evilscientist3

Sean

@evilscientist3

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The one and only Evil Scientist (3). Known for posting good and doing actual science.

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evilscientist3
@evilscientist3
Seven-Cute-Fish
@Seven-Cute-Fish
alyaza
@alyaza
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alyaza
@alyaza
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alyaza
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discflame
@discflame

for a hot moment we thought that they'd have negative mass or react negatively (as in, fall up) to gravity but we found out that anti-hydrogen does in fact fall down.

anyways we use antimatter elements in PET scans regularly.

Seven-Cute-Fish
@Seven-Cute-Fish
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evilscientist3
@evilscientist3

Antimatter is not identical to matter! Due to CP-violation in weak interactions, neutral meson and antimeson branching fraction ratios for the same decays aren't reciprocals of one another, i.e. matter and antimatter respectively decay into a given set of particles and equivalent antiparticles at different rates

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in reply to @alyaza's post:

GardenerAether
@GardenerAether

oh you can make much more fucked up stuff than anti-matter atoms
my favorite trick you can pull is being able to make an atom with a single electron orbiting a single antitau as the "nucleus". the antitau is short-lived and decays into an antielectron quite quickly, at which point they annihilate each other, but the fact you can do it at all is wild

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in reply to @alyaza's post:

Anschel
@Anschel

Fun side effect of this is that we (pretty much) can't tell matter from antimatter at a distance. Like, there could be entire galaxies where antimatter predominates rather than matter, and we probably wouldn't know unless some physical stuff came from there to here (in which case we'd find out very quickly lol)

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LilacPeregrine
@LilacPeregrine

actually, interestingly, we know all the galaxies we see are matter!
The intergalactic medium is thicker than we expect - still about a particle per cubic meter. So if there was an antimatter galaxy next to a matter one, we would see a gigantic-as-hell glow between them as the antimatter and matter combine

Unfortunately, we don't see it ::< so, no antimatter galaxies

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Starra
@Starra

There's another way to tell, assuming there's also intelligent life there that can communicate with you & can perform particle-physics experiments, as detailed by a great MinutePhysics video: there's a very particular interaction of the weak nuclear force that violates both mirror-image and matter/antimatter symmetry, and with that you could communicate both left vs. right and matter vs. antimatter unambiguously

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