Is it possible that there's a force that can transform matter to anti-matter and visa versa?
Please explain it to me like I'm an idiot
Anything's possible.
>>8104839
Anything's possible, idiot.
fix'd
>>8104876
Science doesn't mandate what is possible because science is an evolving view.
>>8104876
No, it's a stupid question. End of discussion.
>>8104820
Asking science if something is possible can only ever return answer of "yes" or "maybe"
In our current understanding of things you can't have a process that just takes matter in and puts out anti-matter.
Basically, particles have various numbers associated with them that need to be conserved in interactions. Quarks have a number associated with "quarkness" and antiquarks also have this number but negative. This means that if you want to create an anti-particle in some interaction then you'll be introducing some negative quarkness into the system but because the overall quarkness needs to remain the same you need to balance this out with something, usually this is satisfied by the non-anti version of this quark.
The actual number is called Baryon Number and there are a bunch of other numbers like charge and stuff to consider but that would just obscure the main point here.
Essentially, if you're making antimatter it will usually be balanced out by related regular matter.
This is kind of weird though because there's a lot more matter about than anti-matter, people are looking into that.
This is just my undergrad take on things, particles aren't my main area of interest and I'm not clued up on the latest stuff but I'm pretty sure most of what I said is on point.
>>8104905
We've made anti-matter though...
>>8104954
And this does not contradict the person you are responding to. Creating antimatter also creates matter.
>>8104957
>In our current understanding of things you can't have a process that just takes matter in and puts out anti-matter.
How does it not? This is exactly what happens.
>>8104954
Read again
Yeah we've created anti-matter but it comes with regular matter due to symmetries and stuff. OP was asking if you can get some matter and turn it into antimatter and you can't do that because it would violate baryon number conservation, the "quarkness" I mentioned (lepton number for stuff like electrons but that's beside the point).
Basically we have facilitated interactions which result in antimatter popping out but this is not the same as "turning matter into antimatter".
>>8104960
The keyword there was "just" as in "only"
>>8104966
What else do you put in? If you want to argue semantics you still lose.
My schlong is made mostly of anti-matter
>>8104905
There's more matter because matter and antimatter are NOT equal, but are opposite. Look into CPT symmetry.
>>8104971
The "only" applies to both sides. There is no known process that will take in matter and purely put out anti-matter, that would violate conservation laws.
I chose to interpret OP's question as "can we get a bunch of matter and do something to it that turns it into a bunch of antimatter?" Now you can in principle put a bunch of matter into some process and get an amount of antimatter out but all that antimatter that came out would have to be balanced out by more regular matter. In a sense, you'll end up with more matter than you started with so I don't think you can really say you've turned matter into antimatter.
>>8104978
Yeah my lecturer mentioned some stuff like that towards the end of our course. Isn't it still an ongoing area of research though?
>>8104992
Yeah CERN and such are looking for more and more CP violations, but they are hard to come by. Feels good to answer a big question like that though, however vaguely.
>>8104905
Okay, what about this: lets say there is a particle that mediates matter-antimater transformations. What properties would it need?
electrons are
>B - L = -1
>Q = -1
>S = ±1/2
>T3 = -1/2
positrons are opposite in every respect, so some hypothetical mediator A would have the properties
>B - L = 2
>Q = 2
>S = ±1 or 0
>T3 = 1
It would probably decay into 2 electrons (or muons or tauons) so even if it did, it still would be indistinguishable from just making an electron-positron pair appear. Of course I'm just really simplifying the math because I don't know this shit
>>8104905
There's one thing that always irked me about laws of conservation like the Baryon number you mentioned. One of the most well known is conservation of energy, and everything I've always heard is that IN EVERY SITUATION, UNDER ANY CONDITIONS, ENERGY IS ALWAYS CONSERVED, ALWAYS. Oh unless space is expanding. Photons loose energy as they are red shifted, oh well.
It is made to sound like one of the most fundamental laws in the universe: energy is never created or destroyed, oh unless the object is in an accelerating reference frame. A building block of physics is just thrown out the window when the object is speeding up.
I'm probably just being autistic though.
>>8104974
Because it's mostly theoretical?
>>8105111
I know. I don't get why certain things are said to be conserved if they aren't. They say flavor is conserved... until the weak force comes into play, which being one of the four fundamental forces is kind of a huge hole in the logic
>unless space is expanding
Spacetime has energy and shit. Literally, if two black holes (or neutron stars, can't remember) are spiraling inwards on eachother, there will be a point in their orbit (very small orbit) that will cause them to speed up and emit energy, because they are emitting gravitational waves.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html
>Gravitational waves
A binary pulsar emits gravitational waves, according to GR, and one expects (innocent word!) that these waves will carry away energy. So its orbital period should change. Einstein derived a formula for the rate of change (known as the quadrapole formula), and in the centenary of Einstein's birth, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor reported that the binary pulsar PSR1913+16 bore out Einstein's predictions within a few percent. Hulse and Taylor were awarded the Nobel prize in 1993.
>>8105207
P.s. I hadn't read the whole article, but literally right underneath it is the consideration of space expanding and energy within it.
>>8105193
You would think if various physical phenomenon were conserved, they would all be conserved in the same manner. But some seem to be always conserved (electric charge as far as I'm aware), some are almost always conserved (energy/mass), and some are barely conserved like the example you gave.
I guess there's no reason why they should under the same rules, but it seems like most cases there just shouldn't be exceptions to universal rules. F=ma is always F=ma, there's no exceptions to that, so why these?
>>8104820
hurrr durr durr duurrrrrrrr hurrrrrr dur. dur.
>>8104839
I think what anon means is that there's probably a consistent model that we can attach to the standard model to make it work.
Imagine a pair of gauge bosons like the W's that instead of acting on the lepton and quark doublets, acted on the Dirac spinors themselves. The Dirac Lagrangian has a manifest SU(2) x SU(2) symmetry anyway so we're not asking too much of it. The bosons would have to have electric charge [math]\pm 2e[/math] though. Similarly with lepton and quark number. The quantum numbers would have to be such that the total is conserved in ever sense. >>8105097 illustrates this very well in the list.
It's not impossible to write down the rules for a universe in which this interaction could exist. Whether or not they would be consistent with our own Universe is a completely different question.
Anti matter is created in the clouds during intense lightning storms, usually above them where they experience a matter-antimatter convergence event thus disseminating all the energy between the two into based thermal radiation.
god all those people here talking shit without knowibg anything.
yes there are such forces.
for example the weak interaction turns a down quark into an up quark, an electron and an electronantineutrino so a bit of the energy had been transformed to antimatter
>>8104820
We use anti-matter decay everyday in PET-scanning.
It uses the natural autodestruction e-/e+ that occures when 18F-FDG decays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
>>8104887
So is it possible to science to answer "no"? :-)
>>8105845
Yes, but only if you ask "Is phenomenon X impossible?"
Yeah bro, I think it's called like the 'weak nuclear force' or something. Pretty obscure tho.
