

Generating Matter and Antimatter from Nothing - sgift
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208130038.htm

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dmoney
_a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse could rip
apart a vacuum into its fundamental matter and antimatter components_

I'm not a physicist, but this sounds wrong. Vacuum doesn't have "matter and
antimatter components", it's vacuum.

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jacquesm
This is going to be a bit weird when you're used to interacting with the
universe at a macroscopic level, but the vacuum is actually more like a cosmic
bank account. On balance it is at '0', but locally there can be small
'offenses' which create pairs of particles that spontaneously annihilate
(again, in pairs) before anybody gets a chance to notice.

As long as the books balance (particles and anti-particles created in equal
proportions) the universe does not seem to care, it even does not care if
these particles are in existence for a longer period of time, or are separated
by distances large enough that you can notice them.

This also apparently is one of the more interesting pieces of the puzzle about
where all this stuff came from in the first place and has been used to
postulate the existence of an 'anti-universe'.

<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67O3TH20100825>

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iwr
Pair production is not a new phenomenon, it's been known since Einstein. This
is the fundamental way particle colliders work.

~~~
wladimir
But it seems they managed to do it at a pretty large scale, this time, though.

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RiderOfGiraffes
The original was submitted yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986505>

It garnered no discussion, and sank without trace.

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redacted
Where Nothing = massive amounts of energy.

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thyrsus
Please correct any misunderstandings I may have in the following:

* Vacuum has no mass (gravitational attraction). * Normal matter has mass. * Vacuum is composed of matter and antimatter. * Therefore, antimatter has negative mass (negative gravitational attraction).

~~~
bOR_
Its tricky to answer, as I am limited to browsing wikipedia pages on these
topics and no more knowledgeable than you are on the topic :-). One obvious
alternative to your line of thinking is that the matter+anti-matter that is
created in a vacuum is not 'normal' (using your position on normal matter),
and has no mass.

One of the wikipedia pages seems to support that:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles> "As such, virtual particles
are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are detectable only as
forces but not particles."

It seems to have something to do with normally existing only for a very short
time, and affecting the universe only on a very short range that these virtual
particles get away with appearing to not having a mass from the point of view
of the rest of the universe. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles>

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shawndumas
so this is not creating something out of nothing is it? it is figuring out
that what we thought was nothing is really something, no?

could've said, "vacuum != nothing" imho.

~~~
Egregore
Then what is 'nothing'?

~~~
shawndumas
"That which rocks dream about." -Aristotle

