humble3d Posted September 24, 2017 Share Posted September 24, 2017 Why antimatter might be the answer to life... the Universe and everything Experiments that reveal the behaviour of antihydrogen could tell physicists more about the rules that hold the Universe together. The answer to life, the Universe and everything, according to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42. He was out by a factor of two: the solution to the Universe is 21. Or to be more precise, 21 centimetres, which is the wavelength of radiation emitted when a hydrogen atom shifts from one specific energy state to another. That’s why the plaque attached to NASA’s 1972 Pioneer 10 spacecraft pictures a woman whose height is shown as the binary representation of 8. (Eight of those 21 centimetres making 1.68?metres.) Related stories via the link below... Observation of the hyperfine spectrum of antihydrogen The race to reveal antimatter’s secrets Observation of the 1S–2S transition in trapped antihydrogen In the twentieth century, a Who’s Who of physicists used hydrogen to predict and examine subatomic interactions. A paper this week describes a major advance in this effort — one that takes it into the mysterious realm of antimatter. It shows that antihydrogen, hydrogen’s antimatter counterpart, also produces the telltale 21-cm hydrogen emission line (M. Ahmadi et al. Nature 548, 66–69; 2017). This latest experiment could answer some fundamental questions. One way to test for cracks in the standard model of physics — the rules that help to bind the Universe together — is to seek and find discrepancies in how matter and its antimatter counterparts behave. Decades of careful analysis of hydrogen atoms offer a benchmark that can now be tested against corresponding measurements of antihydrogen. Any divergence in the results could open a door to new physics: an answer to the Universe that somebody, somewhere, perhaps already knows. https://www.nature.com/news/why-antimatter-might-be-the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-1.22387 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.