The idea said:
Here is the full text of a 16-page paper by Starson and someone else. Would anyone care to give a brief explanation of the ideas in layman's language?
"Free anti-particles near the surface of the earth will `fall' up with the same acceleration that the corresponding particles fall down."
The only direct experimental result on antimatter and gravity comes from Supernova 1987A. This supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud emitted both neutrinos and antineutrinos, some of which were eventually detected on Earth. Those neutrinos and antineutrinos took 160,000 years to reach Earth, and while travelling were bent from a "straight line" path by the gravity from our own galaxy. The bending with gravity changed the time needed to reach Earth by about 5 months, yet both the neutrinos and the antineutrinos reached Earth at roughly the same time (within the same 12 second interval). This shows that the neutrinos and antineutrinos "fell" similarly, to a very high level of precision (about 1 part in a million). [4] and [5] provide some background information on this.
However, this does not necessarily tell us that matter and antimatter will fall similarly to the same level of precision when dropped on the Earth, because they could be affected differently be some new, unknown force which has too short a range to be seen on galactic length scales.
Another reason why antihydrogen is worth studying is its potential to test the Weak Equivalance Principle (WEP) of Einsteins General Relativity, which requires the gravitational acceleration of a falling body be independent of its composition. This has been tested rigorously for different objects of matter, but tests of antimatter and direct comparison of a matter object and its antimatter equivalent, such as protons and antiprotons, have proved very difficult, mainly due to the difficulty of shielding for even very small electromagnetic fields. This is necesary since the elctromagnetic force is much stronger than gravity. Antihydrogen, on the other hand, is thought to be stable and neutral and tests using this should thus be able to be made at much higher accuracy.
It seems to me that there would be no difference between:Dilb said:All I can really tell about the paper is it hypothesizes that gravitational mass and inertial mass are different for anti-particles. As a simplistic explanation:
F=ma
F=GMm/r^2
are simple Newtonian relations. According to the paper, for an anti-particle the first m will be normal, the second m will be negative. An anti-particle would be repelled by normal matter gravitationally, but act normally under other forces, like electricity. This is a fairly odd thing, from what I understand.
Art Vandelay said:It seems to me that there would be no difference between:
A. Negative gravitational mass, positive electrical mass, positive charge
and
B. Negative gravitational mass, negative electrical mass, negative charge
Groundbreaking. And truly informative and exciting. My hat is off to you, Sir. I AM 100% IN YOUR CORNER ON THIS ONE.Art Vandelay said:Misreading "inertial mass"? No, just pointing out that there isn't really any way to distinguish between electricity working normally, and there being a special negative electrical mass combined with a reversed electrical charge.