LHC Scientists Create and Capture Antimatter 269
Velcroman1 writes "Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have created antimatter in the form of antihydrogen, demonstrating how it's possible to capture and release it. The development could help researchers devise laboratory experiments to learn more about this strange substance, which mostly disappeared from the universe shortly after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Trapping any form of antimatter is difficult, because as soon as it meets normal matter — the stuff Earth and everything on it is made out of — the two annihilate each other in powerful explosions. 'We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen,' said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics, and LBNL faculty scientist. 'Since no one has been able to make these types of measurements on antimatter atoms at all, it's a good start.'"
Enter Stage Right (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh hey everybody, it's Tom Hanks!
Re:Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter (Score:4, Insightful)
The core is negative/neutral mass and the orbit is positive mass. Naturally, anti-matter electrical conductors conduct positive particles rather than negative. The questions of behavior that need to be answered is what exactly causes i.e. electroconductivity. Reversing the charges, in theory, won't affect the behavior insomuch as you have X mobile particles and Y non-mobile particles setting up orbits that should be the same (the nature of electrical charge attraction doesn't change), so anti-copper should conduct positrons like copper conducts electrons etc. The reality... we don't know, of course.
It would be a big thing if someone created anti-copper AND it didn't behave exactly like copper when supplied with an anti-potential from an anti-battery.
Weird post unless you meant for it to be a joke that I didn't get.
We don't know that the assumption that anti-H behaves like H is true, and there's value in experimentally examining as many aspects of its behavior as we can. I'm not sure why you seem to indicate otherwise.
But then you go on to imply that electrical properties of anti-copper are the really interesting topic of anti-matter study. You seem to realize how incredibly difficult that would be. I don't understand why you declare one experiment to be uselessly redundant and the other a "big thing."
Quoting an American about a European Experiment? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No; "powerful explosions" belongs to literature (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not sure why you're surprised the public anticipates an antimatter bomb? Haven't you seen Star Trek? Are you also surprised that the public anticipates warp drive?
Re:No; "powerful explosions" belongs to literature (Score:3, Insightful)
1: Did we somehow escape the Archimedes' principle of buoyancy? I mean - come on, it's over two thousand years old, surely with our scientific and technological progress we should be able to build ships which are not constrained by it!
Problem is, people seem to assume (and wish) how our dreams from works of fiction should inevitably come true, if we only "work hard enough"... but Real World(tm) has practical limits; ignoring them won't do us any good (however pleasant it seems now to live beyond sustainability - though, truth be told, perhaps most of humanity lives on detritus already)
Just look at those airplanes from "our" times [goo.gl] (/. & unicode links...), as imagined ~130 years ago (depiction no doubt influenced by rapid advances in (sub?)marine technology, capturing imagination of observers) - we can build them! (take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy), but it would be a horrible idea, at the least. Probably something similar gave us Shuttle (designers of which raised on scifi of ~1940s, inspired by rapid advances in aircraft technology & with lots of shiny spaceplanes) - which, in light of its purpose, is somewhat analogous to flying boats (not many those around nowadays)
2: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm [tufts.edu]
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
In particle physics, that's still about half an eternity.
Re:antihydrogen (Score:3, Insightful)
Matter can neither be created or destroyed, merely transformed
My particle physics is a little rusty, and I only studied it to undergrad level, but isn't an anti-particle annihilated and converted into energy on contact with its "normal" particle?
In that sense, yes, matter most certainly can be destroyed (though of course *energy* is conserved in all cases).