liz said:
i'm getting quite confused about this antimatter stuff. I've heard that for every particle there is a corresponding antiparticle somewhere out there in the universe. but it also said somewhere else about the big bang theory, that the universe only exists because for some unexplained reason there is far more matter than antimatter. which one is correct? and what is antimatter?
i think of particles and matter as blobs, so is an antiparticle also a blob? i read some analogy to explain antimatter as thinking of a sheet of metal and stamping circles out of it. the circles are matter. The spaces left in the sheet of metal are antimatter. but that doesn't really make sense.
If anyone can help clarify all this stuff than thank you very much.
Yes matter and antimatter are both blobs, but matter is a black blob and antimatter is a white one. I've heard that analogy before, that the spaces left are antimatter, I don't know what the creator was going for but... that's not right. Maybe if you put the circules back in the hole it just makes a sheet again, the sheet being a p-brane, or spacetime? To add something, Dirac said E=±mc
2, meaning since antimatter's the opposite of matter, energy can equal negative or postive charged mass times speed of light in a complete vacuumn squared. Negative matter and energy is something else, don't get them mixed up.
eNathan said:
ZapperZ, we observe more matter than anti-matter, and the only explanation as of now is that there was just a little bit more matter than anti-matter after the BB. So, are you saying it's not a theory? Its certainly not a fact, and it is not just a "guess".
Science is a cycle of theory and experiment. Scientific theories are created to explain the results of experiments that were created under certain conditions. A good theory should also make predictions about new experiments under diffrent conditions. If a experiment comes along that shows the theory is not a good approximation of completely wrong, the theorists make another, or change the first. Theories are predictions
and explinations, with good proof to go with it and back it up.
ShadowKnight said:
From everything I've read anti-matter behaves just like matter, except for opposite charges. I'm going out on a limb but couldn't it stand to reason that there are entire galaxies made of anti-matter, possibly in our observable area of the universe? If they are not in direct contact with matter galaxies, there would be no annihilations, so no massive energy would be radiating from them. Any reasons I've missed that prevent this?
Nope, maybe matter-antimatter annihilation is the source of the mysterious gamma-ray bursts cosmologists have been trying to figure out. Most of the EMR from annihilation comes out in gamma wavelength.
lawtonfogle said:
delete my earlier post, in the book 'A Breif History of Time', there is a hypothesis (or maybe a theory) about why there is more matter than anti-matter. Also, if i read right, the anti-matter is everywhere. electrons decay (this happens about a much as proton decay which takes 10000000000000000000000000000000 years to decay, that should be 31 zeros) into antiquarks which make up antimatter. it is viceversa for antimatter electrons. as i said, if i read right.
also, it had how we could tell antimatter apart from matter, it said it did not follow the rules based on three comparisons. Read the book for how or why, even though it states results, it gives the names of the ones who did the experiment and about when it was done, so you can look up the experiment if you want.
Well, the half-life is 10
35, meaning theoretically (in perfrect conditions with all variable accounted for)
exactly half of the protons will have decayed. In half of that period 1/4 of the protons will have decayed, in half of that, 1/8 and half of that 1/16. So, since there's a hell of a lot of protons around us, there's always a bunch decaying. As I recall, just like neutrino observatories, proton observatores use huge vats of pure liquid, usually ultra-pure H
2O.
The simplest way we tell antimatter from matter:
Shoot the antimatter/matter particles between a magnet. If there's a proton that goes towards one pole, the antiproton will go towards the other, because antimatter has opposite charges as matter.