Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory
https://lemmy.world/post/5836349

Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory - Lemmy.world
Hmm interesting. I wondered if it would be attracted or repelled by matter. It does annihilate when it comes in contact with mater, right?
The reason antimatter is "anti" is that an antiparticle has the oppose charge of its non-anti counterpart. Electrons have a negative charge, while their antiparticles, positrons have a positive charge. And since opposite charges attract, well, I think you can figure it out from there.
And yes, matter/antimatter interactions result in annhilation.
What exactly does “annihilation” mean in this context. Do both “atoms” give off energy and convert to sub atomic particles? Does one atom kind of “win” over the other and undergo fission instead of complete annihilation?
At this tiny scale, energy and mass are essentially equivalent. So when we say that matter annihilates, we mean that they transform into pure energy (in this case, as photons of light). They don’t break into subatomic particles, because that still counts as mass. They just simply cease to exist.
As a side note, the “conversion rate” of mass into energy (and vice versa) is governed by Einstein’s E=mc^2. All this equation means is that it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to create a small amount of mass, and vice versa, it only takes a small amount of mass to create a ridiculous amount of energy. Because antimatter annihilates completely (ie, 100% of its mass, as well as 100% of the regular matter’s mass, gets converted into energy), antimatter is currently the most explosive thing known to mankind
Ok that makes sense.
Man that’s pretty wild to think about. If antimatter was created at the same time as matter in the same quantity and distribution, then why are we here. Why didn’t the entire universe essentially cancel itself out? Was there some factor that benefited regular matter or hindered antimatter? Is there some level of chaos on the atomic or subatomic scale that played in regular matter being the dominant? Has some crazy philosophical implications.