One of the greatest scientists of all time turned the world upside down when he expounded his Theory of Relativity. And not because it was the answer they were looking for, but because no one believed it. With the passage of time, many of its facets have been verified, until today, only a few remain to be seen as true (white holes, wormholes, etc.). The most surprising of all has just been discovered, and it has to do with antimatter and gravity, two forces theorized by Einstein that control our entire universe.
This phenomenon was supposed to be impossible: Einstein predicted it and got it right
Recent groundbreaking research has confirmed a pivotal aspect of Einstein’s theory of general relativity: As with other forms of matter, matter antimatter also experiences forces such as gravity. This finding not only substantiates Einstein’s propositions but also helps to answer questions that bothered scientists and researchers for decades.
In 1915, Albert Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity, based on which gravity affects all types of mass without any differentiation between the material from which it is made. Ever since this theory was proposed, it has been implied that antimatter, which is made up of antiparticles including antiprotons and positrons, experiences the force of gravity like normal matter.
It is the counterpart of matter, though it has reverse charges and magnetic charges. Still, this theoretical premise was not backed by direct experimental data on how antimatter behaves when it is tested for gravity. The problem is that antimatter is scarce and hard to investigate since it interacts with matter and vanishes, “burning” the energy.
The Landmark Experiment has confirmed it: This law of physics has been broken by antimatter
In the series of experiments conducted at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) within the last few months, the scientists have captured the first on-video look at how antimatter moves in a gravitational field and thus in agreement with the Einstein principle (now again, a prediction confirmed decades later).
The ALPHA collaboration at CERN set out a very careful experiment to study the gravitational influence on antihydrogen, a basic antimatter made up of one antiproton and one positron. To study its local effect, the researchers synthesized antihydrogen atoms and confined them within a magnetic bottle.
The scientists in their experiment then lowered the field strength, and that caused the antihydrogen atoms to break free and to begin falling. Surprisingly, the physicists managed to pinpoint that 80% of the antihydrogen atoms settled at the lower part of the magnetic trap, and therefore, antihydrogen like any other substance, follows gravity.
Einstein got it right, and the universe “runs like that”: From the base of “antiwater” to the Big Bang
Indeed, the outcome of the experiment showed that the gravitational acceleration of antihydrogen is almost identical to that of normal matter, which is about 9.8 meters per second squared. This is important because it eliminates one possibility as to the nature of antimatter and whether it has properties that allow it to be repelled by gravity.
It also managed to accurately quantify the strength of the gravitational force that exists between matter and antimatter to a near perfection, with an accuracy level of 0.97%. These findings do not only concretize Albert Einstein’s theory but also further the existing knowledge on explaining why the content of the universe is of major importance, even though theories on the Big Bang’s creation point.
The proof that antimatter falls towards matter means that some of the deepest quests in cosmology can now be pursued, albeit in a much different manner. There is a problem of the baryogenesis, which became famous after the advocates for the creation of isolated islands of matter at the initial stage of the development of the universe.
Perhaps the first scientists of Einstein’s time did not believe that the interaction between antimatter and gravity was possible, but the German genius was always stubborn, which leads us today to speak of a truly mysterious prediction. Most shocking of all is the machine we have built to detect it, so precise that it is capable of identifying atoms light years away, something never before seen in science fiction.
