$100 says antimatter is also attracted by gravity. Anything else would be too cool for school.
Fuck it, you're on. $100. I want to believe ...
Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#52$100 says antimatter is also attracted by gravity. Anything else would be too cool for school.
Fuck it, you're on. $100. I want to believe ...
Doesn't look like your odds are good (consensus atm is there's no theoretical basis): http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h28sd/is_there_a...
Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuck it, you're on. $100. I want to believe ...
Doesn't look like your odds are good (consensus atm is there's no theoretical basis): http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h28sd/is_there_a...
Well, let's see what the data says. I confess I want the universe to surprise and confound. I want the theories to be wrong, I want reality to be stranger than fiction. That would be awesome!
Or I am wrong, in which case I'll happily pay out[1]. I'm a layman, as if that wasn't obvious, and it will be a much-needed physics lesson. Win-win.
[1] If in Australia, payout will take the form of alcohol credits at an establishment of winner's choosing. Hey, I want to learn from my superiors :) If not, a crisp USD$100 note will be posted to any mailing address in the world, to be supplied.
Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#54Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#55Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#56Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#57I am nothing short of _astounded_ that we don't know if anti-matter "falls up".
I thought this was a settled question, but I guess it's never been tested... so it's just consensus opinion, not verified fact.
I am also surprised.
Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard anyone argue that it would react any differently to gravity than normal matter. After all, the only difference is the electrical charge of the particles. They have the same mass.
I think the "falling up" argument comes from the conception that antimatter is the time-reverse of matter.
Of course, regular old hydrogen "falls up", being lighter than air. :) I guess if gravity is truly reversed for antihydrogen, it would fall up even faster. But I highly doubt it's actually gravitationally repulsive.
Re: Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds
#59$100 says antimatter is also attracted by gravity. Anything else would be too cool for school.
I'm with you on this one. If antimatter was just backwards everything then there'd be large conspicuous clusters of the stuff all over the cosmos because ordinary matter would be repelling it instead of annihilating it.
While there does seem to be a lot of dark matter out there, if it were actually antimatter and had opposite gravity to normal matter one would imagine there would be a huge discrepancy between cosmologists' models and observation. The high-end supercomputer simulations and regressions cosmologists employ have good predictive power, even though we lack a full explanation for the phenomena we can observe. Cosmologists deal with such far-out concepts to begin with (by definition) that it's not as if they'd be averse to a concept like antigravity if it had predictive utility.
toys idly with desk magnets while thinking about it
Then again, given that photons are massless maybe there could be such a thing as a gravitational dipole...
/timecube