CERN playing with Antimatter & gravity!

[julianm]

I understand only a bit but it sounds great fun!

https://www.home.cern/news/news/physics/alpha-expe...

[Upinflames]

Didn't they cause the Mandela effect last time?

[glazbagun]

It's kind of amazing that it's taken so long when the theory is so old, though also amazing that they got so much right without a particle accelerator.

Incidentally I've started reading Brief History of Time and wish I'd read it as a teenager. It's very accessible & has made a lot of these big experiments more relatable.

[thegreenhell]

Anton Petrov's daily science video yesterday discussed this experiment. The visualisation makes it much easier to understand for a layman like me.

[Skeptisk]

I never really understood why anyone thought antimatter wouldn’t be subject to gravity. Antiparticles seem to be affected in the same way by the electromagnetic force as negative and positive attract and if you can form anti hydrogen then presumably antiparticles are subject to strong and weak nuclear forces too. But still amazing that they managed to prove it.

[deckster]

Skeptisk said:

I never really understood why anyone thought antimatter wouldn’t be subject to gravity. Antiparticles seem to be affected in the same way by the electromagnetic force as negative and positive attract and if you can form anti hydrogen then presumably antiparticles are subject to strong and weak nuclear forces too. But still amazing that they managed to prove it.

Well the key point is that we don't understand how gravity works at the quantum level. So it's not really so much as anyone thought antimatter wouldn't be affected by gravity - more that we needed to validate that it is.