Wednesday, September 27, 2023

If antimatter could be dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa would it drop like matter or not?

Amazing stuff! Antigravity may not exist! Galileo Galilei is fascinated! 😊

"... After several months of analysis and cross-checks, ... [Alpha team] were able to confirm their initial inklings: For the first time, they had shown that antimatter, when dropped, falls down. ...
But one area that hadn’t been fully investigated is how antimatter interacts with gravity. “A difference in the behavior would be a completely unanticipated result and would change our understanding of physics,” ..."

From the abstract:
"Einstein’s general theory of relativity from 19151 remains the most successful description of gravitation. From the 1919 solar eclipse to the observation of gravitational waves, the theory has passed many crucial experimental tests. However, the evolving concepts of dark matter and dark energy illustrate that there is much to be learned about the gravitating content of the universe. Singularities in the general theory of relativity and the lack of a quantum theory of gravity suggest that our picture is incomplete. It is thus prudent to explore gravity in exotic physical systems. Antimatter was unknown to Einstein in 1915. Dirac’s theory appeared in 1928; the positron was observed in 1932. There has since been much speculation about gravity and antimatter. The theoretical consensus is that any laboratory mass must be attracted by the Earth, although some authors have considered the cosmological consequences if antimatter should be repelled by matter. In the general theory of relativity, the weak equivalence principle (WEP) requires that all masses react identically to gravity, independent of their internal structure. Here we show that antihydrogen atoms, released from magnetic confinement in the ALPHA-g apparatus, behave in a way consistent with gravitational attraction to the Earth. Repulsive ‘antigravity’ is ruled out in this case. This experiment paves the way for precision studies of the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration between anti-atoms and the Earth to test the WEP."

Antimatter falls down | symmetry magazine Results from the ALPHA experiment confirm that matter and antimatter react to gravity in a similar way.


Fig. 1: ALPHA-g apparatus.



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