Antimatter and the Big Bang!?!

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kelle

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Many big bang theories says that there were created equally or almost equally amounts of matter and antimatter at the beginning of time. But the problem of this is that why hasn't all the matter and antimatter annihilated? Scientists have come up with some possible explanations, but what about this one:<br /><br />I've heard that some physists believe that antimatter is the same as matter travelling backwards in time. So what if at the big bang there WAS created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But the reason why it was not all annihilated was that the matter and antimatter travelled trough time in different directions, and was therefore separated the same instant they were created? So we have another universe that's like ours and also started at the same big bang as ours, except this universe is travelling the other way on the time scale, or something? And this is why we have only matter in our universe, while all the antimatter is in the other universe travelling in the opposite direction of time relative to us.<br /><br />Is this possible with what we today know about physics? I'm no astrophysist, so I don't know if there is something fundamentally wrong with this, or if I've totally misunderstood the nature of backwards-in-time-travelling-antimatter or whatever. This just popped into my head while I was reading an article about antimatter. Is it all just gibberish or might it be something in it? If there actually is something in this, I guess someone else would have thought about it, but I couldn't find anything about it on the web (but then again I didn't search for more than like 30 seconds <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" />). So... yeah?
 
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Saiph

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I think you've got the anti-matter mistaken with something else.<br /><br />Anti-matter is the same as matter, except the particles have opposite charges (so you have postively charged electrons and negatively charged protons) and maybe something else.<br /><br />They travel as normal through time.<br /><br /><br />The explaination comes from two things: 1) We know there is matter here, so there must have been less antimatter created by BB (even if it was just a little bit).<br /><br />2) Observations of matter-anti-matter creation shows a discrepancy. They aren't made equally for some reason during experiments. Why is still to be answered, but we're working on it. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p align="center"><font color="#c0c0c0"><br /></font></p><p align="center"><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">----</font></em></font><font color="#666699">SaiphMOD@gmail.com </font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">-------------------</font></em></font></p><p><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">"This is my Timey Wimey Detector.  Goes "bing" when there's stuff.  It also fries eggs at 30 paces, wether you want it to or not actually.  I've learned to stay away from hens: It's not pretty when they blow" -- </font></em></font><font size="1" color="#999999">The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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odysseus145

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Here is a recent space.com article about anitmatter. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>
 
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rogers_buck

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Humm, interesting idea. Perhaps before the Higgs field was semi-frozen and gravity was a repulsive force antimatter was squeezed into an adjacent brane. Perhaps in that brane entropy is reversed and that universe is moving to a state of lower entropy. In which case real time would seem to run backwards. Eggs would assemble themselves from shattered shells, etc.. <br /><br />I think the crew of the Red Dwarf visited that universe. If you find yourself there, be carefull what you do in the Bushes.<br />
 
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kelle

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Thanks for the comments and the link!<br /><br />My misunderstanding is built upon something I read on other websites, that "antimatter is backward-in-time matter" so if we get an antimatter particle to travel back in time, it looks like a normal particle for us. So the way I understood that is that antimatter relative to itself looks like matter, just like our matter looks like matter relative to us, so a matter universe of antimatter will be travelling the other direction of time compared to us, uhh... But is that "antimatter is backward-in-time matter" just a rejected theory, or is it a part of one of the most up to date theory about antimatter, that I just misunderstood or something? Hmm... antimatter and such complicated stuff are not easy to understand <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" />
 
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rogers_buck

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I like your original thought. Anti-matter may have C, P, CP violations in our univese, but anti-matter we observe is effected by the Higgs field of our universe. But the Higgs boson itself (if it exists) also has an anti-Higgs analog. So why not during inflation suspect that their was a simultaneous anti-inflation for antimatter? <br /><br />While matter was foaming out to form the universe the coupled anti-particles were being squished into a black hole singularity and thereby channeled out of this universe. So as the black hole dumped the still entangled information into another plank sized brane the information of the original anti-particles was preserved along with their entanglement to particles in our own universe. The new infinite anti-universe would be at a state of maximum entropy and would be filled with an anti-Higgs field, etc. which would then proceed to anti-inflate. Bosons would have mass in this universe, fermions would not. This universe would have anti-symery to our own. The antimatter of this universe would not suffer CP violations. <br /><br />Keep in mind that it would be entangled to our universe, but moving from a state of maximum entropy to a state of perfect order. In effect times arrow would be reversed.<br /><br />As the two entangled universes converged on middle age, they would the gravitation and respective anti-gravitation of each would have influence on the other. This would appear as dark energy.<br /><br />Or something like that...<br /><br />
 
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kelle

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Oh... I see... <img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /><br /><br />Pretty picture though!
 
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chebby

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Wow, I always thought antimatter was something out of sci-fi books. I guess I am behind times. So does antimatter actually repell matter? Whould a chunk of antimatter drop to the ground on earth or will shoot out like in the G. Wells book?
 
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Saiph

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matter and anti-matter are attracted. Why? Because it's the same thing, except the charge is opposite. So protons have a + charge, and anti-protons have a - charge. Thus, they attract (opposites attract in electrostatics).<br /><br />Of course, if you have two electrically neutral lumps, they just sit there (The anti-matter better not be sitting <i>on</i> anything though <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> ) <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p align="center"><font color="#c0c0c0"><br /></font></p><p align="center"><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">----</font></em></font><font color="#666699">SaiphMOD@gmail.com </font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">-------------------</font></em></font></p><p><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">"This is my Timey Wimey Detector.  Goes "bing" when there's stuff.  It also fries eggs at 30 paces, wether you want it to or not actually.  I've learned to stay away from hens: It's not pretty when they blow" -- </font></em></font><font size="1" color="#999999">The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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chebby

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Oh I see, you are talking about elecromagnetic forces. I always thought (being sci-fi educated) that antimatter would bend space around it (in the opposite direction then matter) and produce something like antigravity. I guess that's something else.<br /><br />So they have actually created antimatter in labs? How much energy is released when proton and anitproton meet each other? And what is the end result?
 
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Saiph

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energy released: E=mc^2 where M is the total mass (mass electron plus mass anti electron for example) or simply 2m <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p align="center"><font color="#c0c0c0"><br /></font></p><p align="center"><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">----</font></em></font><font color="#666699">SaiphMOD@gmail.com </font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">-------------------</font></em></font></p><p><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">"This is my Timey Wimey Detector.  Goes "bing" when there's stuff.  It also fries eggs at 30 paces, wether you want it to or not actually.  I've learned to stay away from hens: It's not pretty when they blow" -- </font></em></font><font size="1" color="#999999">The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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chebby

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Ok, here's a idea:<br /><br />Can we use antimatter as energy storage? Convert energy to to antimatter and when need, slowly add a few molecules at a time to the "antimatter combustion chamber" where it would react with regular matter?<br /><br />Of course, that begs the question: can we store it safely? Like in a magnetic bottle?
 
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Saiph

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yes we can, and yes, that's how we store it.<br /><br />Problem is it's really hard to make in any quantity worth considering for the purposes of energy storage. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p align="center"><font color="#c0c0c0"><br /></font></p><p align="center"><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">--------</font></em></font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">----</font></em></font><font color="#666699">SaiphMOD@gmail.com </font><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">-------------------</font></em></font></p><p><font color="#999999"><em><font size="1">"This is my Timey Wimey Detector.  Goes "bing" when there's stuff.  It also fries eggs at 30 paces, wether you want it to or not actually.  I've learned to stay away from hens: It's not pretty when they blow" -- </font></em></font><font size="1" color="#999999">The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
 
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rogers_buck

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It's probably worth mentioning that charge is a bit of a misnomer. Matter and anti-matter particles have the same mass and spin as one another but are mirror images for other properties such a strangeness and baryon number. In some cases that gives the particles opposite charges, but there are also anti-neutrons (for example). Same holds true for bosons and fermions.<br /><br />You can also make your own special matter and special antimatter by playing with the group theory. These special configurations of quarks particles will not interact with ordinary matter or antimatter and will only anhillate with other special matter and anti-matter. The WIMPs theorized to be one explanation for dark matter are examples of special quark matter. This kind of fuel might be a bit safer to handle in case the power goes out...<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
 
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Maddad

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chebby<br />"<font color="yellow">Wow, I always thought antimatter was something out of sci-fi books. I guess I am behind times. So does antimatter actually repell matter? Whould a chunk of antimatter drop to the ground on earth or will shoot out like in the G. Wells book?</font><br /><br />It's interesting that you ask this question. In Discover magazine someone asked the very same thing in a letter to the editor this month. The editors said it was an interesting question that they'd not thought of before. They said though that Einstein's equations treated matter and anti-matter the same way, so they didn't think you'd see anti-gravity.<br /><br />The guy writing in was addressing the issue of why there is more matter in the universe than anti-matter, and thinking that time would run backwards for anti-matter. He was saying that a partile of matter's time was more than for anti-matter, so it would look to us like the matter particle disintegrated in 4.0000 seconds, and the anti-matter particle in 3.9999 seconds. Since the anti-matter disintegrated faster, we're left with more matter.
 
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chebby

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<i>It's interesting that you ask this question. In Discover magazine someone asked the very same thing in a letter to the editor this month. The editors said it was an interesting question that they'd not thought of before. They said though that Einstein's equations treated matter and anti-matter the same way, so they didn't think you'd see anti-gravity. </i><br /><br />I think instead of antimatter I was thinking of "Cavorite" from "The First Men in the Moon" by H.G. Welles. That was wrong as he actually did not use the term antimatter.
 
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diogenes

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Discover pointed out the error in the letter writer's theory.
 
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