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Conservation of Mass and Antimatter
Name: Chris
Status: student
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Actually, the solution to your problem is quite simple. There IS no law of
conservation of mass. The appropriate conservation law here is conservation
of energy. Mass, see, is a type of energy. So in the LHC, or other colliders,
some of the tremendous energy pumped into the system is converted to mass.
Richard Barrans, Ph.D., M.Ed.
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Wyoming
You have to be very careful with conservation laws. They "ain't so simple"
as appears in introductory texts. The first Oh! Oh! is Einstein's famous law
E=mc^2 which demonstrates the equivalence of energy and mass. So if energy
is gained (or lost) for a particular event, and you have not included that
in your conservation of mass bookkeeping, you would seem to have
"discovered" a violation of the conservation of mass, but in fact you
haven't, you just haven't counted all the origins of the mass.
There are some cases where this discrepancy has been used to characterize an
unobserved particle, which gave particle physicists a good idea where to
look, and behold the missing mass was found.
The second Oh! Oh! Is Emmy Noether's theorems. She was an 'up and coming'
theoretical particle physicist in the 1920's and early 1930's when she was
unfortunately struck down by breast cancer. She was able to prove
mathematically that for EVERY CONSERVATION LAW there was a corresponding
SYMMETRY LAW. This is an "if and only if" requirement. A Web Search will
give more details than we can use in this limited format. This is one of the
motives that drive high energy physicist and cosmologists to look for more
and more particles, and symmetries in high energy events.
It appears from reading your question several times that you think
anti-matter has zero mass: "... how are we able to create antimatter... ,
would we not also have to create matter when creating antimatter..."
That is not the case. Matter and anti- matter have the same mass (so far as
we know) it is their charge which differs
Vince Calder
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Update: June 2012
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