Antimatter = antigravity?

They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a
gravity field:
http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html

Pat

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...
They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a gravity
field:
http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html

Weird, I could have sworn reading about such experiments in the works 20+
years ago and when they finally occurred, confirmed that anti-matter behaved
in the same way as matter in a gravitional field.

--
Greg Moore
SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available!
Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html

"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:

:"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
hdakotatelephone...
: They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a gravity
: field:
: http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html
:
:Weird, I could have sworn reading about such experiments in the works 20+
:years ago and when they finally occurred, confirmed that anti-matter behaved
:in the same way as matter in a gravitional field.
:

Same here. Given that gravity is merely a bend in the space-time
curve, there is every reason to expect antimatter to behave
identically to ordinary particles.

Since cyclotrons create a certain amount of antimatter, wouldn't we
already have noticed if it behaved differently?

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:14:46 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a
gravity field:
http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html

....It's not negating gravity as it is just blowing things upwards as
well as up :-)

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:

:"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
hdakotatelephone...
: They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a gravity
: field:
:
http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html
:
:Weird, I could have sworn reading about such experiments in the works 20+
:years ago and when they finally occurred, confirmed that anti-matter behaved
:in the same way as matter in a gravitional field.
:

Same here. Given that gravity is merely a bend in the space-time
curve, there is every reason to expect antimatter to behave
identically to ordinary particles.


Do you really believe that question is settled?
Anyone that thinks the basics of reality are a closed
question is assuming far too much. In fact I think
it's safe to say we've only scratched the surface.

Consider the following two tracks.
First....


A Quintessential Introduction to Dark Energy

Paul J. Steinhardt
Department of Physics, Princeton University

Abstract

"Most of the energy in the universe consists of some form of
dark energy that is gravitationally self-repulsive and that is
causing the expansion rate of the universe to accelerate."

Introduction

"The discovery of dark energy is one of the most surprising
and profound discoveries in the history of science. Consider
some of its implications:

Most of the energy in the universe is not "matter."

For its first 300 years, physics has focused on the properties of
matter and radiation, including dark matter. Now we know that
they represent less than 30% of the composition of the universe.
The rest consists of something we know virtually nothing about.

Most of the energy in the universe is not gravitationally attractive.

We are probably the last generation to have been taught that "gravity
always attracts," a notion which has been presented as a basic fact
of nature for hundreds of years. We are now aware that gravity
can repel, as well. Of course, the possibility of self-repulsive
forms of energy was there in Einstein's general theory of relativity
since its inception, but this point was never generally appreciated until
now. We must rewrite the textbooks to explain that the gravitationally
self-attracting matter with which we are familiar is the minority in the
universe today and for the indefinite future.

We live at a special time in the history of the universe.

The Copernican revolution taught us that there is nothing special about
our location in the universe. If space is uniform, then should not the same
be true for time? Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding taught
us that the universe is evolving, but the notion had been that the
evolution has been steady over the last 15 billion years with no remarkable
changes. We now know that time is anti-Copernican.

We live at a special moment in cosmic history, the transition between a
decelerating, matter-dominated universe and an accelerating, dark
energy dominated universe."
http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/steinhardt.pdf
http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/



And second....

Why is it that living systems and physical systems follow the same
inverse square/power law forms in behavior?

If the physical and living worlds follow the same mathematical
laws, then saying gravity is a bend in space time is like saying
humans are attracted to oh say...money because the ground
between here and there is (literally) tilted in that direction.

Explain gravity without 'bending space', or explain gravity in
a way consistent with Darwinian evolution. Can you do that?
I can with my hobby.

Gravity wells and fitness landscapes share the following two
primary properties. Peaks tend to cluster together.
And higher peaks have a larger basin of attraction.
Which means that if either matter...or...life, if randomly
placed on the landscape, would be more likely to find
itself drawn into a basin of attraction than to find itself
in empty space.

Both landscapes follow a similar inverse square law
relationship. Explain the source of that universal behavior
if you can? I can, read below. Phase transitions are
the ultimate source of power law relationships.
The source of all creation in fact, living or physical.

Power Law

"Power-law relations characterize a staggering number of natural
patterns, and it is primarily in this context that the term power law
is used rather than polynomial function. For instance,
inverse-square laws, such as gravitation and the Coulomb force
are power laws, as are many common mathematical formulae
such as the quadratic law of area of the circle."


"Research on the origins of power-law relations, and efforts to
observe and validate them in the real world, is extremely active
in many fields of modern science, including physics,
computer science, linguistics, geophysics, sociology,
economics and more."


"The equivalence of power laws with a particular scaling exponent
can have a deeper origin in the dynamical processes that generate
the power-law relation. In physics, for example, phase transitions
in thermodynamic systems are associated with the emergence of
power-law distributions of certain quantities, whose exponents
are referred to as the critical exponents of the system. Diverse
systems with the same critical exponents - that is, which display
identical scaling behaviour as they approach criticality - can
be shown, via renormalization group theory, to share the same
fundamental dynamics. For instance, the behavior of water and
CO2 at their boiling points fall in the same universality class
because they have identical critical exponents. In fact, almost
all material phase transitions are described by a small set of
universality classes. Similar observations have been made, though
not as comprehensively, for various self-organized critical systems,
where the critical point of the system is an attractor."





Since cyclotrons create a certain amount of antimatter, wouldn't we
already have noticed if it behaved differently?

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw



"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,
as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Albert Einstein


s

In sci.space.policy, Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:

:"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
hdakotatelephone...
: They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a gravity
: field:
: http://space.newscientist.com/articl...e-fall-up.html
:
:Weird, I could have sworn reading about such experiments in the works 20+
:years ago and when they finally occurred, confirmed that anti-matter behaved
:in the same way as matter in a gravitional field.

I can't find such an experiment. I find, e.g.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/antimatter_fall.html
saying that the experiment hasn't been done (as of ten years ago).

Same here. Given that gravity is merely a bend in the space-time
curve, there is every reason to expect antimatter to behave
identically to ordinary particles.

Read the article, did you? That's what it says, several times.

Since cyclotrons create a certain amount of antimatter, wouldn't we
already have noticed if it behaved differently?

They create charged antiparticles. Any stray electromagnetic force
(which cyclotrons aren't exactly short of) will swamp gravitational
effects.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't shipped you to Syria for interrogation,
it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not because you're patriotic.

Andrew Plotkin wrote:

:In sci.space.policy, Fred J. McCall wrote:
:
: Same here. Given that gravity is merely a bend in the space-time
: curve, there is every reason to expect antimatter to behave
: identically to ordinary particles.
:
:
:Read the article, did you? That's what it says, several times.
:

No, I didn't need to. I actually took a physics course or two way
back when.

Are you always such an ill-mannered **** or are you making a special
effort for some reason?

--
"So many women. So little charm."
-- Donna, to Josh; The West Wing

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

Weird, I could have sworn reading about such experiments in the works 20+
years ago and when they finally occurred, confirmed that anti-matter behaved
in the same way as matter in a gravitional field.


You'd expect it to behave exactly the same, as the electrical charge
reversal shouldn't affect its mass, or how the gravity field affects
that mass.
I also thought that they had worked this out long ago.
Maybe they didn't have enough antimatter to work with, and were basing a
lot of their ideas on theory.
Physics has gotten a lot weirder over the past twenty years, so maybe
they figure its time to recheck things to make sure their assumptions
are still right.
I'm still queasy about CERN getting ready to make quantum black holes
late this summer, in case we don't fully understand them either.

Pat

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Since cyclotrons create a certain amount of antimatter, wouldn't we
already have noticed if it behaved differently?


Given the small mas of the particles created (positrons and what-not) by
the cyclotron, the effects of the strong magnetic fields in it may
greatly overpower any gravitational effects and make them very hard to
observe.

Pat

On Jun 15, 2:14 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
They are going to check up on what the stuff does in regards to a
gravity field:http://space.newscientist.com/articl...antimatter-app...

Pat

Black holes are likely hosting an antimatter core. There's supposedly
a seriously big BH at the center of each galaxy.

Antimatter is not anti-gravity, although reverse-gravity may exist
within the center 1%r realm of an antimatter orb or sphere. Possibly
as great as 10%r could represent a hollow realm of reverse-gravity.

- Brad Guth Brad_Guth Brad.Guth BradGuth