this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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science

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just science related topics. please contribute

note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What... How...

EDIT

i asked chatgpt if antimatter travels backwards in time, and this was the reply:

Some physicists have proposed that antimatter is actually matter moving backwards in time, based on a mathematical equivalence that emerges from quantum field theory. This idea was first suggested by Richard Feynman, who wondered if all electrons could be the same electron bouncing back and forth in time. However, this is not a widely accepted interpretation, and there is no experimental evidence to support it. In fact, most physicists do not believe that antimatter is really moving backwards in time, because it is not clear what that would mean physically.

One way to test this idea is to see how antimatter responds to gravity. If antimatter falls upwards instead of downwards, that would imply that it has a negative mass and a negative energy, which could be interpreted as moving backwards in time. However, a recent experiment at CERN has confirmed for the first time that atoms of antimatter fall downwards, just like normal matter2. This means that antimatter and matter have the same gravitational mass and the same sign of energy. However, this does not rule out the possibility that antimatter and matter might fall at different rates, which would still indicate a difference in their behavior under gravity.

So, to answer your question, antimatter does not travel backwards in time, at least not in any obvious or observable way. It behaves very similarly to normal matter, except for having opposite charges and other quantum numbers. The mystery of why antimatter and matter did not cancel each other out completely in the early universe remains unsolved, and requires further investigation and experimentation