matter exists in two forms: matter and anti-matter. if equal quantities encounter eachother, the mass is immediately transformed into energy (boom!). So, is their an anti-energy state somehow? have physiscists ever accounted for an anti-energy state in the universe? Seems like anti-energy would have some very strange properties 9if it exists). What do physicists say?
The analogy to matter and anti-matter doesn’t really hold. Systems can have both positive and negative total energy: imagine a ball at the top of a hill vs. one in a well. Combining systems can produce a system with net total energy of zero, but that’s more of an accounting trick than anything, since energy is a conserved quantity.
Anti-energy? That’s pretty much what I have on Monday mornings…
(This being IMHO, I hope smart-arse answers are okay…)
Humorous responses are allowed, and for the purposes of this thread, anti-humorous responses will be accepted-lucky you.
Entropy?
It is said that mass and anti-mass are converted to energy, but what really happens is that they are converted into photons that contain energy equal to the values of the mass and anti-mass times c squared. Energy itself isn’t a thing that can interact with other things, but rather it is a property of things, so the idea of anti-energy doesn’t really make sense.
There’s also the theoretical “negative mass”, but that won’t make anti-energy, just negative energy, which is perfectly normal since energy is just a comparative quantity, so you can throw around plus and minus signs with reckless abandon.
Basically, matter and antimatter are mirror images of each other ( thus the occasional term “mirror matter” for antimatter ); like two knots of opposite handedness on the same string, they unbind each other when they come into contact. This unbound form is energy - or more specifically, gamma rays and particles. If whatever . . . stuff a particular form of energy is made of comes in a variety of opposite handedness, perhaps it too could dissolve into some more basic force. However “energy” as a term refers to so broad a spread of phenomenon that I don’t think any one thing could be the mirror of all forms of energy.
What’s been said so far pretty much answers the question, but, as a little nitpick, there’s something called mirror matter that’s a different concept from anti-matter, though the term mirror matter is in fact sometimes used to mean anti matter.
But what most physicists would mean by referring to mirror matter is an entirely different beast, essentially thought up to make parity an universal symmetry. Parity, in particle physics, is essentially the property of an interaction to be symmetric under a transformation that amounts to a mirror reflection – i.e., the interaction looks the same whether viewed directly or in a mirror. Three of the four fundamental forces – gravity, electromagnetism and strong interaction – obey this symmetry, however, the fourth, weak interaction, does not; it is dependent on the handedness of a particle (as a – perhaps rather weak – analogy, think of chemistry: lots of molecules exist in both a right- and left-handed variety, and there exist chemical reactions that are dependent on this property; thus, a given reaction would work differently if one were to reverse the handedness of the molecules, which is basically what a parity transformation does).
Thus, parity is said to be violated by the weak interaction (for instance, in beta decays)
To make parity a universal symmetry again, one can propose a form of matter that is essentially a ‘mirror image’ of normal matter: where the interactions of ordinary matter are left-handed, that of mirror matter are right-handed; otherwise, mirror matter works pretty much the same as normal matter.
Other than via gravity, mirror matter would interact extremely weakly with normal matter, which is why it has been suggested as a candidate for (at least some portion of) the elusive dark matter.
Those in the know call it “ygrene.” It’s the force that powers cats. This is why they fall asleep when exposed to sunlight-- the solar energy and the cat’s ygrene annihilate each other.
Ygrene can only be used to perform “krow,” which explains why cats are so goddamn useless.