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.
Quote from: HappyMartian on 05/02/2011 01:42 pmQuote from: MP99 on 05/01/2011 12:41 pmISTR 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=BlogsIf 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
Quote from: MP99 on 05/01/2011 12:41 pmISTR 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=BlogsIf 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.
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.
... Many capacitors and field effect transistors in the amplifiers of most stereos have microscopic negative energy fields ...
Quote from: MP99 on 05/02/2011 02:11 pmQuote from: HappyMartian on 05/02/2011 01:42 pmQuote from: MP99 on 05/01/2011 12:41 pmISTR 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=BlogsIf 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, MartinICAN-II was to use 140 nanograms of antimatter.
Quote from: TyMoore on 04/23/2011 01:50 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).
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 communicationBuild an antimatter spaceship and then let it accelerate up to speed
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.
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.
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.