Antimatter particles may be a lot more predictable than science fiction makes it out to be, responding to gravity just like regular matter.
"If you walk down the halls of this department and ask the physicists, they would all say that this result is not the least bit surprising," said Jonathan Wurtele, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a. "But most of them will also say that the experiment had to be done because you never can be sure."
Even Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, from over 100 years ago, posits that all types of matter respond to the same gravitational forces. "The opposite result would have had big implications; it would be inconsistent with the weak equivalence principle of Einstein's general theory of relativity," Wurtele explained in the statement. "This experiment is the first time that a direct measurement of the force of gravity on neutral antimatter has been made."
If antimatter didn't succumb to the effects of gravity, we could theoretically create a perpetual motion machine, the researchers noted, which would violate the basic laws of thermodynamics.see so little antimatter in the universe in relation to regular matter, despite current theories predicting the Big Bang created just as much antimatter as regular matter.
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