When does matter and antimatter not matter?

When it’s just a smatter.

I think it is cool to discover new stuff.

I figure, however, that people will take information like this and run out of bounds with it.
I can’t wait until a new sub-branch of epistemology appears, wherein a thing can indeed be what it is and what is not at the same time. There goes Aristotelian logic, there goes science (ironic), there goes rational debate, there it all goes.
Sort of like when people said that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means you can not be certain of anything, so truth is established by those in power.

Other than that, real interesting stuff. I don’t really get it. Not sure what anybody is going to do with it. But interesting never the less.

Does it matter that nevertheless should be all one word? Yes, no…no matter :)

@josie Wasn’t the end goal of science to render itself no longer necessary? As soon as we figure out what 42 means, we’re done, right?

@ETpro

Well that would be an astonishing moment. And I think that it would make humanity obsolete in the course of the evolution of the cosmos. Once the universe knows everything there is to know about itself, it won’t have anything else to do.

And I can’t prove what I am about to say.

But I just bet that every time we think we understand 42, we will discover we are actually only at 41.9 or something. And then the next time, it will be 41.99 etc etc.

Maybe not.

@josie Hope we make it to that point. I think I would prefer to become obsolete rather than extinct.

I’ve heard that photons were also their own antiparticles. Is this different?

Also, it seems like the majorana fermion is not a particle in the typical sense. Based on this sentence: “I’m not sure if they exist in nature, but I think we can create them by designing nanostructures,” it appears that the majorana does not exist outside of the laboratory.

An antiparticle is specifically a particle with opposite charge and all other properties the same. An antiparticle pair, like electron and positron, are identical except for charge, which is exactly opposite.

FTA:
“We made one. The Majorana comes out of the superposition of an electron and a “hole”—the absence of an electron in a metal. By applying a magnetic field to semiconducting nanowires laid across a superconductor, you can move electrons along these wires, creating two points in space that each mimic half an electron. The electrons go back and forth, so the hole jumps from left to right. If it spends an equal amount of time on each side, then, quantum mechanically, it’s in a superposition of being on the left and right. If it’s stable, then we call it a particle”

So this virtual particle is a superposition of one electron over two events. Assuming a smooth distribution, this would mean that each virtual particle is, as the quote says, “half a particle”. This implies, not two particles with opposite charge, but two particles each with charge -0.5 – and also with ½ the mass of the electron. Therefore the two particles would not be mutual antiparticles.
Granted, this guy is a professional physicist, and I’m a professional nothing. Still, the definition of an “antiparticle” is a pretty widely-accepted one, and this situation does not seem to fit it.

@PhiNotPi This Majorana fermion is a quasiparticle and was generated in a laboratory rather than found in nature. No similar particle has been found in nature, nor is it likely to be found in my opinion. If they exist in nature, how would we experimentally distinguish a single electron from a pair of half-electrons? What spin could a half-electron have?

This person might be a great physicist, but I’m afraid he’s not a very good communicator.

If antimatter is -1 and matter is 1, then antimatter is not matter. In fact matter is not 1, and antimatter is not -1, and the question has no meaning to physics. In physics talking about quantities without units means nothing.

@josie So you suspect the Universe might be the ultimate intelligence too. It’s an intriguing possibility, I think. And if it’s so, why wouldn’t that ultimate intelligence play with our heads as we try to fully understand it?

@rojo I’m just the opposite. I’d rather be dead than obsolete. Dead, I can’t feel. Obsolescence positively sucks.

@PhiNotPi Yes, in a sense, photons are their own antiparticle. This is because photons are waves. Think of waves in water. If you overlap two identical waves at a half a wavelength apart, they cancel one another. But I cannot see how this fact would be of any value to quantum computing.

@rexacoracofalipitorius I was pressed for time and honestly didn’t do a very good job of phrasing the question. My interest in it is not so much any need to modify the standard model of particle physics as it is the possible impact on quantum computing. And of course, in that vein, we aren’t concerned with particles or quasi-particles we can’t easily create or collate where we want them.

@ETpro Just to clarify, I don’t have any issue with the way you phrased your question- I was just pointing out some problematic aspects of the article you linked. I have a problem with the way Leo Kouwenhoven explained things, not with anything you said.

With that said, I should point out that a photon neither is nor has an antiparticle, since it has charge 0.

@rexacoracofalipitorius I agree with the review of the article’s quality. I stand by the importance of the discovery.

The photon being its own antiparticle is just an interesting way of looking at photons—something we do so often without even thinking about what it is we are looking at.

@ETpro I don’t dispute the importance of the discovery, but I can’t be sure even what the discovery is since the interviewee explained it so badly.

Also, I don’t understand what you mean the photon being its own antiparticle. To be honest it’s quite likely that you understand physics and photons better than I do, but from what I’ve read it doesn’t seem like that could be possible in physics under the Standard Model as I understand it (which understanding is, I admit, not very thorough.)

@ETpro That fact is of value to quantum computing, as some people are trying to build quantum computers out of light. http://phys.org/news/2011-06-all-optical-quantum-controlled-not-photonic-gate.html

@PhiNotPi Wow. The petaflop computer is coming.