Author Topic: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion  (Read 41556 times)

Offline mlorrey

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #40 on: 05/04/2011 02:10 am »
Haha, as soon as I read the MIT Techreview article, I came rushing here to post it, but I see I was beaten to the punch.

Anyway, as my comment below the article says, it's important to experimentally verify the most established theories, because nothing must be blindly trusted and everything must be verified. The more fundamental the divergence between theory and observation, the more corrective knowledge we gain.

They acknowledge that antimatter has positive mass, the alleged question is whether antimatter reacts the same to gravity. Standard model says that gravity is a function of mass, however dark matter exhibits gravitational influence but we are unable to measure its mass due to it failure to interact with normal matter by any means other than gravitational. Such lack of interaction means dark matter is both electrically and magnetically neutral, something that antimatter is not, so antimatter is ruled out.
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Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #41 on: 05/04/2011 01:24 pm »
Dark Matter is a theory, as yet unproven by physical observation. It could be that matter-antimatter repulsive interaction exists in place of Dark Matter. Unless there are huge streams of neutrinos out there, orbiting the galaxies.

Offline Spaniard

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #42 on: 05/04/2011 01:39 pm »
They acknowledge that antimatter has positive mass, the alleged question is whether antimatter reacts the same to gravity. Standard model says that gravity is a function of mass, however dark matter exhibits gravitational influence but we are unable to measure its mass due to it failure to interact with normal matter by any means other than gravitational. Such lack of interaction means dark matter is both electrically and magnetically neutral, something that antimatter is not, so antimatter is ruled out.
Mmmm.. I think that there is three differents questions abous the antimatter-gravity interaction.
1- Antimatter reacts equals to acceleration (relative mass)
2- It reacts equals to gravity
3- It generates the same space-time distorsion ("gravity")

The first has been proved with the accelerators.
Now it's near to prove "2"
But 3 will require a lot more antimatter to measure the gravity distorsion that antimatter generates.

Offline Nomadd

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #43 on: 05/05/2011 01:52 pm »
 I think someone in here has confused properties of anti-matter and negative energy.
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who couldn't hear the music.

Offline Joris

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #44 on: 05/05/2011 02:00 pm »
ISTR a recent article about trapping neutral anti-hydrogen, and that it may eventually allow a check of gravitational behaviour of anti-matter. I believe the Standard Model is clear on the expected result, but In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

And also, on 05/02/2011  Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds

"The long term storage of significant amounts of antihydrogen should soon settle the question of whether antimatter falls up or down"

At: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26709/?p1=Blogs

If the long-term storage of antihydrogen is doable, it is going to be to easier to use antihydrogen powered
rockets to get humans to the Moon, Mars, and Ceres and maybe... everywhere. And do those trips quicker than most folks think.

Making antihydrogen on the Moon might become a viable industry down the road a bit.

Thanks, that's what I had in mind.

We're a LONG way from being able to create enough anti-matter to be useful to space flight. And it would be very hard to make it safe in case the launcher has a failure.

cheers, Martin

ICAN-II was to use 140 nanograms of antimatter.
JIMO would have been the first proper spaceship.

Offline mikegi

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #45 on: 05/05/2011 02:27 pm »
... Many capacitors and field effect transistors in the amplifiers of most stereos have microscopic negative energy fields ...
Do you have a link to anything about capacitors in most stereos having "negative energy"? Capacitors are simply two conductors separated by space. There's either a field between them (positive energy) or not (zero energy).

Offline HappyMartian

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #46 on: 05/07/2011 01:49 pm »
ISTR a recent article about trapping neutral anti-hydrogen, and that it may eventually allow a check of gravitational behaviour of anti-matter. I believe the Standard Model is clear on the expected result, but In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

And also, on 05/02/2011  Antihydrogen Trapped For 1000 Seconds

"The long term storage of significant amounts of antihydrogen should soon settle the question of whether antimatter falls up or down"

At: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26709/?p1=Blogs

If the long-term storage of antihydrogen is doable, it is going to be to easier to use antihydrogen powered
rockets to get humans to the Moon, Mars, and Ceres and maybe... everywhere. And do those trips quicker than most folks think.

Making antihydrogen on the Moon might become a viable industry down the road a bit.

Thanks, that's what I had in mind.

We're a LONG way from being able to create enough anti-matter to be useful to space flight. And it would be very hard to make it safe in case the launcher has a failure.

cheers, Martin

ICAN-II was to use 140 nanograms of antimatter.

Yep. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAN-II_(spacecraft)

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/ican.htm

Quick trips to Mars are coming. The question is when.

Cheers!
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Offline colbourne

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #47 on: 05/13/2011 10:02 am »
Lets assume that anti-matter does behave the opposite of normal matter with gravity.

How can we use this property to our advantage ?

Could we use it for FTL communication

Build an antimatter spaceship and then let it accelerate up to speed

Offline Tass

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #48 on: 05/13/2011 01:11 pm »
... Many capacitors and field effect transistors in the amplifiers of most stereos have microscopic negative energy fields ...
Do you have a link to anything about capacitors in most stereos having "negative energy"? Capacitors are simply two conductors separated by space. There's either a field between them (positive energy) or not (zero energy).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #49 on: 05/13/2011 02:31 pm »
Lets assume that anti-matter does behave the opposite of normal matter with gravity.

How can we use this property to our advantage ?

Could we use it for FTL communication

Build an antimatter spaceship and then let it accelerate up to speed

Well, as I mentioned in my original post, perhaps you could use anti-matter to anti-gravitationally accelerate away from our solar system towards some distant star. Then as you approach the half-way point, you jettison your anti-matter so that you can approach the destination unhindered by repulsive effects.

If anti-matter was indeed gravitationally repulsive to normal matter, wouldn't it tend to accumulate in the Lagrange points between stars?

It's one thing to visualize how attractive forces cancel at a Lagrange point, but would repulsive forces cancel in exactly the same way? If you and I are tugging on a pillow, we might get stuck in a stalemate, or we might even rip it apart if we tug hard enough. But what if we were both pushing the pillow at each other? Wouldn't the pillow just end up being shoved in some other orthogonal direction?

What does water in a toilet bowl do at the equator?

Offline colbourne

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #50 on: 05/14/2011 04:04 am »
Maybe a ring of antimatter forms around galaxies and this is what appears to make the  mass of the galaxy higher requiring the possibly false invention of dark matter .

Would a anti-matter be limited by light speed as maybe the force increases with speed.

Offline QuantumG

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #51 on: 05/14/2011 04:07 am »
Maybe this thread is made of antimatter and it is opposing anyone with an educated opinion on the matter.
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #52 on: 05/14/2011 11:53 pm »
Oi! Please don't post on threads to say how silly they are! It just moves them to the top of the list. :)

Honestly, I think it is fascinating that it has not been absolutely ruled out that antimatter reacts differently to gravity, but that is all that can be said without an actual result. If it is just antigravity, it is very hard to imagine exploiting such a tiny force any time soon. What would be important is the gaping hole it reveals in what we thought we knew.

Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #53 on: 05/15/2011 06:57 pm »
You may see it as just a tiny force, but it's a force with a very long span of reach.

Imagine a force that keeps acting on you even at a very great range, and which keeps accelerating you even from very far away.

If there is some violation of a the Equivalency Principle, so that gravitational mass is not the same as inertial mass, then the implications of a negative gravitational field are enormous.

There may be entire galaxies made of anti-matter which are hurtling away from us, due to gravitational repulsion. Would our universe eventually bifurcate, like cellular mitosis?

If gravity is the manifestation of spacetime distortion, then is anti-gravity a symmetrically opposite type of spacetime distortion?

Could equal amounts of matter and anti-matter traveling together behave like a Cooper's Pair?
« Last Edit: 05/15/2011 06:58 pm by sanman »

Offline mlorrey

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #54 on: 05/15/2011 11:41 pm »
Oi! Please don't post on threads to say how silly they are! It just moves them to the top of the list. :)

Honestly, I think it is fascinating that it has not been absolutely ruled out that antimatter reacts differently to gravity, but that is all that can be said without an actual result. If it is just antigravity, it is very hard to imagine exploiting such a tiny force any time soon. What would be important is the gaping hole it reveals in what we thought we knew.

If a particle with positive mass doesnt act the same way to gravity as other particles with positive mass, then the entire set of laws of physics is screwy. Gravity is an inherent effect of the existence of mass. The only people who continue to argue the point are essentially the physics equivalent of creationists.
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Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #55 on: 05/16/2011 05:56 am »
No, what's being debated here is the Equivalency Principle - ie. whether gravitational mass is always the same as inertial mass.

No one is debating whether matter and antimatter have the same inertial mass, what's being debated is whether they have the same gravitational characteristics, and whether the Equivalency Principle works the same for antimatter as it does for matter (ie. repulsive interaction instead of attractive)

The best way to confirm this is thru direct observation, and not blind assertion. It should be fairly doable to conduct an experiment to directly observe the direction in which antimatter falls up or down in the Earth's gravitational field. There have been many experiments verifying known physical laws down to very precise tolerances, and so it shouldn't be bizarre or unwarranted to likewise verify this.


Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #56 on: 05/16/2011 08:22 am »
You may see it as just a tiny force, but it's a force with a very long span of reach.

Imagine a force that keeps acting on you even at a very great range, and which keeps accelerating you even from very far away.

ok, now this is reaching my silliness limits also, and in my case they are quite high :)

We don't need to imagine because in this case the maths is easy. It doesnt even involve any algebra. If antimatter had antigravity, the velocity it would gain leaving the solarsystem would merely be equal the escape velocity for an ordinary piece of matter starting at the same depth within the gravity well. Not sure what that is, but merely some tens of km/s probably. We can do better right now.

I think I will be escaping this thread now.. :)

Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #57 on: 05/16/2011 05:37 pm »
why call it silly? you may find escape velocity to be trivial, but remember that the force required to achieve it is based on the mass that you're trying to help escape.

helping a tiny pico-satellite or satellite-on-a-chip achieve escape velocity may seem trivial to you, but helping something far more massive achieve that escape velocity can be far more difficult.

anyway, back to what I was saying with the Equivalency Principle - why should the equivalency principle dictate direction of gravitational force, anyway? If a man is inside that famous closed elevator-in-space which is accelerating, how does he know whether he's experiencing a gravitational field vs an anti-gravitational field?

A man in a closed chamber should neither be able to tell whether he's accelerating inertially, or whether he's experiencing a gravitational field, or whether he's experiencing an anti-gravitational field.

If you disagree, please explain why.

(Obviously I'm defining a gravitational force to be the attractive force generated by the same kind of matter he's made of. Likewise, an anti-gravitational force is the repulsive force generated by the opposite type of matter that he's made of.)


Offline mlorrey

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #58 on: 05/16/2011 10:42 pm »
why call it silly? you may find escape velocity to be trivial, but remember that the force required to achieve it is based on the mass that you're trying to help escape.

helping a tiny pico-satellite or satellite-on-a-chip achieve escape velocity may seem trivial to you, but helping something far more massive achieve that escape velocity can be far more difficult.

anyway, back to what I was saying with the Equivalency Principle - why should the equivalency principle dictate direction of gravitational force, anyway? If a man is inside that famous closed elevator-in-space which is accelerating, how does he know whether he's experiencing a gravitational field vs an anti-gravitational field?

A man in a closed chamber should neither be able to tell whether he's accelerating inertially, or whether he's experiencing a gravitational field, or whether he's experiencing an anti-gravitational field.

If you disagree, please explain why.

(Obviously I'm defining a gravitational force to be the attractive force generated by the same kind of matter he's made of. Likewise, an anti-gravitational force is the repulsive force generated by the opposite type of matter that he's made of.)



You are trying to make conjectures about physics while ignoring the maths. You can't do that.
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Offline sanman

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Re: Anti-Gravity from Matter-AntiMatter Repulsion
« Reply #59 on: 05/17/2011 12:05 am »
You are trying to make conjectures about physics while ignoring the maths. You can't do that.

The maths you are referring to are based on observation - observation which cannot be claimed as being complete, if it hasn't yet included direction observation of gravitational interaction between matter and anti-matter.

This is like a man claiming himself to be the smartest man ever, and if you question his assertion, he says "Well of course I'm right - I'm the smartest man ever!"  That's a circular inference.

What's needed here is direct physical observation of the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter. We need to directly see whether anti-matter falls up or down in our Earth's gravitational field.

Sound physics should not be based on circular inference - there has to be cross-validation between observation and theory.

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