Dozentinnen: | Dr. Todd Huffman, Univ. Oxford, U.K. Dr. Celia Brown, Freiburg |
Inhalt: | What may seem impossible appears to actually happen. Our mathematics treats antimatter, which like all things has positive energy and travels forward in time, as if it were matter with negative energy and heading backward in time. Changing particles to anti-particles very nearly leaves the Universal laws unchanged. All phenomena around us that we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell are related to the theory which was first created with these strange objects going backwards in time. But do they really? It could just be a mathematical trick. I begin with an introduction to the mind-blowing world of quantum mechanics, where all parti-cles have wave-like properties. I intend to discuss matter-antimatter symmetries with the help of the operator 'C' which is charge-conjugation; a fancy way of saying that it turns matter into antimatter in a mathematical equation (like switching 'red' for 'white'), and then Parity 'P' which involves the looking glass. And then how this wonderful symmetry between matter, having positive energy going forward in time, and antimatter, having negative energy going backward in time, begins to crack....because there is a force that we cannot see, touch, feel, hear, or taste, called the Weak Force, that does not obey this symmetry If a matter pawn encounters an antimatter pawn both would annihilate in pure energy of pho-tons...so it's like a chess game where, if two pieces of the same type encounter each other, both are sacrificed. So when 'red' is exchanged for 'white' and heads the opposite way down the board the exchange is not perfect...red (antimatter) will slowly lose...and after thousands of games white will win just a bit more often and have a few more pieces left. This would repre-sent the weak force. If you play enough matches, white will come out the winner even if the players are evenly matched. |
Zeit/Ort: | Mittwoch, 18.07.07, 20-22 Uhr, KG I, HS 1199 |