Scientists have observed antimatter free-falling due to gravity for the first time

For the first time, an international team of scientists have directly observed that antimatter – the mysterious counterpart to ordinary matter – free-falls under gravity, answering a question which has been the subject of endless speculation among the scientific community.

If Sir Isaac Newton was watching an apple made from antimatter fall from a tree, would it go up or down?

For the first time, an international team of scientists can answer that question, after they directly tested how antimatter acts under gravity, a question which has been a subject of endless speculation among the scientific community.

What they found was that antimatter is affected by gravity in the same way that matter is.

“As it turns out, an anti-apple would also fall down,” Scott Menary, professor emeritus at York University, said in a press release.

This confirmation, described in a paper published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, only brings up further questions, Menary said.

“Such as, does antimatter fall in exactly the same way as matter or are there subtle differences in how it behaves that we haven’t discovered.”

This is the first major result to come out of use of the new ALPHA-g apparatus, a specialized particle-trapping device which was funded through the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It is housed at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, operated by the intergovernmental organization of CERN.