September 19, 2002
12:21 PM Subscribe
Matter cannot be created or destroyed. But antimatter? Apparently you can cook that right up in a lab in Switzerland. Leave it to CERN. Of course, if antimatter turns out not to be symmetrical with matter, physics textbooks will have to be rewritten. So the stuff can be good for business, even if making cheap rocket fuel with antihydrogen is still a dream. In any case, Paul Dirac would be delighted.
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Also: as far as I can tell, this is equivalent not to creating matter, but to assembling hydrogen atoms from smaller particles.
"By corralling clouds of antimatter particles in a cylindrical chamber laced with detectors and electric and magnetic fields, the physicists assembled antihydrogen atoms"
posted by moss at 12:41 PM on September 19, 2002
"By corralling clouds of antimatter particles in a cylindrical chamber laced with detectors and electric and magnetic fields, the physicists assembled antihydrogen atoms"
posted by moss at 12:41 PM on September 19, 2002
Matter can be created or destroyed, it's the matter/energy total that cannot be changed. Matter can be created from energy, and matter can be destroyed into energy. This is happening all the time. CERN isn't breaking any laws here...
posted by LuxFX at 1:03 PM on September 19, 2002
posted by LuxFX at 1:03 PM on September 19, 2002
whoops -- zap away, metafilter commander. & thanks, zpousman. (i searched too quickly and missed the prior thread... KABOOM!)
posted by jellybuzz at 1:34 PM on September 19, 2002
posted by jellybuzz at 1:34 PM on September 19, 2002
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posted by zpousman at 12:30 PM on September 19, 2002