Our boys at CERN have been busy, so busy that we just might have the hover boards and flying cars the 20th century promised us.
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china you're doing it wrong!! |
Scientists at CERN have announced that they've been able to trap 309
atoms of antihydrogen for over 15 minutes. This is long enough that
soon, they'll be able to figure out whether antimatter obeys the law of
gravity, or whether it's repelled by normal matter and falls "up"
instead. It would be antigravity, for real.
While it's never been tested experimentally due to how difficult it
is to create and store the stuff, it's disappointingly likely that
antimatter will fall "down" just like regular matter. The thinking
behind this is that antimatter (despite the "anti-") is made of regular
ordinary energy, and even if it's got an opposite charge, it should
still obey the same general rules as matter does. Antimatter falling up
would mean a violation of the law of conservation of energy, among other
things.
That said, if antimatter were to exhibit antigravity, it
would go a long way towards explaining some of the peculiarities of our
universe. For example, the universe is supposed to have just as much
antimatter as it does matter, but we don't know where the antimatter is.
If antimatter and normal matter repelled each other, it could mean that
there are entire antimatter galaxies out there. Also, that repulsion
would explain why the universe is not just expanding, but speeding up
its expansion, something that's tricky to figure out when everything in
the universe is always attracted towards everything else.
In either case, the team at CERN should be able to put the debate to
rest within a couple months, when they plan to trap a blob of
antihydrogen and then just watch it to see which way it falls. Down, and
the laws of physics stay in place. Up, and you might just get that hoverboard you've always wanted.
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/05/does-antimatter.php
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