What is anti matter exactly? From what i heard from my 8th grade science teacher that it is the opposite of matter, and if they come in contact wiht each other they explode or w/e.

Could someone explain or something what it is and how do they collect it from space without it coming incontact with matter?


this would help a lot, its got me interseted

Welcome to Massassi!

Oh, and I dunno what it is either.

we don't collect it, we just made a huge facility (CERN) thats round and has big lasers running through it and run **** into each other at incredible speeds, the explosion and vacuum it creates is similar to a supernova or something just a lot lot lot smaller. We analyze it while it appears. other than that google is your friend.

Use Google.

You just have to use a little imagination. Everything you see, hear, touch, taste is matter. You are matter, cars are matter, trees are matter, etc. Now try to imagine any of these as being "1".

Empty space is 0, because there's absolutely nothing there.

Following that, anti-matter would be -1.

If you have an apple, it's matter. If you had no apple you'd have 0 apples. If you had an anti-apple you'd have -1 apples.

Positrons, I believe, are a form of anti-matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

Since everyone else is being so lovingly unhelpful i'll provide a hand. Anti-matter is, as you were told, the 'opposite' of ordinary matter. This is because all the particles are the same in mas an function but opposite in charge, such as in the case of a Positron (same charge amount and mass of an electron, just with a positive charge). many times, this is created in quantum interactions were a particle and anti-particle are created seeming out of thin air. This happens in particle accelerators, like CERN that Never mentioned above.

As far as the exploding thing: When a particle and its equivalent anti-particle come into contact, they both are 'destroyed', and convert into pure energy. This release of energy is normally quite violent.

Lastly, we don't collect it, there are no known methods of mass production or containment, we just observe its affect like Never also said above. Theoretically, it may be possible to contain anti-matter with magnetic fields, but that's just Sci-Fi atm.

Edit: and right after i type all that out, DJ comes and posts the Wikipedia article. Fie on you, sir. Fie.

i think matt, all things considering just read DaVinci code and wants to know the how much is truth, this is just considering that his name is an anagram (of sorts) and it is of importance in DaVinci code and Angels and Demons.

Oh ok thx, helped out lots.

Y I brought up the thing about collecting it is that my science teacher said NASA or whoever sends up these lil boxes about the size of a box of stick matches with a magnet inside to collect anti-matter, thats what he said. I was just wondering how could a magnet do that if it is true.


Ill try google sometime

and thx for the welcoming

"your teachers full of snot"

- Rocko's Modern Life

But its just not possibly to have -1 of something. What is that supposed to mean?

There is really no way to know what it looks like, it's just the opposite of an apple.

That isn't true. CERN and Fermilab have been storing anti-protons for 20 years. CERN has also been storing anti-hydrogen and anti-deuterium.

Magnetic anti-matter storage isn't anything new.

And anti-matter isn't really anything amazing either. It just has the same mass, but opposite charge and same spin. Its purpose is to balance equations in nuclear reactions because charge has to be conserved.

You've probably studied β- decay, where a neutron is converted into a proton and an electron (and an anti-neutrino). Charge of proton is +1, charge of electron is -1, so it balances the charge of neutron 0.

β+ decay also occurs, where a proton is converted into a neutron and an anti-electron (and a neutrino). The neutron has a charge 0, the anti-electrion has charge +1, which balances to the proton charge +1.

That looks better as an equation, and makes more sense. Still, this is the essence and will be your first introduction to anti-matter.

From what I've read though, anti-matter costs around $1.7 billion per ounce to produce.

how much for an eigth?

It means he doesn't really understand what antimatter is.

It's easier to think of "antimatter" as matter that has a different charge.

Hydrogen is made up of, generally, one Proton (positive charge) and one Electron (negative charge). I'm not a quantum physicist so I can't tell you what those particles are, thus, comprised of, but you get the idea.

Antihydrogen is composed of one Antiproton (negative charge) and one Positon (positive charge).

Antiprotons and Protons are alike in most behaviors, but they are of opposite charges. As with Positrons and Electrons. Contrary to popular belief, we are able to create positrons quite easily and employ them in high-resolution sensor systems.

Apart from that, antimatter and matter behave exactly alike unless exposed to the other. Some scientists theorize that the universe was once composed of exactly half matter and half antimatter, although new mathematical evidence indicates the contrary (making antimatter much rarer than matter). An antipie will still be as delicious and filling to an antiperson, but if a normal person eats the antipie they mutually annihilate, releasing enough gamma radiation to kill everything on earth.

I love you and want to make you sexually happy forever, just because you quoted the greatest cartoon ever made. EVER.


Same thing happens to me with beans.

-I know I'm not the only person who thought that upon reading your post, Jon.

To emphasize a little detail in Jon`C's post:

When matter and antimatter meet, at particle level it's called annihilation, not explosion.

nucleus is made up of nuetraly charged and negatively charged particles and is surrounded by positvely charged particles.

when matter and anti-matter come into contact, we get an explosion withthe energy of mass of the matter and anti-matter reacting times the square of the speed of light. (i.e "e=mc^2").

no, a supernova is just when the matter comprising a star is sent out into space. it is caused by a core trying to fuse Iron on an atomic (which is a very poor fissible material) and failing. this causes the star to be unable to maintain itself and implode.

nova is either a serious solar prominance (like an eigth of the star being shot out instead of a tiny amount) or a dense star absorbing matter from a companion star that is still in the main part of its life and partly exploding due to an overload of matter.

and enough of a nuclear reaction to wipe out mots of the actual planet as well. (even a tiny amount of antimatter could cause a reaction powerful enough to boil the oceans.

Heeeeeeeeeee!

It means you're in debt...
For example, the US has -x trillion dollars because we spend it all on collecting anti-matter...

It doesn't matter.

despite the fact Ive been doing high level physics for many years... I can honestly say u have to realise particle physics is a bit bent. Its not exact, mostly theories of what we THINK we see..

Apart from that, how can anyone not understand what antimatter is? DONT YOU WATCH STAR TREK???

Antiprotons >< Protons

Positrons (natural) >< Electrons

Anti neutrino >< etc

etc

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
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elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
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else{
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Ah, didn't know that. Still, the rest of my post is correct.

I need sleep. I read that as "Ive been doing high school physics for many years"

I've been doing high school physics for many years.

I'm more wondering where we're supposedly collecting it from.
Maybe you should ask your "teacher." (I used quotes because he/she is apparently a moron.)

Assuming it's electrically balanced.

I wonder if anti-electricity would behave differently since positrons would be moving instead of electrons. :-\

Or would we call it "positricity?"

It would move the other way around the circuit.

Well... yes. But don't electrons and positrons have different properties besides charge?

No, they are identical in every way except charge and spin (the spin being a result of the charge). If they were not, they would not annihilate completely when they came into contact.

The spin is not the result of charge, the spin is a completely independent quantum property. And the spin is the same in an anti-particle.

Um, sorry. mark that down as temporary insanity, please? you're right. got some physics stuff messed up in my head.

umm, neutrino is another partical altogether. they are a radioactive particle. Neutrons and protons switch their charges between each other all the time (according to my physics teacher). Anti matter would either have regular matter style neutrons or an anti-neutron

also, I belive the correct term for the negatively charged particle in the nucleus of anti-matter is negatron.

you folks do love to give really complicated answers for what really is a simple question...

at its basic form a piece of anti-matter is a piece of matter viewed in a mirror, a mirror that reflects both charge and parity, (if your wondering what parity is, don't, your at high school and won't really know enough physics till college/university to understand, if anyone wants to give a layman’s explanation go ahead, rather you than me). Charge is pretty simple and that’s already been explained...

Say you looked at your hand in the mirror, everything should look the same, act the same, behave the same but in reverse. Anti-matter is just the opposite of matter, nothing more and nothing less...you can create it in labs, relatively easily, you do not go into space and collect it...!!

Particle accelerators...the big accelerators, the likes of CERN (which is not operational at the moment, undergoing a large upgrade) and Fermilab use particles called Hardons, hence the name of the next ring of CERN is called the LHC, Large Hadron Collider...

The Hadron's used in the beams of these collider’s are proton's, your everyday particles that are in the nucleus of your atoms, they contain three Quarks (uud), 2 Up and 1 Down quark...I’ll leave it to you to find out about Quarks, basically your neutron and proton are not singular particles, i.e. they are made up of more things, so far to our knowledge an electron is singular and as such belongs to a whole other family of particles called Leptons...

which takes me to neutrinos, there are billions of them passing through you right now....they are NOT radioactive, otherwise we would all be glowing right now...they are also weakly interacting, why till only recently we've been able to study them, i.e. they pass through objects without effecting them...

neutrinos are an interesting particle...I should know I just did my final year physics project at University on an experiment that involves making them and aiming them at a big detector... :p

Neutrinos are virtually mass less...ie they are so small we have yet to have a finite measurement on their size, we can only say they are smaller than 'this'...

One interesting feature of neutrinos is that they can oscillate between 'flavours' there are three flavours, electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino and tau-neutrino, these three flavours relate to the three 'generations' of particles, if you've looked up quarks you'll know what I mean by now...and that each generation relates to a higher mass...this is an interesting fact in itself which is still not understood...

So neutrinos can oscillate into 1 of three different types, each with a supposed different mass...what’s interesting however is when we look at anti-neutrinos they oscillate into different 'flavours' at different rates...this goes against quite a few laws of physics, specially that anti-particles should have the same properties but in reverse to that of particles...i.e. this oscillation factor should be the same...that fact this it isn't relates to a action called CP-Violation, Charge/Parity-Violation

which leads me nicely to another point...the Big Bang...

It predicts that equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were produced in the Big Band and according to the laws of physics (as we know them) one would expect for each particle and anti-particle to annihilate each other and leave us with a universe of just pure energy...so what’s up?

either there was more matter than anti-matter in the initial explosion, therefore the Big Bang model needs altering..or the interactions between matter and anti-matter have a preference for matter surviving the collision, a type of CP-Violation....as yet we don't know which is true, or if they are both wrong and something else is going on...

there are a bunch of new experiments coming online in the next 2-5 years which will hope to answer these questions so keep an eye on the news...

/end of physics lesson.... :p

[just correcting some rather embrassing typos]

BUT WHERE DO THOSE SILLY STRINGS FIT IN?!



<.<
>.>

But no really, string theory (M gubbins) is intermeresting too. Mmmmmm.... vibrations....

:p

There's no such thing as a 'radioactive particle'.

A neutrino is given off in ß+ decay, an anti-neutrino is given off in ß- decay, to conserve lepton number.

if we could see a Quark by itself and not paired with another, who knows? maybe a singular quark is just a string...

and as for radioactive particles, I believe alpha is kinda referring to the fact that if you keep adding neutrons to a nucleus, it will become radioactive, but you cannot have a radioactive particle, but you can have one that causes something to become radioactive if enough are added...

?


So... a lack of these particles causes impotence?