Posted on 07/07/2011 1:18:28 AM PDT by shibumi
US particle physicists are inching closer to determining why the Universe exists in its current form, made overwhelmingly of matter.
Physics suggests equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made in the Big Bang.
In 2010, researchers at the Tevatron accelerator claimed preliminary results showing a small excess of matter over antimatter as particles decayed.
The team has submitted a paper showing those results are on a firmer footing.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
.....or is it perhaps a sinister attempt by Imperialistic Matter to colonize and enslave the universe?
What is the difference between an anti-proton and an electron?
How do they create anti-matter?
25 or 6 to 4
But particle physics has a strict definition for what may be called a discovery - the "five sigma" level of certainty, or about a 0.00003% chance that the effect is not real - which the team must show before they can claim to have solved the long-standing matter/antimatter mystery.
Could someone ask Al Gore what the sigma certainty of Anthropocentric Global warming is?
An anti-proton has the same mass as a proton, which is much greater than the mass of the electron. An electron and an anti-proton cannot interact to anihilate one another.
Lonesome in Massachussets: How about a neutron and an anti-proton? Do you happen to know of a table of subatomic particles that shows which particles and anti-particles will annihilate if they come into contact?
Good question, Mind-numbed Robot. I had never considered it before.
You can ask anything you want, I suppose. In hypothesis testing, one must have a clearly stated set of hypotheses, at least two. In the case of matter, antimatter, I believe the two hypotheses are:
Null hypothesis: Matter, as opposed to antimatter, preferentially generated from the interaction of high energy electromagnetic radiation.One then gathers data, by conducting an experiement, or analyzing historical data, or both, to test the hypothesis and compares the results to the results expected if either hypothesis were true. For instance, if the Null hypothesis is that a given coin is "fair", exhibits heads and tails with equal likelihood, then the experiment would consisted in repeated trials (coin flips) to see if the results are consistent with a fair coin.Alternate hypothesis: The null hypothesis is false.
If we flipped a hypothetically fair coin ten times and it came up heads five times, we would not have "proven" that the coin is fair, only that our observations were consistent with a fair coin. If if came up heads (or tails) ten straight times, we would not have "proven" that the coin is unfair, only that the observations are highly unlikely (once in 1024 series of trials) given a fair coin.
As the number of coin flips became larger and larger, our certainty about the nature of the coin (see Bayes ninth proposition) would generally increase, though there would always be limits on our confidence. In a run of a thousand trials, a fair coin will produce between 469 and 531 heads 95% of the time. If our results fall in the range, we say with 95% confidence, that the coin is fair.
In global warming, the carnie pulls a coin out of his pocket, won't let anyone examine it, doesn't give you an opportunity to decline to play, tosses the coin and calls out "Heads I win, tails you lose!"
Google antimatter and look in wikipedia. Every particle is believed to have an antiparticle.
Nice.
The science is settled!
Wonder where matter and antimatter came drom to cause the big bang??.
“How about a neutron and an anti-proton?”
By themselves, the neutron doesn’t directly interact with the anti-proton, I think; but the neutron can lose a bit of energy (e=mc^2 and all that) and decay into a proton. They aren’t static marbles, subatomic particles are changing state all the time. There’s a full menagerie of them (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_particles) and their relationships and interactions are quite interesting.
Great, thank you. And thanks for the link, too! Very interesting.
So exsqueeze me but this kind of proves to me anyway, that beside the 'all powerful' HCL, meaningful science can still be accomplished at Fermilab and closing it is a big mistake.
(full disclosure: I live pretty near Fermilab and visiting it is a nice learning experience for youngsters. Plus, riding around the grounds you can see the Bison roaming in the fields. That's pretty cool too)
Null hypothesis: Matter, as opposed to antimatter, preferentially generated from the interaction of high energy electromagnetic radiation.
I assume that is defined by E=MC2. That would mean that the proton, though of equal charge to the electron, would contain much more energy, right? Sounds reasonable in that it would take more energy to hold together more mass.
I still don't understand how one manufactures or captures anti-protons for the purposes of experimentation.
As far as your coin flips are concerned, you are talking about the Law of High Numbers which states that the higher the number of tries, the more consistent the probability laws. With high enough tries the deviation from 50/50 becomes insignificant.
Good questions. I think it helps to keep in mind that these are just names given to particles and may not accurately represent the full extent of their physical characteristics.
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