Does antimatter have its own sort of properties?

AI Thread Summary
Antimatter behaves similarly to ordinary matter, obeying the same physical laws, including inertia. The primary distinction between matter and antimatter lies in their electric charges; electrons are negative while positrons are positive. Protons in matter are replaced by negatively charged anti-protons in antimatter, but this charge difference does not significantly impact their behavior on a large scale. Antimatter objects would generally act like matter unless they collide with it. The discussion raises questions about the direction of motion in response to applied forces, suggesting a need for clarification on the physics involved.
Clever boy
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If antimatter moves in the direction it was pushed from, is this because it has its own sort of properties such as inertia in regular matter?
 
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Antimatter is really not much different from "ordinary" matter in many senses, so it obeys the same laws of physics (such as inertia, as you mentioned). In fact, the only real difference between matter and antimatter is the charge. Electrons (particles that "orbit" the nucleus of ordinary matter's atoms) have negative charge while positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons) have positive charge. In turn, protons (positively charged particles that are part of matter's nucleus) are in the case of antimatter replaced by anti-protons (you guessed it, they're negatively charged protons). This however does not affect anything in the large scale. As long as it doesn't collide with matter, an antimatter object would most likely behave identically to a matter one.
 
Clever boy said:
If antimatter moves in the direction it was pushed from

I assume you mean that the acceleration is in the opposite direction of the applied force via ##\vec F = m \vec a## with a negative mass m. As far as I know, this is not true. Do you have a source that states otherwise?
 
But then how come antimatter moves toward the force that pushes it
 
Clever boy said:
But then how come antimatter moves toward the force that pushes it
Do you have a source for this (i.e. where you have heard it/read it) ?
 
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