Antimatter and Antigravity Connected ?

[Antonio Lao]

Retro-update on the confinement of anti-particle. Many years ago, Dehmelt was able to confine an anti-particle named Priscilla in a Penning trap for an indefinite time. Long enough to verify some of the constants of nature and for more precisions in their numerical values. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul, together with Ramsey, shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics for their works.

 

[Olias]

Exactly!

Good update, for now.

 

[Olias]

These recent papers may be of great interest Antonio:
http://uk.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0407/0407081.pdf

http://uk.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0312/0312312.pdf

 

[Chronos]

I fail to see how the Weeks et al paper breaks any new ground. All it does is arrive at the conclusion the observable universe is finite. That is not the same as saying the 'real' universe is finite. It only infers that our ability to observe is finite. Duh. We cannot 'prove' anything is 'true'. We can only prove that certain pairs of things cannot both be true simultaneously. Our inability to solve the 3 body problem of gravitational attraction illustrates how incompetent we are, not to mention our inability to solve the Dirac equation for anything more complex than a hydrogen atom. We have much to learn.

 

[Antonio Lao]

Our inability to solve the 3 body problem of gravitational attraction...

Could nature be simpler than what we want it to be? Newton's law of universal gravitation is a 2-body problem (though a mass disparity of very large and very small). Coulomb's law of electrostatic force is also a 2-body problem of electric charges.

But the n-body problem is solved using statistical mechanics which necessarily incorporate the theory of probability and random variables. Anything more than 3 bodies, probability is involved and the process becomes stochastic instead of deterministic. But when n is just a little bit greater than 2, perturbation theory can be used. In astrodynamics, the n-body problem is solved by taking the interaction of 2 bodies at a time and then add all the 2-body interactions together.