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.'"
Still on track... (Score:5, Funny)
... for destroying the world in 2012.
Re:Just my speculation.... (Score:5, Informative)
Not likely, we have a special image of the universe 400,000 years after it formed, the CMB from the "surface of last scattering" which shows that it was matter dominated (and very uniform) when it was 1/1100th it's present size.
Re:Just my speculation.... (Score:5, Informative)
NASA's page is good, see the last 3 paragraphs under the title "surface of last scattering"
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_cmb.html [nasa.gov]
then could read the whole page from the beginning, good stuff.
No, not at all possible (Score:3, Interesting)
Could it at all be possible that during the big bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created.
No. It is one of the Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. While your suggestion of "random" separation is technically possible the odds against it happening are so vanishingly small that it would be more reasonable to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by spontaneous suffocation caused by no oxygen molecules entering any dinosaur's lungs just by "random chance".
Even if you ignore the odds of it happening then there would still have to be a border between the matter and anti-matter that would be dev
Enter Stage Right (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh hey everybody, it's Tom Hanks!
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And... is that a bloody volley-ball?
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My thought exactly, should we expect a bombing attempt on the Vatican in about a week?
antihydrogen (Score:4, Informative)
IANAP.. but..
I think the temporary capture of antiprotons and antielectrons has been achieved before, since it is relatively easy. It is the significant-duration capture of antihydrogen (i.e. antiproton + antielectron, forming an electrically neutral 'anti-atom') which is new ( ? ). Please correct, and scold, me if I am wrong.
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To support the above.. Here is a link to a paper referring to confinement of antiprotons. I do not know the date (how do I find it?), but it was apparently already cited back in 1993.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r5m0760242k25775/
Re:antihydrogen (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, capturing anti-ions is relatively easy (still quite hard though) since you can just use magnetic fields to confine the anti-matter without it coming into contact with the walls of the container. Getting the anti-protons and anti-electrons to combine into a single atom that stays at a low enough energy level that it can be contained for a significant amount of time is hard, especially since it is neutral and can't be contained with magnetic fields. They managed it here by producing very, very cold anti-hydrogen so that the energy levels were low enough that they didn't immediately annihilate with the regular matter that made up the container.
Re:antihydrogen (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe you can, by manipulating the dipole moment. Not easy.
Re:antihydrogen (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct. For example the Fermilab Antiproton Source, which creates antiprotons and stores them, has been in operation since 1985 [1] [fnal.gov], while the Fermilab Recycler has held onto a continuous stash of antiprotons for over a month [2] [fnal.gov]. And these are by no means the very first machines to capture and store antimatter, I'd have to dig though the history a bit more to find an earlier example.
Production of Anti-hydrogen (antiproton orbited by a positron) seems to have been achieved in 1995 at CERN, with Fermilab confirming production in 1997 [3] [wikipedia.org]. But those atoms were destroyed immediately after being created, this is the first time I've heard of anyone successfully storing anti-hydrogen for any long period of time. So yes, the headline is misleading, we've been capturing antimatter for quite some time, it's the fact that you are capturing the neutrally charged anti-hydrogen (antiproton -1, positron +1, total = 0) that's the real news.
Re:antihydrogen (Score:4, Informative)
"But those atoms were destroyed immediately after being created"
Does not compute..
Simple explanation:
Re: (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).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
IANAP
Not a proton? Sorry, due to violent history, antiprotons are no longer permitted to post on these forums. We hope you understand. However, if you feel this policy is threatening or misplaced, please post a message to our Dilithium moderators, and they will be glad to transfer your message once it has been phase-adjusted. We do not intend to inject our own matter/antimatter opinions, or to warp your discussions, but our core values require that we encourage a field of openness. Please do not post trilit
If it's antimatter.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If it's antimatter.. (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be "doesn'ts", in English, if it were.
Good for them! (Score:2)
demonstrating how it's possible to capture and release it
Actually I think it shows a lot of forethought that they are trying to keep from depleting the local pool of Antimatter by trying to institute "Catch and Release" rules.
If more Sport Physicist follow suit, they are less likely to find government intervention and the need for Licenses before they go Colliding their own particles.
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Best joke ever
Only if... (Score:5, Funny)
Now if they could only create antiidiot we could release it and take care of most of the worlds problems.
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If by "take care of the world's problems" you mean "annihilate in a blast of pure energy", then yes.
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This is how many problems are already calculated to be best handled. [wikipedia.org]
Most of the calculations could stand to be checked, however.
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I'm just saying, you don't see statistics professors playing the slots.
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You're thinking antitician if you want any change.
Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter (Score:5, Informative)
No, you are correct. The only difference we *expect* to see from anti-matter is that the electrical charge is reversed. The mass, spin states, etc. should all be the same.
What the scientists are looking for is the slim chance that anti-matter is different in some way. That would be exciting, because it would tell us something new.
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correct. Mass can't be negative. The particles have opposite charge.
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I have a feeling though that it is slightly more complex than that - it's not "just' that the charges are swapped - otherwise there'd be no reason that "regular" matter seems to have prevailed over antimatter. The positive particles (Protons) also have far more mass than negative particles (Electrons) - so I honestly don't expect anti-copper to behave exactly like copper.
Re:Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter (Score:5, Informative)
The positive particles (Protons) also have far more mass than negative particles (Electrons)
Protons are not antimatter electrons. Positrons are antimatter electronis, and they do have the same mass as electrons. The antimatter opposite of a Proton is an anti-proton. The naming system is inconsistent, probably because the original creators of the names did not know about antimatter.
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How do you know that matter prevailed over antimatter over the *entire* universe?
Because if there was an antimatter region next to a matter region, the two should interpenetrate some, and the pair annihilation region (from the overlapping interstellar gasses) would put out gamma rays at predictable energies. As there are no such regions visible, any antimatter regions must be quite small (i.e., too small to matter -- the exact minimum size of course depends on your detectors, but is certainly well below the size of a galaxy).
Re:Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Would anti-physicists finally get the polarity correct on the anti-battery or would it still be backwards?
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We will never know since every time an anti-physicist turns up for a meeting with a physicist to discuss their results they both disappear.
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."
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just saying that anti-matter is charge-reversed matter; but charge is really an irrelevant topic for the most part. Electrons (negative charge) are attracted to protons (positive charge). Electrons also move freely, since protons inhabit the nucleus of the matter and electrons orbit. All properties of matter are based on the interaction of electrons with the nucleus-- the orbital levels, valence shells, etc. Swap the charges and, reasonably, you have the same thing.
If you swap the charges and find
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Don't we already have materials that care very much about the direction of charge? I suspect you'd have a hard time posting on Slashdot if the silicon in your computer stopped being a semiconductor.
That's not to say that your claim of "it's just reversed charges; everything else is the same" is wrong, but there's certainly interesting science to be done. If nothing else, there's value in validating our assumptions. Our current models don't really account for antimatter, much like Newton's laws don't account
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maybe you'd only need a few grams of antimatter to push a craft to/past the speed of light(?)
We can't get to or past the speed of light, the power requirements increase asymptotically (that is, they grow towards infinity) as we approach light speed. And even at E=mc^2 its power is limited, it's estimated that 10 grams can make us reach Mars in one month. To get to a reasonable fraction of lightspeed we'll probably need tons, it also depends on how good we can make the engines use it.
What you must understand is that we're extremely far from interstellar travel today. In practice we just get them a l
Matter/Antimatter balance. (Score:2)
However, a particle and antiparticle won't annihilate if they do not come in contact with each other. If one half of the big bang were matter rich and the other half was antimatter rich, and were kept apart, then half the universe could be ant
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Read "Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology" (1966) by Hannes Alfvén. Its the original discussion of this topic.
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There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe (I believe current understand says that if it were there our tools are powerful enough to see it) so it would seem that the part of the universe we live in is all matter. I suppose it's possible that the interface lies somewhere outside of our visible universe though.
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Things is, apparently there weren't equal amounts of matter and antimatter created. Supposedly the symmetry between matter and antimatter is not the case at very high energies, like just after the Big Bang.
Antimatter areas of the Universe would had to be reconciled with some pretty fundamental stuff [wikipedia.org] (for which there is quite a lot support - enough so they would probably had to be far beyond our horizon / observable Universe, in which case: no, we can't observe them and it doesn't matter, they don't exist fo
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I believe the easiest answer to this is that in the very early universe, things were hot enough that everything was an ion (the first 300,000 years). Oppositely charged particles would have collided and where pa
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If there's an anti-photon, would that mean that black holes are just anti-matter stars?
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Photons aren't matter.
More generally, photons don't care if they're going between matter and antimatter.
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Easy, all the particles would have tiny pointy beards if that were the case.
CERN != LHC (Score:5, Informative)
ALPHA project is NOT a part of LHC. It is one of many other project at CERN that does not have much to do with LHC.
Re:CERN != LHC (Score:4, Informative)
To make antihydrogen, the accelerators that feed protons to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN divert some of these to make antiprotons by slamming them into a metal target; the antiprotons that result are held in CERN’s Antimatter Decelerator ring, which delivers bunches of antiprotons to ALPHA and another antimatter experiment.
source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/11/17/antimatter-atoms/ [lbl.gov]
Antihydrogen production and capture is not new (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
ATRAP has not demonstrated trapped hbar. Production, sure... but the Speck thesis was written long before the magnetic traps for trapping hbar even existed, let alone worked.
Not the LHC (Summary and title are incorrect) (Score:5, Informative)
Pix or it didn't happen. (Score:4, Funny)
If they really created antihydrogen, they should prove it by taking a photo.
We'll have to be extra cautious that they don't just take a photo of regular hydrogen and apply a negative filter to the image.
- RG>
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Actually, anti-hydrogen looks exactly like hydrogen, but with a goatee. It's usually taking advantage of this fact by surprising regular hydrogen's friends with evil acts. The fact that the two annihilate each other if they ever meet is why you never see them both in the same take...
Fox News, really? (Score:5, Informative)
Stopped reading after the first sentence...
Scientists working on the big bang machine in Geneva have done the seemingly impossible: create, capture and release antimatter.
The "machine" in question does have a name, you know?
BBC News also has coverage,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11773791 [bbc.co.uk]
Dan Brown (Score:2)
A link to Fox News? But not the CERN site? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not trying to rag on Fox News here, but why link them and not CERN's press release page?
Clicky [web.cern.ch]
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Because then we wouldn't be able to go laugh at (or cry because of) the comments at FoxNews.com.
Some of my favorites from this article:
Forget terrorists, nukes, and germ warfare. These guys are the real threat. I hope these a*holes dont end up messing everything up before my kid has a chance to live a whole life.
They don't. The modern scientist is just an imaginative liar.
Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jason Lisle has proven that the earth doesn't have to be billions of years old for light to reach us from distant stars. His theory of Anisotropic Synchrony Convention proves that light traveled at an infinite velocity at the moment of creation. Thus, we can be comfortable with the fact that the earth turned 6,014 years old on Oct. 23. Thanks to the theory of Amyotrophic Lateral Convection, the truth of the Bible in verified.
14 billion years ago? Where do they come up with that ridiculous number? The universe was made in 6 days by God, thousands of years ago. It is in the Bible. Now they claim to have the substance of Lucifer? End of the year is coming and I guess it's time to dole out new grants.
The way it looks, some of these guys are just good trolls. However, I've been around long enough to know how hard it is to distinguish extremists from those pretending to be extremists.
The LHC is in for trouble from the PETAM (Score:4, Funny)
LHC Scientists Create and Capture Antimatter
PETAM (People for the Ethical Treatment of Antimatter) are not going to be pleased with this. Especially the bits about physicists staging pit-bull style "dog fights" between matter and antimatter, and placing quantum mechanics based bets to the outcome of the duels.
Remember, children, "God does not play dice!"
And let that antimatter roam free! No capture, no antimatter!
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Antimatter Engine? (Score:2)
The article, although limited on scientific data, is interesting. It makes me wonder how much and at what rate they capture antimatter? What circumstances are required to ensure that antimatter is present to trap?
If one can readily trap antimatter you wouldn't need to store it long. Instead control matter antimatter collisions and harness the explosive power. What would it be called? an engine? a reactor? a generator? Hmmmmmm...
Re:What would it be called? (Score:2)
A bomb. I wonder how long it will take to produce it.
Now get us some dilithium crystals (Score:3)
Really? (Score:2)
A story about the LHC and you link to Fox News? Come on now...
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
perhaps a better link: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/11/17/antimatter-atoms/ [lbl.gov]
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I read this from a few sources today, including fox, and I can't really find fault in the reporting from fox news on this topic; Seems just as complete as any other source I've read.
Link to the Original (Score:3, Informative)
Please use this link http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101117/full/468355a.html [nature.com] it was the original. Tired of the FOX News links.
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Whoops, I probably should have looked for the original. Thanks. Would mod up but I don't have points right now.
First time? (Score:2, Informative)
How much can you catch before... (Score:2)
Can I have my blaster now? (Score:2)
All I want is a beam or bolt of antimatter that I can launch at my enemies and the occasional bird or squirrel. I'm guessing the beam or bolt would have to be encapsulated with something to prevent reaction with the atmosphere prior to hitting the target and I assume it would be some sort of energy field. So now let's do that so I can have my blaster!
Also... lightsaber? Where is my lightsaber?
Slashnot (Score:2)
News for nuffers. Stuff that antimatters.
Gotta love the sarcasm.. (Score:4, Informative)
At http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/30577 [cerncourier.com] you can read a slightly sarcastic piece about what it would take to hold the quantities that Dan Brown used in his books.
Nice wry write-up - I like the details..
What a bunch of idiots (Score:3, Funny)
Why not just make a container out of anti-matter? Problem solved.
positive first (Score:2, Funny)
If I reply, will our comments annihilate each other?
Annihilate Inaccurate Story (Score:5, Informative)
In fact Alpha uses the Anti-proton Decelerator [web.cern.ch] which uses the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) which is one of the low energy machines at CERN accelerating protons to only 25 GeV - which is so low in energy that the protons have to be accelerated by another machine, the SPS, before they can even be injected into the LHC for final acceleration!
last get (Score:5, Funny)
This would have been a better joke if you said "last get" instead.
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Dumb Question (Score:2)
Re:Dumb Question (Score:5, Funny)
How do you trap a neutral antiparticle?
Tell him that his neutral anti-girlfriend is pregnant.
Re:Dumb Question (Score:4, Funny)
Really, that sounds more like the answer to "How do you get a neutral antiparticle to skip town and never be heard from again".
Re:Dumb Question (Score:4, Funny)
A neutron walks into a bar. He goes up to the counter and asks the bartender, "How much for a beer?"
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
That's no neutron (Score:5, Funny)
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
Of course if the bartender had been a particle physicist and looked him up and down then he would have said: "Hey you're no neutron, you are a quark short. That'll be full charge for you, you pion!"
Smart Answer (Score:2)
Don't.
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
They use the magnetic moment of the antihydrogen. They trap it for about 1/6 of a second, which isn't very long, considering we can trap charged antiparticles for weeks in Penning-Malmberg traps. But it's still impressive.
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
In particle physics, that's still about half an eternity.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
Naw, the real question is, "Does it antimatter?"
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Naw, the real question is, "Does it antimatter?"
Absolutely positively!
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Don't worry, Gummal [slashdot.org] will take care of it. Or did will take care of it. Or will did take care of it.
Or something. Damn, the mechanics of time travel give me a headache.
No; "powerful explosions" belongs to literature (Score:5, Interesting)
First, most of the energy released in matter-antimatter annihilation is carried away by neutrinos.
Secondly...CERN covered this [web.cern.ch] on one occasion:
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes. ...
Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.
Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.
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It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter
[reality off] Not so, Starfleet put a station in close orbit to the Sun so that they could use the intense solar radiation to provide the necessary power for the anti-matter production facility. This also adds a measure of safety in the unlikely event of an accident, since it's off-world. [reality on]
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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 sustainabil
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From TFA:
""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."
There you go. If there exists even the slightest possibility that something like this can be weaponized (and I'm not even pretending to be smart enough to make that call) you can be damn sure there will be no shorta
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Then at least disclose that it's a European experiment.
Well, the headline did start right off by saying it was the LHC. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who knows that the LHC is in Europe.
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Re:Someone call Dr. Langdon... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Then again, I always keep my distance from the Vatican."
Too bad, the Vatican is a warehouse of historical art and documents that span almost 20 centuries, from ancient Celtic gold captured by Roman Emperors to some of the most exquisite illuminated French manuscripts ever known. Sculpture by Michelangelo, paintings by Titian, medieval tryptics chased with gold filigree, original manuscripts by pagan authors such as Plato, Cato, and Virgil... really amazing stuff. But you'll never see it as you have obviously made the wise choice of avoiding Christian Ground Zero. They might zap you with their evil baptism rays. Good for you.
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"...I love how these articles talk about THEORIES like they are pure facts. "
Not facts, theories. You do however seem to be laboring under some false pretense that scientific method is some kind of ramshackle rim-shot affair, like it doesn't really work, and is only for people who study it. People like you show what an astounding divide exists between science and the lay populace. Not that Science hasn't tried to bridge that divide, People like Sagan and Hawking have tried to do it. Those effort obviously weren't enough. A theory isn't an idea that a person, say YOU, came up with w
Re:How do we know? (Score:4, Informative)
The space between our galaxy and the next one over is not empty. It contains extremely rarified gas. If the next galaxy was made of antimatter there would be a transition region where matter and antimatter would mix, collide, and emit easily detected gamma rays.