Sep 292023
 

OK, not exactly a surprising result but still, a fantastic experimental achievement: Yes, Virginia, antimatter falls downward.

Why is this important? Well, we kind of knew that it was inevitable. I mean, if antimatter were to fall upward, it’d have meant that our entire understanding of gravitation is wrong. That even our understanding of special relativity is probably wrong.

So it was a rather safe bet that antimatter follows the same geodesics as normal matter and falls downward.

But physics, lest we forget it, is ultimately not about erudite speculation. It is about experiment and observation.

And this amazing experiment achieved the almost impossible: it observed antihydrogen atoms in a vertical vacuum chamber at cryogenic temperatures and, as expected, most of those hydrogen atoms ended up at the bottom.

 Posted by at 12:33 am