2023-09-27 18:38:58
Mister antihydrogen: American physicist Jeffrey Hangst, who teaches in Aarhus, Denmark, setting up the ALPHA experiment at the European research center Cern near Geneva in 2018. Image: CERN
Scientists have now proven that antimatter is subject to gravity in the same way as ordinary matter. The opposite would have been very surprising, but that is precisely why this measurement was so important.
Anyone who walks through fruit-growing areas on these sunny autumn days will occasionally hear a muffled sound. Then another apple fell from the tree. According to reports from contemporaries, such an event inspired Isaac Newton to think about gravity in 1665 or 1666 in the garden of his family estate Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. In a commentary in tomorrow’s September 28th issue of Nature asks physicist Anna Soter from ETH Zurich what Newton would have seen if the apple had been made of antimatter.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Editor in the “Science” department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Would an antifruit perhaps disappear upwards instead of falling? After all, elementary antiparticles are exactly opposite in sign properties to their respective particles, even if both are exactly the same in everything else, such as mass. Negatively charged particles such as electrons have positively charged antiparticles as counterparts – which in this case are called positrons. And positively charged protons are opposed to negatively charged antiprotons. Electric or magnetic fields usually have the opposite effect on charged particles as on their antiparticles. Couldn’t this also apply to gravitational fields? Are antiparticles there perhaps subject to a repulsive antigravity, perhaps of the kind that saves the ground transport in the Star Wars films from needing tire service?
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