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There’s No Such Thing as Anti-Gravity
Experiments at CERN prove that antimatter does not mean antigravity
Matter and antimatter should, as far as we can tell, have been created in equal amounts during the Big Bang. Every proton should have a twin anti-proton, every electron an anti-electron. And yet, somewhere along the line, all that antimatter seems to have disappeared.
One possible explanation is a difference in the way gravity interacts with the two types of particle. If, for example, gravity attracted matter but repelled antimatter, that could explain the imbalance we see today. Yet testing this possibility is tricky. Antimatter can only be made in extremely small amounts and gravitational effects are, therefore, small.
In an effort to address this, an experiment at CERN, the European particle collider, recently monitored oscillations of protons and anti-protons over the course of a year and a half. Experiments of this can show the mass to charge ratio of the two particles, a ratio that should be the same in both matter and antimatter.
The results indicate that the ratio is indeed identical, at least to within a billionth of a percent or so. But, since the gravitational force on the Earth shifts over a year, physicists could also look for the effect of this force on the particles. Again, no difference was found between the two particles — at least to within 3%.
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