Antimatter, anyone?

[Used Band-Aid]

So I was talking with my chemistry teacher about, well...physics, of all things.  I was trying to anyway.  He was pretty cool about it though, even though he had no reply for my why antimatter-matter reactions occur.  So before I go and consult a nuclear physicist (because I'll never remember to) I'll just throw it out there.  Why is it that matter and antimatter annihilate one another?  What is it that is so catastrophically different about the two, yet causes them to appear so similar? 

An idea of mine is that, if string theory is true, that perhaps matter and antimatter are generated as result of string vibrating in opposite values to one another.  I don't know a whole lot about vibrations of this sort, or if such an idea (as "opposite" or "reciprocal" vibration) is even applicable.  The idea is that the observed annihilation of mass could be the result the vibrations of two strings, one having an opposite (or such a relation) value to the other, "interacting" with one another.  Since they have polar vibrations, so to speak, they would, in a sense, "cancel out" the vibrations of each other.  Assuming that all (or a great majority) of the energy that was being put into causing the string to vibrate was released as a result of the cancellation of the vibration, and that the vibration of the string is what causes matter/antimatter to appear to exist, then the absence of said vibration would, in turn, cause the matter to have disappeared; to have been completely converted into electromagnetic radiation energy (or some other form).

Now, I know that's a lot to take in.  Or maybe not.  Maybe nothing I said made the slightest sense.  I'm sure some of you understand my own ideas better than I do, but the only way to find out for sure is to discuss our ideas!  Yay!

I'd love to hear any other ideas about antimatter and such.  Feel free to criticize my logic (if there is any ).  Enjoy discovering a little something about the universe as we do not know it.

[Polyphony]

antimatter is one of the (if not THE) weirdest things in the universe.  I can see how your idea could be possible but average Joes would have no way to test it and observe the reactions actually taking place, which is actually a good thing lol.  Some scientists say that there are entire anti-Universes, and this to me is a craaazy idea... but it could be possible lol

[silenthunder]

I was actually thinking of almost the exact same thing as Polyphony when I finished reading. Sure it's theoretically possible, but there's no real way of testing the hypothesis. I didn't really understand what you meant by the strings "interacting" with each other when you mentioned it to me earlier, but I get it now. What if black holes are really just enormous collisions between matter and anti-matter, and instead of the matter being transported elsewhere as it is commonly thought to do, the anti-matter and the matter are both being converted into energy at equal rates?

[p_2001]

The big bang theory does mention antimatter. For every 1001 matter particles there were 1000 antimatter particles released.
The matter and antimatter combined to give out energy and the universe we observe is made up of remaining matter particles.
this was explained in a discovery show.

[Uriah]

Nice post! I like your idea on how this works.Here is how I think about it:The reason antimatter reacts so devastatingly to matter, is because they are true opposites of each other. Opposites cancel out. For example, in math, -2 units plus 2 units = 0 units. Examples of this can be seen in devastating interference, as seen in sound wave cancellation. So the same principle must apply to matter. Just as in this, these sound waves both may appear to be equal, but are in fact "catastrophically different."
Although other opposites exist in the world, they don't cancel out in nature because the numbers are representing how much of, rather than an actual quality. Finding a true opposite of something in nature is rather difficult, i believe.
But, my idea would be saying that antimatter exists against individual "types" of matter, but in actuality, antimatter cancels out matter as a whole, no matter what "type" of matter it is. So I have no explanation for why it works in that specific way. This is the best I could give though.
And yeah, Big bang theory mentions antimatter in the creation of the universe, so I think modern science classifies it as just as normal as positive matter"(It's not special). Its just the opposite of matter.That said, i believe there exists both matter and anti matter, its just a matter of which has a greater quantity in each given situation. In our situation we came out with matter, so to us that's the norm.
This is just my personal thought on it though.

[hanorotu]

If you have more matter than antimatter and they collide will there still be matter left over?

I know nothing on this topic.

[p_2001]

If you have more matter than antimatter and they collide will there still be matter left over?

I know nothing on this topic.

No.. They say matter and antimatter combine in 1:1 ratio to form energy. Now just infer.

[Blackout]

If you have more matter than antimatter and they collide will there still be matter left over?

I know nothing on this topic.

actually if you would take lets say 500 particles of matter and 450 particles of antimatter and combine it, you should be left with 50 particles of matter and a whole bunch of light

[hanorotu]

So I was partially right?

[eliaou]

we could theoretically observe anti-mater  no?..because light that arrives to us from the farthest places of the universe could be as far as millions of light years so anti matter in that area would seem to us existent because it h asent been annihilated by the mater yet and could we possibly differentiate it from mater even if they are exactly the same but opposite?

[p_2001]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#section_4

me thinks it's enough to read .

[Nerotic7]

A general rule of particle and nuclear physics is that particles like to decay into things that have as little mass as possible (this is not always true, but good enough). You can imagine it, very roughly, like a ball on a hill. Mass is analogous to height - just like the ball rolls down the hill and speeds up, the particles want to reduce their mass and speed up.[/size]When people say matter and antimatter annihilate, like in the PET scan thread, they mean the two matter and antimatter particles dissapear and produce photons, which are massless. Since massless is about as far down the hill as you can go, if you believe me about the rule above, then the real question should not be why does matter and antimatter annihilate, but why doesn't everything annihilate all the time? If everything wants to go to the least massive particle possible, why don't things just burst into photons all the time?The answer is conservation laws. Consider, for example, an electron. Why doesn't it just become a photon? Well, an electron has a negative charge. A photon has zero charge. Since charge is conserved, an electron then can't just become a photon (or a pair of photons). Why doesn't the electron just decay to something else? Well, if you think about it, an electron is the lightest charged particle, so it really has no where to go.But bring in a positron. A positron has positive charge. In fact, ignore some more subtle things like spin and angular momentum and a positron has pretty much opposite values from an electron for every conserved quantity. As photons have zero for most conserved quantities, the positron and the electron cancel each other out, and now they're able to produce photons. Since that's what they wanted to do in the first place, and its no longer forbidden, it happens!More generally, an antiparticle always has the opposite intrinsic quantum numbers (a fancy term for the conserved things I was talking about earlier) that its normal particle brother has, and so in general they will annihilate (i.e., positron-electron, proton-antiproton, etc.).


Credit to Krinthis

[Dubiaku]

I think you need to keep in mind that ideas, such as "strings", are conceptual tools to allow us to have some sort of visual representation in our brains of something that we can never see or understand except by a process of analogy. There are, of course, no real "strings". If you think about it, you'll begin to see. What would they be made of? Cotton? LOL. You see what I mean.


But your idea of anti-vibrations is just as good as any other analogy, and right up there among the best ways to look at it. Remember that all matter comes from nothing, literally. Totally empty space still has an energy potential and virtual particles are created and destroyed within it. Hard to believe, until someone actually catches some before they  mutually annihilate. So the fact that they come from nothing means that they need to add up to nothing when the whole process is over. The only way that can happen is if they are exact opposites, like a 1 and -1. That way, any particles that come into existence can go back to non-existence without leaving anything behind.

Make any sense?


Strangely enough, this all comes from the Uncertainty Principle. We cannot determine exactly where a particle is if we know how fast it moves, and vice versa. Thus the limerick:


Higgledy piggledy,
Herr Werner Heisenberg said
"But Your Honor, it just isn't fair,
That I was speeding is unascertainable,
And if I was, then I can't have been there!"


Not only do we not know where a particle is, we don't know where it is not, and we don't know when it does not "not" exist, meaning "does" exist.


The fact that the universe is mostly matter means that they cannot be exact opposites. There needs to be some asymmetry somewhere that tends to favor the matter.