Some of the smartest people I have ever met are Physicists. Obviously, they have to be very smart to understand Physics, but what always struck me about Physicists was their intelligence in softer domains such as human relationships, the arts and politics.
Nevertheless, I always had a problem understanding how the velocity of an object that is going faster and faster could be decreasing. Yes, if it is going downwards or left it’s speed may be increasing but its velocity is decreasing. This is because velocity is considered to be negative in a downward or left direction. This smacks of taking the easy way out in order to use a system with negative numbers.
Each atomic particle has an antiparticle. The only difference between the two particles is that one spins in one direction and the other in the opposite direction. When they meet, they annihilate each other, a bit like a number and its additive inverse. It is not exactly like a number and its additive inverse as the result of a particle and antiparticle meeting can be the production of 2 photons or other particles. There is a remainder.
One of the earliest antiparticles found was the positron also known as the antielectron. A cloud chamber filled with dry ice tracked gamma ray photons that came from space. In 1932, a physicist observed a photon splitting into an electron and positron. This was explained as being due to the photon passing close to a heavy atomic nucleus. Later an electron merging with a positron was observed with the production of pure light, in fact 2 photons. An electron and a positron can also produce a muon and anti-muon if the electron and positron have large amounts of movement-energy and meet head-on.
The antiparticle of a photon is a photon. Other particles with antiparticles include the neutron, boson, meson, gravitons and WIMPs. I don’t understand what all these particles do, but gravitons are to gravity as photons are to light. WIMPs is a great acronym for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. It is possible that Dark Matter is made out of WIMPs.
Today there is a theory that there is an anti-universe. It is based on the theory that there is a fundamental symmetry in nature. The theory is called CPT standing for charge, parity and time. CPT maintains that any interaction is the same if you flip the components to their opposite charge, take the mirror image of the components and then run the interactions backwards in time. This leads to the possibility of an anti-universe existing. The interesting possibility about the anti-universe is that it runs backwards in time and may explain where dark matter comes from.
Whether these theories are true or not, the interesting fact is that Physicists seem to avoid negatives and are much more interested in Opposites, backwards, mirrors and anti-particles.
