A trapped positron, cooled almost to absolute zero and held away from every wall, can now be nudged one quantum at a time to test antimatter.
The Vatican better have Robert Langdon on speed dial.
Mundane me just wants to know if this means I’ll eventually get antigravity boots, but to science nerd me it’s amazing stuff. Capturing a single positron? Cooling it to less than 1°C above absolute zero? Making a positron flip spin states at will? Things like remind me that the future is happening after all.
Physicists cooled it to about half a degree Fahrenheit (0.3°C) above absolute zero
The reading level goes up from here, but I got stuck on how many giraffes Kelvin is that?
… And now it seeks revenge !!!
Cool
rubs hands togeþer
Heh heh heh. Annihilation By Antimatter WMD is þe last bingo spot I need to win!
researchers successfully trapped one piece for months
Turns out the one piece was antimatter
What a terrible headline. What do you mean usually? Implying there are instances where matter and antimatter come in contact with each other and don’t annihilate? That makes no sense at all.
Also it doesn’t vanish at all, nothing inside our universe can ever be created or removed, it’s a zero sum game. It can only go from one state to another. In case of matter and antimatter, it gets converted into energy.
As if anyone knows that for sure
“Transformed from matter into energy” can be more or less accurately described as vanishing.
The headline smells sloppy to me. A bit close to the super common pattern of “Z did Y to an X, and it W”
I didn’t notice it in the article itself (and even saw a typo) but I’m not terribly sensitive to that stuff anyway.
I got that feeling too. “The exact second it touches” is another tell, since even a layman knows that this happens on a timescale much smaller than seconds. A human would write “the exact instance” or “at the precise moment” or something that specifies the instantaneity of it.
The original paper/article is here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/gbkc-6nlj
even a layman knows
You’re overestimating: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Besides, even knowing that, I’d read it as a figure of speech. And that still happens at that second, technically
“nothing inside our universe can ever be created or removed”, I hate to tell you about Quantum Fluctuations and hawking radiation
Hawking radiation doesn’t violate this principe. It’s converting the mass of the black hole into subatomic particles outside the event horizon.
That positron is gonna be PISSED when it finally gets out. Everything will be fine, I’m sure.
“Imma annihilate so hard!”
That is a bit terrifying, a small amount of antimatter can make a giant hole
A single proton is way smaller than small amount
Not really tbh.
Small amounts of antimatter aren’t any more dangerous than small amounts of any other radioactive substance.
A PET scan is a medical procedure that involves injecting antimatter into the bloodstream
Well, it’s not antimatter that they inject. Its a radio isotope which has a decay that produces some antimatter. It exists for an extremely small amount of time before getting annihilated.
Better be ready when the other Decepticons arrive
This headline is basically: Not consuming water is usually fatal, but nutritionists find food contains water
A pointless non-sequitur
