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Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory
(www.nature.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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I have a basic understanding of CERN, but if it comes down to it, everything they do there still blows my mind.
Like, imagine being the person who designed that experiment.
“Here is a CERN. Find out how antimatter falls.”
And some one/team was like ok I got this. And then they showed up one day & did it.
“Down. It goes down.”
I know it was much more complex than that, but still…imagine having the brain that stores the information required to do this. It’s so fucking cool.
What you don't see is the hundreds of people and countless hours of work that went into stuff like this. None of it is one person just showing up and making it happen. Everyone has their specific skill set and role in the project, no one knows everything. We see the result, but the day to day of this work would look mind numbingly boring to most people. It's not about geniuses having inspiration strike and figuring out something amazing, it's about months and years of staring at spreadsheets, analyzing data, fixing your mistakes, double checking, running the test again. It's about not giving up not being wicked smart, though the people working on it are definitely smart. Also this is the expected result. We were sure it fell down not up already, this was a confirmation of that.
This is pretty accurate. I was part of a detector group that did a beam test at Cern this summer. Everyone there is super helpful and humble because they know it takes grit more than anything at the end of the day.