Putting Einstein’s Special Relativity To The Test
Putting Einstein’s special relativity to the test
“It’s long been thought that antimatter is an exact reflection of matter, and we are gathering evidence to show that is indeed true.”
This result is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen will have identical light-emitting characteristics, but now physicists have the chance to test even more spectra emissions by using different types of lasers.
If they all end up identical, Einstein’s special relatively lives for another day, as Adrian Cho explains for Nature
“Explaining exactly why special relativity requires antimatter to mirror matter involves a lot of math. But in a nutshell, if that mirror relationship were not exact, then the basic idea behind special relativity couldn’t be exactly right.
Special relativity assumes that a single unified thing called spacetime splits differently into space and time for observers moving relative to each other. It posits that neither observer can say who is really moving and who is stationary. But, that can’t be exactly right if matter and antimatter don’t mirror each other.”
But if matter and antimatter don’t mirror each other – if antimatter doesn’t obey the same laws of physics as regular matter – our models of the Big Bang will be flawed.
And that gives us the chance to rethink everything and figure out once and for all why matter escaped total annihilation in the Universe and allowed us and everything else to exist.
We’ve tried shine the same color of light if you will on an anti hydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen to see if it responds in the same way in particular is the frequency of that light ready to the color the same exact frequency that you would use to interact with atoms of hydrogen and the answer so far is yes .
when we went looking at the place where we expect to see and affecting hydrogen we see in effect in and hydrogen now what really matters here in and for the future is how precisely you do that measurement right so right now we have a precision of a few parts in 10 billion right we hope to get much much better than that the precision with hydrogen is a few parts in a thousand trillion so for me is an antimatter physicist would be fair to say that this is a dream come true this is what I set out to do more than 20 years ago to actually look at this transition in an anti hydrogen .
there’s a lot more work to do but I can say that is this is the biggest step in my career in in the history of this type of experiment this is what we set out to do this what the machine was designed to do there’s a lot more work to come and and it opens up a whole new branch of physics if you will.
First time ALPHA observes light spectrum of antimatter
“It’s long been thought that antimatter is an exact reflection of matter, and we are gathering evidence to show that is indeed true.”
This result is consistent with the Standard Model of particle physics, which predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen will have identical light-emitting characteristics, but now physicists have the chance to test even more spectra emissions by using different types of lasers.
If they all end up identical, Einstein’s special relatively lives for another day, as Adrian Cho explains for Nature
“Explaining exactly why special relativity requires antimatter to mirror matter involves a lot of math. But in a nutshell, if that mirror relationship were not exact, then the basic idea behind special relativity couldn’t be exactly right.
Special relativity assumes that a single unified thing called spacetime splits differently into space and time for observers moving relative to each other. It posits that neither observer can say who is really moving and who is stationary. But, that can’t be exactly right if matter and antimatter don’t mirror each other.”
But if matter and antimatter don’t mirror each other – if antimatter doesn’t obey the same laws of physics as regular matter – our models of the Big Bang will be flawed.
And that gives us the chance to rethink everything and figure out once and for all why matter escaped total annihilation in the Universe and allowed us and everything else to exist.
We’ve tried shine the same color of light if you will on an anti hydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen to see if it responds in the same way in particular is the frequency of that light ready to the color the same exact frequency that you would use to interact with atoms of hydrogen and the answer so far is yes .
when we went looking at the place where we expect to see and affecting hydrogen we see in effect in and hydrogen now what really matters here in and for the future is how precisely you do that measurement right so right now we have a precision of a few parts in 10 billion right we hope to get much much better than that the precision with hydrogen is a few parts in a thousand trillion so for me is an antimatter physicist would be fair to say that this is a dream come true this is what I set out to do more than 20 years ago to actually look at this transition in an anti hydrogen .
there’s a lot more work to do but I can say that is this is the biggest step in my career in in the history of this type of experiment this is what we set out to do this what the machine was designed to do there’s a lot more work to come and and it opens up a whole new branch of physics if you will.
First time ALPHA observes light spectrum of antimatter
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