivalence principle holds to within 10^-14

      https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.231101

    5. Re:Yes it does by crunchygranola · · Score: 1

      The XKCD strategy doesn't work. The True Believers always welsh* on their bets.

      *There is no evidence that this is a slur against the Welsh.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
    6. Re:Yes it does by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      *There is no evidence that this is a slur against the Welsh.

      Ha! Only in ultra-PC 2018 does someone need to put this disclaimer at the end of a sentence about welshing on bets.

      Even if it DID mean that, fuck-em. Never in my life, until you put up your little asterisk did I even think about the Welch, and welshing on bets in the same context. So in essence, by trying to dis-connect the two, you've actually made the situation WORSE!

      So please stop supporting the language police. Don't appease them. You're only giving these assholes more power!

  4. Re:No anti-gay in FEDERAL PRINCETON by So++gay! · · Score: 0

    Come out of the closet already, BeauHD. What are you waiting for? The rest of us did it 10 years ago when it *finally* became acceptable.

  5. Antimatter shouldnâ(TM)t falls up but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There is possibility it falls down at different rate. If it falls up, then how is GR going to describe this behavior ?

    1. Re:Antimatter shouldnâ(TM)t falls up but by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      There is possibility it falls down at different rate. If it falls up, then how is GR going to describe this behavior ?

      Neither falling up nor falling at a different rate is consistent with GR.

      We can tell by the recoil effect in nuclear reactions that the inertial mass of particles and anti-particles are identical. GR says the gravitational mass must also be identical. So if it isn't, GR would be overturned, and we would need some new theories to explain how the universe works.

      Don't hold your breath. If this experiment shows that AM "falls up" it is more likely to be an equipment failure than a correct result. It is that unlikely.

  6. An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can I make an obvious observation.

    There are lots and lots of attraction only 'forces' in nature. They're not really forces, they're the net effect of dipolar forces.

    Example 1: Stick magnets in a bag, shake it, the magnets will organize to stick together. The NN and SS poles could repel but they always end up stuck together as NS NS.... The forces push apart similar poles, and attract different poles and the net effect is an attraction only force.

    Example 2, think of a crystal forming. At the bind site for the molecule, the force is zero. If you squeeze the crystal the force goes negative and the crystal pushes back. But beyond the nano level, the force is attraction only, and reduces according to the square rules, just like gravity. (Think about this force for a moment, as it gets closer, the force increases, at super small distances it decreases to zero, then goes negative. I could label this force 'crystal strong force' or some other name and model it as if its a real force with magic properties, but to do so would be dumb).

    Example 3, my spinning dipoles always organize to have a net attraction force. I found they clump like matter, and concluded that gravity isn't caused by a magic 'mass' property, gravity is the measure of this net clumping ability on a large scale. Mass is simply the potential to clump.

    Example 4, Do the same as 1 with more complex magnets with multiple poles, they will form magnetic crystals when you shake them up.

    So, the lack of an anti-gravity force points to gravity being one of these net organizational dipolar forces.
    Which means you won't find an anti-gravity.

    It's also why I say you cannot assume a black hole can suck in matter forever, because you don't know how gravity will behave at super short distances. If its a net organizational dipolar force, it goes negative at super small distances. Just like the crystal case, just like my spinning dipole case.

    1. Re: An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      tl;dr

    2. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The thing is that while this is interesting, I'm not sure its true. Thanks for this.

    3. Re:An observation by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      The forces push apart similar poles, and attract different poles and the net effect is an attraction only force.

      I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here. The forces push apart and attract, but the net effect is attraction? How does that work?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:An observation by Mal-2 · · Score: 1

      Attraction causes a force along the axis between the objects, but a repulsive one as part of a dipole pair is going to induce a torque on the magnets instead, since flipping one of them around to then attract is a lower energy state. The repulsion serves only as a means to move things around until they are attracted instead. Then they are bound to each other.

      At least that's my guess what he's getting at.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
    5. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The 'gravity from left-over forces when everything is summed up' theory is very attractive, and gravity models can be made to work from it, but they fail to explain the (well measured) relativistic effects.

    6. Re:An observation by CSMoran · · Score: 5, Informative

      Example 2, think of a crystal forming. At the bind site for the molecule, the force is zero. If you squeeze the crystal the force goes negative and the crystal pushes back. But beyond the nano level, the force is attraction only, and reduces according to the square rules, just like gravity. (Think about this force for a moment, as it gets closer, the force increases, at super small distances it decreases to zero, then goes negative. I could label this force 'crystal strong force' or some other name and model it as if its a real force with magic properties, but to do so would be dumb).

      This is patently untrue. First, repulsive forces are positive, not negative -- they are the negative gradient of the potential after all. It's attractive forces that are negative. Second, as you squeeze the crystal together, it's Pauli repulsion, not electrostatics, that produces the huge positive (repulsive force). Third, attractive forces at the nanoscale are due to van der Waals (dispersive) interactions, where instantaneous dipoles induce dipoles in nearby atoms, and this instantaneous dipole - induced dipole interaction is attractive. This potential decays as R^-6, so unlike gravity.

      --
      Every end has half a stick.
    7. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're really not going to like massless spinning dipoles. Because once you lose mass, energy becomes a force delta and force depends on relative spin mode of the dipoles around it. So for even a simply thing a velocity change from v1 to v2, the energy delta doesn't depend on a property of the dipole (i.e. its mass, v1 and v2), it depends on the bindings to other matter.

      Which is going to be difficult to accept.

      Repulsive forces are +ve. is just a convention plucked from thin air, and inducing s dipole at electron level is not comparable, since one dipole doesn't induce the other to be dipolar.

    8. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The thing is that while this is interesting, I'm not sure its true. Thanks for this.

      It's not even wrong. The sad part is that people modded up this drivel. It's just extrapolating and hand waving.

    9. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK.

      a) Does the molecule orient itself correct and bind to the bind site? Or b) is there a molecule at the bind site that happens to be in the correct orientation, that then binds? Feel free to model it.

      b) does the magnet orient itself correctly and bind to the other magnets? Or does it simply find itself correctly oriented.

      c) You don't need to understand the massless spinning dipole model, I can tell you it is organizational and the net attraction falls away by squares law except at close distances. That's by observation not theory.

      a) and b) are thought experiments to help you understand/accept that net attraction effect of c).

    10. Re:An observation by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      If you use a negative or positive sign for describing forces is completely arbitrary.

      I can't remember that we ever used a sign ... why would we? The formula is the same, regardless if something is attracting or repelling ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    11. Re:An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which means you won't find an anti-gravity.
      That's a lot of reasoning by analogy, which proves nothing.

      General relativity doesn't have any anti-gravity in it. Mass is mass, and there's no anti-mass in GR. There's no weird analogies required. What's being tested is if this theory is correct. It almost certainly is, but the reason we do experiments is that sometimes, we get something not quite right.

  7. Unlikely to work by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

    This seems extraordinarily unlikely to produce any surprises. Is there any theory or experiment in matter with an opposite electrical charge has anti-gravity? They're distinct fundamental forces.

    1. Re:Unlikely to work by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's one of those things, "You don't know until you try." I think everyone has a low expectation of finding that anti-matter behaves differently with gravity, but it's an experiment we can do, so why not do it?

      We know there is something missing here (that is, why is matter so much more common than anti-matter?) so we need to keep experimenting, process of elimination, until we find the answer.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Unlikely to work by DanDD · · Score: 1

      Gravity might not be a fundamental force of nature at all, only a side effect of other things.

      Google 'entropic theory of gravity'.

      --
      "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
    3. Re:Unlikely to work by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      > but it's an experiment we can do, so why not do it?

      That's a reasonable question. It's a profoundly expensive experiment in terms of electrical power, engineering and scientific time, and the exclusive use of one of the most demanded scientific resources in the world. So those are good reasons to weigh the potential scientific benefit of the results, and include the chance of any usable results.

    4. Re:Unlikely to work by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

      It's like the gold-foil experiment done about 105 years ago that showed us that "solid" items aren't really all that solid.

    5. Re:Unlikely to work by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This seems extraordinarily unlikely to produce any surprises. Is there any theory or experiment in matter with an opposite electrical charge has anti-gravity? They're distinct fundamental forces.

      The quantum mechanical model of antiparticles is that they are normal particles which are travelling back in time. It's a bit nonsensical from a non quantum mechanical persepective and it's not time travel as you might think of it. But if you time-reverse an electron and calculate how it behaves it behaves like that particle we can observe known as the positron.

      It makes other things neat. For example accelerating electrons emit photons, or the emission of a photon causes the electron to accelerate. So far so good. If you take the time travel model then annihalation is an example of that. An electron and positron meet and get drstroyed emitting a photon. Or an electron amits a photon and changes direction in time rather than space and goes backwards as a positron. From a forward time point of view that looks like an electron and positron coming togther.

      Pair production and annhilation just becomes a single electron whizzing round in circles in time.

      IOW in the rather peculiar world of quantum mechanics a lot of observable things are modelled to within measurement error as time-reversed particles. Sure it's a mathematical abstraction but it works.

      Quantum mechaices has no model of gravity. If an electron travelling forwards in time falls into a graviy well what do you think a time-reversed one might do? GR says it has mass so it's attracted and falls down. That seems to be the most popular view. But QM says it's time reversed so... what?

      The answer is we won't know for sure.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    6. Re:Unlikely to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ShanghaiBill proposed:

      > but it's an experiment we can do, so why not do it?

      Prompting Antique Geekmeister to respond:

      That's a reasonable question. It's a profoundly expensive experiment in terms of electrical power, engineering and scientific time, and the exclusive use of one of the most demanded scientific resources in the world. So those are good reasons to weigh the potential scientific benefit of the results, and include the chance of any usable results.

      The scientific benefit of this experiment's results will be to more-or-less-definitively rule in or out whether antimatter is subject to the same gravitational rule (the deeper the gravity well, the more strongly it attracts stuff) as is matter. The usable result will either be "Okay, then - moving on," or "Okay, then - back to the drawing board." In view of the rather monumental paradigm change that would be compelled by the latter conclusion, it seems reasonable to perform the experiment simply in order to determine whether that will be necessary, does it not?

      Time is short before the facility goes offline for upgrades and maintenance. It won't be available for longer-duration projects until sometime in 2021. (Just because the upgrades and maintenance have been completed doesn't mean the accelerators can simply be switched back on. It'll take additional months of testing and calibrating before they're fully back up and available for use in actual research - assuming that there aren't any design flaws discovered in the new upgrades that will need to be resolved first, even further delaying the facility's return to a useful state.) This one won't take months of observation to complete, so it seems to me that this is as good a time for it to be scheduled as any...

      (Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)

      --

      Check out my novel ...

    7. Re:Unlikely to work by crunchygranola · · Score: 1

      Every means of testing GR (and any other scientific theory) that can be tried, should be tried. Regardless of result we increase our knowledge - we may (with small probability) overturn the expected result, or we add yet another method of confirming our best model.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
    8. Re:Unlikely to work by crunchygranola · · Score: 1

      > but it's an experiment we can do, so why not do it?

      That's a reasonable question. It's a profoundly expensive experiment in terms of electrical power, engineering and scientific time, and the exclusive use of one of the most demanded scientific resources in the world. So those are good reasons to weigh the potential scientific benefit of the results, and include the chance of any usable results.

      Umm... what crucial experiments are being blocked by this? They do have a whole organization devoted to scrutinizing experimental proposals to determine the best use of the LHC. Did you not know that?

      In the six years now since discovering the Higgs boson, "all" the LHC has done is confirm the standard model in various ways. No new physics at all. But confirming the standard model is a Good Thing, it can only be confirmed by testing it. This is another experiment in this line of tests of existing physics.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
    9. Re: Unlikely to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wait...you think time-reversed gravity is repulsive? Consider a movie of the Earth going around the sun, and run it backwards. How do you expect the Earth to behave? Think about it. Harder.

    10. Re:Unlikely to work by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      no you're just referencing what is called the Feynmanâ"Stueckelberg interpretation of anitmatter. It's a useful model for property prediction BUT it is not considered "true", antimatter is not considered to be going backwards in time, in bulk it is subject to the same time evolution of entropy as ordinary matter.

    11. Re:Unlikely to work by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      there are many other differences than just charge in antimatter. Isospin, parity, baryon or lepton number, strangeness are reversed too.

    12. Re:Unlikely to work by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      In any case, it's a rare physics experiment that doesn't produce some new insight, even if it has nothing to do with the original aim.

  8. What could possibly go wrong ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This line doesn't inspire confidence ...

    "The ALPHA-g and GBAR teams are now racing to commission their experiments before CERN's accelerators shut down in a few weeks for a two-year period of maintenance work."

  9. Re: No anti-gravity in FEDERAL PRISON by Orange+Man+Bad · · Score: 2

    Orange Man Bad!

  10. Re: No anti-gravity in FEDERAL PRISON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ORANGE FAN MAD! Racism and rape rad!

  11. Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    >ALPHA-g began taking beam

    That sounds pretty dirty.

    But not as bad as ELENA doing it to GBAR.

  12. I'm guessing the results will be ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Funny

    [ removes sunglasses ] ... anti-climatic.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:I'm guessing the results will be ... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      For one moment I was reading anti-climax and was scared ... but then my GF snorted ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  13. Re:No anti-gravity in FEDERAL PRISON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't make Mars worse!

  14. Interesting. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 0

    Interesting. Which I had mod points to mod your comment up.

  15. The real question by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

    I happen to be pro-matter, you insensitive clod!

    So is the entire universe. The real question is: why?

  16. Last 10 years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What has this place been doing for the last 10 years? Is that all they do, run one test, then shut down for repairs? What a money pit.

    1. Re: Last 10 years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pretty much, yeah. See, it is a really big machine. You set it up, which take years, as anyone familiar with running complex custom machinery at that scale would tell you. Then you run, collect your data, and shut down to perform the next setup while the data is analyzed in the meantime.

      Not a money pit. A colossal ballet of precisely choreographed research and development.

  17. I love this phrase by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "began taking beam". You can do so many things with it. :)

  18. My guess: It will be neutral to gravity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Matter bends space, creating a "hole". Anti matter should do the opposite.
    This would explain why we do not see a lot of Antimatter. Most of it got either annihilated when interacting with matter the rest was pushed away by anti gravitation when interacting with Anti matter.
    This also means there should be an equation converting space to mass.

    1. Re:My guess: It will be neutral to gravity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Matter bends space, creating a "hole". Anti matter should do the opposite.

      Why should it? "Feels" is not valid science.

      Although not fully determined, all our theories say that antimatter still has positive mass identical to that of its matter counterpart. Don't get me wrong, it would be an interesting physics-altering result if it did, or even it the mass were not identical, which is why we do experiments; to find these unexpected results or confirm that what we think we know seems to match objective reality. But in this case we really don't expect it to differ from the theory.

  19. Maybe this video helps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Example 2 is probably the easiest to imagine in your head.

    A molecule with one or more dipoles will orient itself so the repel dipoles are further away (and thus repel less) than the attract dipoles. The difference in distance means the repel is less than the attract. So the net effect (of the motion and the forces) is always attraction.

    In the spinning dipole case they also organize to maximize the binding force. Here watch this video:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8

    It's a bunch of metronomes kicking each other to synchronize and its how the photons (clouds) in the organizational dipole model behave. But the model also binds at harmonics too, a metronome could beat twice as fast and it would even out at twice the oscillation of the other metronomes. The same thing happens in the spinning dipole model, and because of a bunch of math, these correspond to velocities.

    So light has a low organizational dipole force, and small velocities make it bind at the second harmonic (or half harmonic), C. So when you measure it, its travelling at C simply because its binding to the matter in the detector.

    Currently I'm going back through high school physics with this model, and finding some real oddities. e.g. send the photon into a glass simulation and it bends, drill a hole in the glass and send it through the vacuum of the hole and it still bends. Send it over the surface of a glass in a vacuum and it still bends. Make the glass planet sized and spherical and it bends. i.e. you don't need bent space to bend light.

    Screaming obvious observation #2:
    The sci fi version of anti-gravity is actually nullified gravity. It's not that matter *repels*, its that they float as if there was no gravity.
    So when people talk about anti-gravity in their (sci-fi biased) heads, they actually mean nullified gravity.

    That should be possible if the underlying mechanism of gravity is spinning dipolar. i.e. find a way to 'spin up' the dipoles in your ship to bind at the second harmonic, then give it a good kick away from the earth and it should accelerate to C the way that light does when it leaves a medium that is slowing it down. How the f**k you'd do that? I have no idea. I'm pretty sure I can simulate it, but I have no idea if it can actually be done.

    1. Re:Maybe this video helps? by meglon · · Score: 1

      Currently I'm going back through high school physics with this model, and finding some real oddities.

      You'll get even more out of it when you stop dropping acid so much.

      --
      Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
    2. Re:Maybe this video helps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeh yeh, it's a model, it has 2 opposing particles, and one force and no mass. I use to examine the most basic of things, and it predicts lots of effects that are counter-intuitive. Maybe its correct, maybe the model is incorrect, maybe the model is correct and the particular simulation is incorrectly coded.

      I try to understand what its doing, why that thing happened, and explain it using pop-sci analogies and thought experiments. These are not aimed at current physicists. They are aimed at the next generation.

      If I dropped acid, I too might believe particles travel backwards in time, but I don't. Sorry.

    3. Re: Maybe this video helps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Many of your questions are answered in college level physics. Don't be discouraged by the negativity here, you ask good inquisitive questions.

    4. Re: Maybe this video helps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly not.

      Negativity is fine, an ac comes along and suggests the entire physics model is broken, bypasses physics completely and targets thought experiments and simple pop-sci explanations to 14 year olds, illustrated with youtube videos!. WTF!

      How would any expert not be negative about that? How dare I mislead 14 year olds as to how the universe exists.

      Meh. In twenty years, the 14 year olds will be the experts.

      Drinks glass of water, asks self if water molecule binds at the electron orbit level, realizes the density varies with temperature and the electron orbits don't.. so nope.

    5. Re: Maybe this video helps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly not.

      I didn't mean to imply that college level physics would confirm any of what he said. I thought he asked good questions for someone with a superficial knowledge of physics. Hopefully more education will inspire more meaningful questions.

      Drinks glass of water, asks self if water molecule binds at the electron orbit level, realizes the density varies with temperature and the electron orbits don't.. so nope.

      What? Density and temperature in a liquid are functions of molecular motion and have nothing to do with electron orbits etc.- I'm not sure what you meant by this.

  20. Re: No anti-gravity in FEDERAL PRISON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Trump is not from Mars. MEN are from Mars.

  21. The photons are exceptional to (anti-)gravity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The photons don't falls down. The photons don't obey the gravity.
    The photons don't falls up. The photons don't obey the anti-gravity.

    The photons maybe neutral to the terms of gravity or anti-gravity.

  22. Actually I'm 210 lbs 6' 2" & forgot to... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually I'm 210 lbs 6' 2" & I forgot to THANK-YOU for pointing this out https://it.slashdot.org/commen... (after you tried to put me down w/ what you said before it which I replied to there in that link).

    * So, YES, you were (for once) CORRECT that hosts CAN stop sources of "portsmash" INTEL CPU flaw attacks!

    APK

    P.S.=> Unlike the lies you tell hosts stop Spectre/Meltdown (afaik hosts can't stop these 2) & that I have a MacOS X model of my program (not yet, but I will inevitably) as you IMPERSONATE me you imposter doing so here https://idle.slashdot.org/comm... (just 1 example of literally 100's you've done like that)... apk

  23. Re:Actually I'm 210 lbs 6' 2" & forgot to... a by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Short arse

  24. Re: No anti-gravity in FEDERAL PRISON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't know why you HATE Trump so much... he has done more to help the people and this country more than any other politician.

  25. Dear UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous worm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dear UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous worm: I'm a BIGGER person than "your kind" (weezils & whimp do-nothing "ne'er-do-wells) will ever be...

    * FACT!

    APK

    P.S.=> You're a WASTE of life... apk