Alright, no sex. The thread just gets read more if i throw it in.
All hail the knowledgable teeming masses. I have a theory, which i wish to run past your massive, pulsating brains. This theory probably involves some of my basic misconceptions about physics but what the hell.
Antimatter is strange stuff and i dont understand it.
Scientists theorize that the big bang should have resulted in more antimatter than is currently available.
Antimatter is generally, as its name suggests, the opposite of matter.
My Stuff
Is it possible gravity affects antimatter in an equal and opposite manner to normal matter, repulsing it? No one has ever made a sufficient amount for gravitational effects to be significant (i think).
If this is the case is it possible that after the big bang antimatter and matter seperated into two different universes, due to the influence of gravity, that are accelerating away from each other? This could explain why there is little antimatter floating around. Also antimatter+ matter= energy, so its not like antimatter could just hang out in the matter universe, or vice versa.
Tell me if im way off the mark.
Antimatter is the opposite of matter, as you stated. It spins the opposite direction. If all matter spins right, all antimatter spins left. The scientists don’t know what happened to a large portion of the antimatter (since there should’ve been a 50/50 split). If that missing AM had exsisted, there would’ve been a bigger bang when all M and AM countered/destroyed/whatevered each other.
The difference between matter & antimatter are their electrical charges. Thus the antimatter equivilent of an electron is a positively charged particle called a positron. Other than its charge it is identical to an electron. Thus, gravity has the same effect on antimatter as it does matter. So scrap those plans for a antimatter hover-ship.
After the Big Bang a bunch of matter and a bunch of antimatter coalesced out of its energy (E=mc^2 works both ways). It so happened that for whatever reason, slighty more matter was created than antimatter. Thus, all (or nearly all…there may be a few stray flecks of original antimatter that have never happened upon a particle of matter in 15 billion years) antimatter was annihilated and almost all matter was as well. Thankfully what matter that was left over was enough to create everything in the Universe. Whew!
Had the distribution been equal the Universe would have been a pretty boring empty expanse. Had the distribution been the other way the matter that we would be made of would be the opposite of what we see, but otherwise physics would work exactly the same way.
Not quite. The positron is indeed the antiparticle to the electron, but charge is not the only difference. It also has opposite parity, or spin, as mentioned above. BTW, the electron is not actually spinning; it’s called spin because the mathematical description is identical to that describing a spinning particle.
Richard Feynman demonstrated that, for all practical purposes, a positron is identical to an electron moving backwards in time. He is supposed to have remarked that it was therefore no surprise that all electrons were identical, since they were all the same electron – it just kept moving backwards and forwards in time.
The scientists postulate the absence of antimatter in significant quantities because of the absence of the radiation that would be given off if it were present and interacting with matter. Even if an entire galaxy, for example, were made of antimatter, there would still be detectable radiation from the very, very thin gas that exists between galaxies. This would show up even in your divided universe theory postulated in the OP.
And, as correctly noted by fiddlesticks, gravity treats antimatter the same as matter. Gravity is universally attractive.