Hey, all I'm saying is that if we can only get those kind of results at CERN, I would keep my mouth shut. It's not science when nobody can reproduce your results. It's "cold fusion," and we've been down that road before.

And it never occurred to you that the sheer number of invested parties need to hear of breakthrough science at CERN or they'll pull the ongoing funding CERN needs to operate? Hell, the money CERN burned through just getting to this point would make most nations weep. They have an obligation to come up with something "groundbreaking" ASAP. The idea they work in a political vacuum is so naive I don't even know how to counter it.

And flashback to the real world, results that are only attainable at one spot on earth are not "science," they are signs of an aberration in that spot or a signature of a fraud. Hence most scientists' reluctance to publish without corroboration, the more the merrier.

If you are interested in thought processes that should be "checked," it's the blind acceptance of esoteric results that cannot be duplicated anywhere else on earth.

Note I am not saying they did not measure an amount of antimatter, I am saying nobody else has, so their results await corroboration. Until someone else corroborates their results I would not take their data to be useful or even accurate. It's not calling them liars, it's saying science is repeatable. Not-science is not. And "scientists" should not be making claims without corroboration.

 

Yes. Huge, huge, HUGE amounts of it. As I said before, 89,876,000,000 MJ of energy (assuming 100% efficiency in the creation process.) Google says we produce just under 20 trillion watt-hours of energy per year here in the US. That's the equivalent of 790 kg of anitmatter. That's less than the weight of an Elise. Which is why antimatter could be a really kick-ass energy store for powering space travel. Not much mass to move around for the amount of energy you can get out of it.

No need to look to pseudoscientific literature - we already know from the well established laws of thermodynamics that it would not. You seem to be under the mistaken idea that I'm talking about antimatter as an energy source, when I clearly said in a previous post "antimatter is not an energy source." It's just a great way to store energy if you don't want a lot of mass associated with it. Just like hydrogen/oxygen is a great rocket fuel, because it stores a lot of energy for little mass. Antimatter has an even better energy density.

That's like saying astronomy is pseudoscience until we travel to a distant star. This is 100% science - particle physics to be a bit more precise. Theory, experimentation, rinse and repeat and all that. The scientific method. Science.

I agree. I'm curious - who asserted this statement? You seem to be address me in this post but I certainly never said such a thing, so I'm not sure who exactly you're addressing...?

Is that how you view the scientific process? Every new claim has no more weight than the ravings of a drunk man who saw flying saucers? Then how do you think the scientific community picks which claims to test, and which to ignore? If they're all given the same weight, why aren't we seeing as many $billions-sized efforts investigating flying saucers over Phoenix as we are investigating particle physics?

Calling it "equivalent to the ravings of a drunk man who say flying saucers" certainly IS belittling.

The interesting bit about this experiment isn't about creating antimatter - antimatter is created all the time in particle physics experiments. Antimatter is USED in particle physics - that's the anti-protons that they sling around the accelerators to smash into protons. The evidence of the particles is quite well established. Heck, this whole experiment is predicated on mixing positrons and anti-protons together and waiting for them to link up and form anti-hydrogen. The existence of positrons and anti-protons is not under question by the scientific community. The novel thing about this experiment is that they were able to trap anti-hydrogen for a relatively long period of time. They did an experiment, recorded their results, and published their findings in Nature. That's how science works around here.

 

Apt choice of words!

Antimatter is very real, and there are certainly more than "a few particles" in existence. PET scans (I had one a couple of years ago) utilize positrons (anti-electrons), so there has even been a practical application utilizing antimatter for DECADES now.

You call this PSEUDOSCIENCE? Equivalent to astrology and UFOlogy?

 

"Pseudoscience" isn't an appropriate term. And I am really referring to the surrounding conversation, not so much what is being done within a laboratory. I still don't like accepting the results of one facility as unquestionable. So far, I think CERN is the only plance antihydrogen has been trapped for any length of time.

PET scans use emitted particles from decaying isotopes. They don't fill the PET scanner tank from a can of positrons before each scan. The idea that they could is what I am dismissing.

 

It sounded like you were dismissing the existence of antimatter.

REgarding reliabity of results from one facility, it's safe to say that faking results or reporting mistakent results at CERN is NOWHERE NEAR as likely as those poor yahoos who prematurely reported their mistaken conclusions regarding cold fusion. That was just bad science on their part, and they got found out. Very stupid on their part to prematurely report their "findings" prior to any kind of reasonable peer review. That is NOT the way science is normally conducted and it's not the way it is or will be conducted at CERN, which is not just a handful of scientists and their lab assistants, it's an army of scientists from around the world.

CERN is and will be the only facility of its kind for a while. We don't have to wait for the next one to be built to accept valid scientific conclusions from results. It's not like the particle physics at another facility is going to be any different.

 

I quit reading Nunco's post after he said it was pseudoscience

Pseudoscience - "any of various methods, theories, or systems, as astrology, psychokinesis, or clairvoyance, considered as having no scientific basis"

Anti-matter has no scientific basis guys

 

You should have stopped reading nunco's posts long before that.