Does Antimatter Create Anti-Gravity?

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From hoverboards to flying cars to cloud cities, anti-gravity is a staple of science fiction and our dream of a less Earth-bound future. But in the real universe gravity appears to be a purely attractive force. Feels like its main MO is keeping us stuck to the surface of this lonely rock. But maybe if we science hard enough we can remove the fiction from science fiction. For the sake of our flying cars we should at least try. And for many years, physicists have wondered whether a certain well-known exotic material may experience gravitational repulsion from the Earth. That material is antimatter, and physicists at CERN have just completed a very long and very difficult experiment to answer a seemingly simple question: does antimatter fall down, or does it fall up?

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Christopher Pollack & Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini & Stephanie Faria
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Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

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Рекомендации по теме

Комментарии

I would love to see an episode on how Anti-matter is actually made. What's the process, what are the materials, what reactions have to happen, and why it actually works.

ajl

I like how Matt keeps bringing up hoverboards like it would be totally safe to have something that if it got into a crash would explode with the force of a Tsar Bomb

diedie

I deeply appreciate how in the split screen rocket illustration, you had the rocket's background Starfield accelerating at increasing velocity instead of just passing by at a constant velocity, reflecting the fact that the rocket is constantly accelerating.

Great attention to detail!

thankfuljosh

It would be funny if this was a 2 second episode with Matt just saying:"Nope"

paulão-

Dear whoever edits/does music for these,

PLEASE make the outro quieter! I love listening to these before bed and the last 15 seconds are so much louder than the entire episode. THANK YOU!

Sincerely,
An overworked mom who just wants to peacefully learn and fall asleep to science

Breakemoff

Thank you for including the confidence level of the result. That makes or breaks this kind of science communication IMHO

rachel_rexxx

Whether or not it disrupted the status quo, this experiment is such an amazing achievement. To think that one of the most exotic forms of matter is merrily floating around in a magnetic field, in CERN, on Earth, created by humans, its simply amazing.

tharun

I was in Cern im 2019 and an old physicist who gave us a tour was really excited and told us young students evrything about that experiment. We were fascinated by the implications and that such a raw hypothesis was tested for. Wether or not it was ever plausible to show antigravity it is still excellent science to test for it.

christian

A few years ago I had the pleasure of visiting the Antimatter Factory at CERN where they described this experiment to us. It was really fascinating and I'm happy to hear about the results now. One interesting fact I found interesting was, that the were shooting the first antiparticles they generated just straight into a concrete wall just casually standing around in the facility. 😀Nothing spectacular happens, sure, it annihilates with the matter of the concrete and creates 'lots' of energy, but, after all, it's just a single particle.

RedOchsenbein

Love your new look!
Thank you again for including the full equations. I love seeing them. I don’t understand and it is motivating to me to learn.

UnionYes

At 3:56 you remove both masses. Acceleration should be a = MG/r^2, with M being the fixed mass of the object you are being attracted towards.

Scrogan

One big issue to me with negative gravitational mass for antimatter is that it implies that particles like photons, which _are_ their own antiparticles, must not interact with gravity, even though we've observed that they do. Is this not the absolute deal-breaker I think it is, or do people just like brushing that to the side when talking about this idea?

clarfonthey

I just want to say that this channel is one of the biggest helps and inspirations for my studies. You are an excellent, top tier teacher who makes math and physics fun, engaging, and rather easy to comprehend.
I've only been watching this channel since 2020, but thank you.
I am attending college this fall to start my journey into theoretical physics at the age of 34.
It's never to late to learn.

OfTheVoid

Congratulations on 3M subs! I like the new logo and the new intro. Btw a youtuber called acollierastro made a video about this topic.

gabor

Ooh! I was at cern last year in November on a shool trip, and an old student from my school was working on this exact project. I got to see the antimatter decelerator and such, being showed around by the reserchers!

mrtoasteer