-
-
------------------------------- 2560 - ANTIMATTER - is all around us?
-
- Antimatter warms the ground under your feet. It rains down from over your head. Cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere producing anti-particles that constantly shower the Earth. Your smoke alarm is producing antimatter. Particle accelerators and nuclear reactors produce antimatter.
-
- The reason you are not aware of its presence is that it exists for a very short time. The amount of matter is much, much greater than the amount of antimatter. When an antimatter particle is produced it quickly collides with a matter particle and the two annihilate each other in a burst of energy, or radiation.
-
- The gamma ray radiation gets absorbed and reflected in other collisions with matter atoms. The atoms gain kinetic energy, they move around faster, which is the same thing as thermal energy, or heat. So, the heat inside the Earth and high in the upper atmosphere is created by antimatter- matter collisions.
-
- Think of antimatter as simply ordinary matter except with the opposite charge. All ordinary matter is made from 12 particles, 6 quarks and 6 leptons. Protons and neutrons have 3 quarks each. The electron is a lepton.
-
- The fundamental particles are of three generations. Each generation is a higher level of energy, or mass, and shorter lived. (Kogayashi and Maskawa proposed the 3 generations for the Standard Model of Particle Physics in 1973)
-
---------- 1st generation --------- up quark, down quark, electron, and neutrino
-
---------- 2nd generation --------- charm quark, strange quark, muon, and muon neutrino
-
---------- 3rd generation --------- top quark, bottom quark, tau, and tau neutrino
-
- For example the muon can be considered as simply a heavy electron. The tau is simply heavier still. Each of the 12 particles have an identical twin that is the anti-particle with the opposite charge.
-
- The first anti-particle discovered in the lab was in 1965 in Brookhaven. A Beryllium target was bombarded with protons at 6 billion electron volts and anti-protons and anti-neutrinos were produced.
-
- Neutrons are neutral, so how can a neutron have the opposite charge. Neutrons do not have an electric charge but they do have a spin direction and the anti-neutron spins in the opposite direction. It is possible for all 12 anti-particles to create a complete galaxy exactly like ours only made out of antimatter.
-
- Of course, people living there would think they were matter and we were antimatter. If an antimatter galaxy existed it would produce the same gravity, produce the same light as our ordinary matter. No one could tell the planets there were antimatter until you got there and touched the surface. Surprise! Equal amounts of matter and antimatter would disappear in a flash.
-
- Just for fun let’s assume we land a 220 pound astronaut who jumps out of a hovering space ship and steps on to the surface of the antimatter planet. He and the surface would be converted into energy in a flash. 100 kilograms of astronaut and 100 kilograms of surface would instantly become gamma ray radiation. Let’s hope the space ship got away. How big would the explosion be?
-
---------------------- Energy = 2 * mass * c^2
-
--------------------- Energy = 200 kilograms * 9*10^16 meters^2/sec^2
-
---------------------- Energy = 180 * 10^17 joules
-
- One ton of TNT explodes with 4.2*10^9 joules. So, this explosion is equivalent to 4,300,000,000 tons of TNT. One hydrogen is equivalent to one million tons of TNT. Therefore, this exploding astronaut is equivalent to 4,300 hydrogen bombs all going off at once. Matter-antimatter annihilation is the most efficient fuel that is possible.
-
- All naturally occurring radioactive isotopes possess a neutron excess. To regain stability the isotope converts a neutron to a proton and emits an anti-electron. For example: the isotope phosphorus 32 has 15 protons and 17 neutrons. It is radioactive and emits an electron and an anti-neutrino to become a stable isotope of sulfur 32 with 16 protons and 16 neutrons.
-
- Beta Decay is another name for this radioactivity. It is a 3-body decay as opposed to Alpha Decay that is a 2-body decay. For example: an isotope of hydrogen 3 decays a neutron is converted into a proton plus an electron plus an anti-neutrino.
-
- The kinetic energy of the electron that shoots out for the nuclei is in the range of 1 to 10 million electron volts. When science first observed Beta Decay they could not get the conservation laws to balance. They theorized that the neutrino existed in 1930 but it was 26 years later in 1956 that the neutrino was actually discovered.
-
- Nothing stays the same unless it cannot change. In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed the world that the Universe was expanding . Before that time even Einstein thought the Universe was static, not changing. Once they realized the Universe is expanding they had to accept that it had a past and will have a future.
-
- There is a basic law in physics that says in order to have symmetry you must have a law of conservation. In studying the beginning for the Universe science expected symmetry for equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
-
- But, that is not what we observe today. There must have been a break in symmetry. For every 1,000,000,000 particles of antimatter there had to be 1,000,000,001 particles of matter. Something does not obey the law of conservation in order to have the matter imbalance we have today.
-
- Is there a law for the conservation of the number of protons? Is there a law for the conservation of the number of quarks, or electrons? So far science has not found the breaks in symmetry or law of conservation to explain the imbalance of matter versus anti-matter. There is a Nobel Prize in it for you if you figure it out. Here are some of the people who have tried:
-
- Paul Maurice Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristol, England. His father was a school teacher. He became a mathematician at Cambridge and worked on the wave-particle duality of electrons. In 1927 he published the Dirac Equation. It was pure mathematics but it predicted the behavior of atomic particles. His math was attempting to merge Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. We are still doing that today.
-
- Dirac first hypothesized the idea of he electron being a point particle, truly a point, something not spread out over space. He used the property of electron spin to measure the electron’s angular momentum. He derived the electron spin to always be ½ Planck’s Constant / 2*pi. In this equation he also derived the existence of a positive electron, the first idea of antimatter. The anti-electron was not discovered until 1932.
-
- His same equations also showed that an anti-proton should exist. His math showed that all electric charges were exact multiples of the same smallest charge. And, if that were true then magnetic monopoles also exit. However, monopoles have never been found. Dirac retired as a physics professor at Florida State University.
-
- Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904 in New York , the son of a German-Jewish immigrant. In 1930 he showed that the positive charged proton could not be Dirac’s anti-electron because it was 1,836 times too heavy.
-
- in 1935 Oppenheimer explained how deuteron, the nucleus of Deuterium, which is a proton and a neutron could be accelerated due to its positive charge, then split off and used to achieve neutron bombardment of a target. In 1943 he was placed in charge of the Los Alamos labs to design the first atomic bomb.
-
- Carl David Anderson born 1905 in New York. Was at Cal Tech. in 1932 studying cosmic rays, tracking them in a cloud chamber that had a lead partition in the middle. He observed an electron’s curved path but in the opposite direction. He had discovered the anti-electron in Dirac’s Equation. -
- Working at Pike’s Peak Colorado he also discovered the “meson” in 1936, called the mu-meson, and later the muon. The anti- muon was positively charged and 130 times the mass of he electron. It decays into an anti-electron and a neutrino. A negatively charged muon decayed into an electron and a neutrino.
-
- Emilo Segre born in 1905 in Tivoli, Italy. He was at the University of Rome. In 1938 Fascist removed his job and he became a U.S. Citizen in 1944. At the University of California Bevatron in 1955 he discovered the anti-proton. Owen Chamberlain born 1920 in San Francisco shared the Nobel Prize with Segre in 1958
-
- 2008 we still don’t know why there is more matter than antimatter? Or, where is the antimatter if it exists? On November 10, 2008 Helen Quinn of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center gave this lecture on antimatter. I took notes.
-
- December 21, 2019 2560 971
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/ -- www.facebook.com -- www.twitter.com
--------------------- Tuesday, December 24, 2019 --------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Antimatter warms the ground under your feet. It rains down from over your head. Cosmic rays smash into the upper atmosphere producing anti-particles that constantly shower the Earth. Your smoke alarm is producing antimatter. Particle accelerators and nuclear reactors produce antimatter.
-
- The reason you are not aware of its presence is that it exists for a very short time. The amount of matter is much, much greater than the amount of antimatter. When an antimatter particle is produced it quickly collides with a matter particle and the two annihilate each other in a burst of energy, or radiation.
-
- The gamma ray radiation gets absorbed and reflected in other collisions with matter atoms. The atoms gain kinetic energy, they move around faster, which is the same thing as thermal energy, or heat. So, the heat inside the Earth and high in the upper atmosphere is created by antimatter- matter collisions.
-
- Think of antimatter as simply ordinary matter except with the opposite charge. All ordinary matter is made from 12 particles, 6 quarks and 6 leptons. Protons and neutrons have 3 quarks each. The electron is a lepton.
-
- The fundamental particles are of three generations. Each generation is a higher level of energy, or mass, and shorter lived. (Kogayashi and Maskawa proposed the 3 generations for the Standard Model of Particle Physics in 1973)
-
---------- 1st generation --------- up quark, down quark, electron, and neutrino
-
---------- 2nd generation --------- charm quark, strange quark, muon, and muon neutrino
-
---------- 3rd generation --------- top quark, bottom quark, tau, and tau neutrino
-
- For example the muon can be considered as simply a heavy electron. The tau is simply heavier still. Each of the 12 particles have an identical twin that is the anti-particle with the opposite charge.
-
- The first anti-particle discovered in the lab was in 1965 in Brookhaven. A Beryllium target was bombarded with protons at 6 billion electron volts and anti-protons and anti-neutrinos were produced.
-
- Neutrons are neutral, so how can a neutron have the opposite charge. Neutrons do not have an electric charge but they do have a spin direction and the anti-neutron spins in the opposite direction. It is possible for all 12 anti-particles to create a complete galaxy exactly like ours only made out of antimatter.
-
- Of course, people living there would think they were matter and we were antimatter. If an antimatter galaxy existed it would produce the same gravity, produce the same light as our ordinary matter. No one could tell the planets there were antimatter until you got there and touched the surface. Surprise! Equal amounts of matter and antimatter would disappear in a flash.
-
- Just for fun let’s assume we land a 220 pound astronaut who jumps out of a hovering space ship and steps on to the surface of the antimatter planet. He and the surface would be converted into energy in a flash. 100 kilograms of astronaut and 100 kilograms of surface would instantly become gamma ray radiation. Let’s hope the space ship got away. How big would the explosion be?
-
---------------------- Energy = 2 * mass * c^2
-
--------------------- Energy = 200 kilograms * 9*10^16 meters^2/sec^2
-
---------------------- Energy = 180 * 10^17 joules
-
- One ton of TNT explodes with 4.2*10^9 joules. So, this explosion is equivalent to 4,300,000,000 tons of TNT. One hydrogen is equivalent to one million tons of TNT. Therefore, this exploding astronaut is equivalent to 4,300 hydrogen bombs all going off at once. Matter-antimatter annihilation is the most efficient fuel that is possible.
-
- All naturally occurring radioactive isotopes possess a neutron excess. To regain stability the isotope converts a neutron to a proton and emits an anti-electron. For example: the isotope phosphorus 32 has 15 protons and 17 neutrons. It is radioactive and emits an electron and an anti-neutrino to become a stable isotope of sulfur 32 with 16 protons and 16 neutrons.
-
- Beta Decay is another name for this radioactivity. It is a 3-body decay as opposed to Alpha Decay that is a 2-body decay. For example: an isotope of hydrogen 3 decays a neutron is converted into a proton plus an electron plus an anti-neutrino.
-
- The kinetic energy of the electron that shoots out for the nuclei is in the range of 1 to 10 million electron volts. When science first observed Beta Decay they could not get the conservation laws to balance. They theorized that the neutrino existed in 1930 but it was 26 years later in 1956 that the neutrino was actually discovered.
-
- Nothing stays the same unless it cannot change. In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed the world that the Universe was expanding . Before that time even Einstein thought the Universe was static, not changing. Once they realized the Universe is expanding they had to accept that it had a past and will have a future.
-
- There is a basic law in physics that says in order to have symmetry you must have a law of conservation. In studying the beginning for the Universe science expected symmetry for equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
-
- But, that is not what we observe today. There must have been a break in symmetry. For every 1,000,000,000 particles of antimatter there had to be 1,000,000,001 particles of matter. Something does not obey the law of conservation in order to have the matter imbalance we have today.
-
- Is there a law for the conservation of the number of protons? Is there a law for the conservation of the number of quarks, or electrons? So far science has not found the breaks in symmetry or law of conservation to explain the imbalance of matter versus anti-matter. There is a Nobel Prize in it for you if you figure it out. Here are some of the people who have tried:
-
- Paul Maurice Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristol, England. His father was a school teacher. He became a mathematician at Cambridge and worked on the wave-particle duality of electrons. In 1927 he published the Dirac Equation. It was pure mathematics but it predicted the behavior of atomic particles. His math was attempting to merge Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. We are still doing that today.
-
- Dirac first hypothesized the idea of he electron being a point particle, truly a point, something not spread out over space. He used the property of electron spin to measure the electron’s angular momentum. He derived the electron spin to always be ½ Planck’s Constant / 2*pi. In this equation he also derived the existence of a positive electron, the first idea of antimatter. The anti-electron was not discovered until 1932.
-
- His same equations also showed that an anti-proton should exist. His math showed that all electric charges were exact multiples of the same smallest charge. And, if that were true then magnetic monopoles also exit. However, monopoles have never been found. Dirac retired as a physics professor at Florida State University.
-
- Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904 in New York , the son of a German-Jewish immigrant. In 1930 he showed that the positive charged proton could not be Dirac’s anti-electron because it was 1,836 times too heavy.
-
- in 1935 Oppenheimer explained how deuteron, the nucleus of Deuterium, which is a proton and a neutron could be accelerated due to its positive charge, then split off and used to achieve neutron bombardment of a target. In 1943 he was placed in charge of the Los Alamos labs to design the first atomic bomb.
-
- Carl David Anderson born 1905 in New York. Was at Cal Tech. in 1932 studying cosmic rays, tracking them in a cloud chamber that had a lead partition in the middle. He observed an electron’s curved path but in the opposite direction. He had discovered the anti-electron in Dirac’s Equation. -
- Working at Pike’s Peak Colorado he also discovered the “meson” in 1936, called the mu-meson, and later the muon. The anti- muon was positively charged and 130 times the mass of he electron. It decays into an anti-electron and a neutrino. A negatively charged muon decayed into an electron and a neutrino.
-
- Emilo Segre born in 1905 in Tivoli, Italy. He was at the University of Rome. In 1938 Fascist removed his job and he became a U.S. Citizen in 1944. At the University of California Bevatron in 1955 he discovered the anti-proton. Owen Chamberlain born 1920 in San Francisco shared the Nobel Prize with Segre in 1958
-
- 2008 we still don’t know why there is more matter than antimatter? Or, where is the antimatter if it exists? On November 10, 2008 Helen Quinn of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center gave this lecture on antimatter. I took notes.
-
- December 21, 2019 2560 971
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/ -- www.facebook.com -- www.twitter.com
--------------------- Tuesday, December 24, 2019 --------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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