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Antimatter can be thought of as ordinary matter going backwards in time. Either it is or it isn't, the odds are 50/50. Mainstream science, assumes matter and antimatter to gravitationally attract each other. Why is this assumption so overwhelmingly strong? Does this dogma have any valid scientific reasoning behind it?
Like what?
Either it is or it isn't, the odds are 50/50.
The arrow of time lets assume for the sake of simplicity can only have two directions and this was the point I was making in saying 50/50. This is self evident.
Physics is almost completely based on this idea, it is so fundamental that it has to be based on something.
If antimatter repels normal matter gravitationally, then that would allow for a violation of the conservation of energy (which is a big no-no).Imagine an electron-positron pair in the gravitational field of the Earth. They both have equal mass, but one is attracted towards the Earth while the other is repelled away from it. In this sense, the pair has no weight, since they cancel out one another's gravitational effects. The net result is that you can change their height above the Earth's surface with no net change in the energy of the system.Now imagine that you put the pair at a high altitude and allow it to self-annihilate to produce a pair of gamma ray photons. Then you move those gamma ray photons down closer to the Earth. When light travels in towards a gravitational source, it's frequency increases and it gains energy (blue-shifting). Think of it as the opposite of what happens when light travels away from a dense object like a neutron star (red-shifting).Once you return to the same height that you originally had the electron-positron pair at (before you moved it up high), you allow the gamma ray photons to create a new electron-positron pair. But wait, this electron-positron pair has a higher energy state than it did before due to the blue-shifting of the gamma rays. You can repeat the process and create a pair with even more energy than that, and so on. Where is this extra energy coming from?If both matter and antimatter are attracted gravitationally, then this problem is avoided.Also, light (which is neither matter nor antimatter) is attracted by gravity (i.e. gravitational lensing). So why would antimatter be different from both matter and light in this sense?
SuperC - nice argument, not entirely convinced, but cannot see the flaw.
"Energy is conserved," is an oversimplefication of the conscept of energy conservation. The energy of a closed system is conserved in any inertial reference frame, but the system has different amounts of energy relative to different reference frames. The photonic energy that is released by annihilation IN THE REFERENCE FRAME OF THE PAIR AT THE TIME AND PLACE WHERE ANNIHILATION OCCURS is equal to the mass of the particle pair, including the mass equivalent of any kinetic energy they had in that reference frame prior to collision. In a different reference frame the mass-energy may vary, but the rest mass is constant. The rest mass of a particle is the mass of the particle in a reference frame which is stationary relative to the particle.