{"id":12150,"date":"2023-09-29T00:33:03","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T04:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12150"},"modified":"2023-09-29T00:33:03","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T04:33:03","slug":"falling-antimatter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12150","title":{"rendered":"Falling antimatter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, not exactly a surprising result but still, a fantastic experimental achievement: Yes, Virginia, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-03043-0\">antimatter falls downward<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Why is this important? Well, we kind of knew that it was inevitable. I mean, if antimatter were to fall upward, it&#8217;d have meant that our entire understanding of gravitation is wrong. That even our understanding of special relativity is probably wrong.<\/p>\n<p>So it was a rather safe bet that antimatter follows the same geodesics as normal matter and falls downward.<\/p>\n<p>But physics, lest we forget it, is ultimately not about erudite speculation. It is about experiment and observation.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-02930-w\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-12151\" src=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/antihydrogen.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"376\" height=\"440\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/antihydrogen.png 751w, https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/antihydrogen-256x300.png 256w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 376px) 100vw, 376px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12150' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;d have meant that our entire understanding of gravitation is wrong. That even our understanding of special <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12150' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12152,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions\/12152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}