Huh I didn’t know antimatter was a completely confirmed thing.
After making a thin gas of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, researchers pushed it up a 3-metre-tall vertical shaft surrounded by superconducting electromagnetic coils. These can create a kind of magnetic ‘tin can’ to keep the antimatter from coming into contact with matter and annihilating. Next, the researchers let some of the hotter antiatoms escape, so that the gas in the can got colder, down to just 0.5 °C above absolute zero — and the remaining antiatoms were moving slowly.
The researchers then gradually weakened the magnetic fields at the top and bottom of their trap — akin to removing the lid and base of the can — and detected the antiatoms using two sensors as they escaped and annihilated. When opening any gas container, the contents tend to expand in all directions, but in this case the antiatoms’ low velocities meant that gravity had an observable effect: most of them came out of the bottom opening, and only one-quarter out of the top.
You may have heard of a “PET scan” used in medicine. This uses a type of antimatter called a positron.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/positron-emission-tomography-antimatter-cancer/
The complexity behind this is fascinating.
Just wait until you find out about MRI :)
That’s pretty awesome too, but they don’t need molecules with atoms that were modified using particle colliders just minutes/hours before you need them.
Still much more complex than PET conceptually, and much more versatile.
Antimatter was first observed physically back in 1932. A positron, more specifically. Its existence has been confirmed, and accepted, for ages, and some of our technology already operates using antimatter to do its tasks.
Not only does it exist, but bananas give off a fair bit of antimatter due to their decaying potassium isotopes.
Allegedly, im not smart enough to verify it
Would an anti-banana give off normal matter?
Does it matter?
I don’t think it would antimatter
Argument anihilated!
AFAIK, yes.
There are some very small differences between matter and anti-matter, but I don’t think any of them affect radioactivity.
Bananas produce antimatter, but just barely. The main radioactive material in bananas is Potassium-40. A banana is about 0.358% potassium in all. About 0.012% of naturally occurring potassium is the radioactive Potassium-40. Only 0.001% of all radioactive decay events in postassium-40 produce an antiparticle (a positron).
An average banana produces a single positron about every 75 minutes.
Brb. Making a fruit-based matter-antimatter annihilation power plant.
You kid but as a kid when I learned about potatoes and lemon batteries I was like “SCALE THIS UP NOW!”
…if only…
That’s fucking awesome.
El psy kongroo
We need a Far Side where ape scientists are colliding two bannanas at high speed
anti-matter? ya, we have been observing it for quite a while (testing is difficult for reasons), it naturally accumulates in parts of the Van Allen belt.
Dark matter on the other hand is still completely up for question
The Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t work if antimatter wasn’t confirmed.
Why wouldn’t it work?
Because it involves colliding protons and antiprotons.
No, it either does proton-proton collisions or heavy ions, both regular matter. At TeV energies the added energy from anihalating matter with antimatter isn’t that much of a contribution anymore that it would justify the added complexity.
Its predecessor collided positrons with electrons though. But the LEP was more for precise refinement of known interactions and not so much about reaching the highest possible energies.
Sure, but it doesn’t just collide protons and antiprotons, does it?
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How? Pro doesn’t mean positive. If anything they’d be called contons.
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But from the antimatter’s perspective, it falls up.
Then it really is lost!
What happens to Australian antimatter?
it falls to the earth, like you would expect normal matter to do above the equator
So then it is not really antimatter in the sense that it is completely opposite?
So antimatter still has positive mass?
In my limited understanding, antimatter just means the particles have the opposite charge of normal matter. All other attributes are not part of the definition of antimatter.
Charge isn’t the right word, although I’m not sure what the right word is. Otherwise you’ve got it right.
No, charge is the right word. But i was wrong about charge being the only difference, apparently antimatter’s “parity” and “time” are also opposite of normal matter. Whatever that means.
The word is charge-parity. All physical systems (at least I’m quantum physics, I cant speak for other fields) are symmetric (nothing changes) if you change C(harge), P(arity) and T(ime reversal) at the same time. This is called CPT symmetry, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPT_symmetry
As antimatter can be described as normal matter going back in time (see the other comment), it means antimatter can also be described as normal matter transformed under the C and P operators. If T(particle) = antiparticle and CPT(particle) = particle then CP(particle) = antiparticle also.
And the reason you can reverse time is because most of the equations are quadratic: they have a positive and negative solution, one describes particles moving forward in time, the other solution describes antiparticles going backward in time.
NB: in quantum field theory it gets slightly more complicated, lets leave that as homework ;)
The Feynman–Stueckelberg interpretation states that antimatter and antiparticles are regular particles traveling backward in time.[18]
So just like in Tenet?
Antimatter can interact with matter and create an explosion of energy that annihilates both.
If you take some antimatter out of its containment cabinet and do that with it 5 minutes from now, you’ve done that in its “past” which means it can’t be there for you to procure in the first place.
Or did you, in reverse time, cause a bunch of energy to converge and become matter and anti-matter, and then walk over and put the antimatter away in the cabinet?
It’s reverse entropic as fuck but I guess that’s anti-time for you. Maybe this is how the Big Bang was caused. Anti-entropic flow of anti-matter into a highly ordered state in one point. Fuck.
Would that mean that they’re not falling, but rather actually rising?
What… How…
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i asked chatgpt if antimatter travels backwards in time, and this was the reply:
Some physicists have proposed that antimatter is actually matter moving backwards in time, based on a mathematical equivalence that emerges from quantum field theory. This idea was first suggested by Richard Feynman, who wondered if all electrons could be the same electron bouncing back and forth in time. However, this is not a widely accepted interpretation, and there is no experimental evidence to support it. In fact, most physicists do not believe that antimatter is really moving backwards in time, because it is not clear what that would mean physically.
One way to test this idea is to see how antimatter responds to gravity. If antimatter falls upwards instead of downwards, that would imply that it has a negative mass and a negative energy, which could be interpreted as moving backwards in time. However, a recent experiment at CERN has confirmed for the first time that atoms of antimatter fall downwards, just like normal matter2. This means that antimatter and matter have the same gravitational mass and the same sign of energy. However, this does not rule out the possibility that antimatter and matter might fall at different rates, which would still indicate a difference in their behavior under gravity.
So, to answer your question, antimatter does not travel backwards in time, at least not in any obvious or observable way. It behaves very similarly to normal matter, except for having opposite charges and other quantum numbers. The mystery of why antimatter and matter did not cancel each other out completely in the early universe remains unsolved, and requires further investigation and experimentation
Thanks for the source. Looks like I have some learning to do.
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Duh. Negative mass doesn’t exist. Antiparticles just have an opposite charge.
Why would anyone think it would fall up?
Because there is no theory of quantum gravity we have no idea how gravity could interact with anti matter. By showing that antimatter behaves just like matter when interacting with gravity we can learn a lot about it and cut the number of possible theories of quantum gravity in half.
Because things exist
(the antigravity hypothesis was an attempt to explain why matter and antimatter haven’t annihilated each other)
Because one common assumption was that the universe might contain as much antimatter as matter.
Which begs the question: Where did it go? We would notice a huge amount of annihilation reactions in the solar system.
“Antimatter falls up” (is gravitationally repelled instead of attracted by normal matter) was an easy hypothesis to explain that.
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