Hacker News Reader

I would have thought this had already been tested on antiprotons, but I'm not seeing any references for it. Just a note that results from testing anti-hydrogen for gravity should be had in the next few years. Maybe containing something so charged overwhelms gravity?

View on HN

As has been alluded to, gravity is an extremely weak force, so any gravitational effect is easily masked by electroweak forces until you accumulate a very significant mass. There's no way they can measure this on a single atom.

But easy to test with 2 atoms! Smash them together at a high enough speed where e=mc^2 says they would create a black hole. If they are destroyed in a blip of Hawking radiation, they had gravity!

Doesn't sound like it would work.

I'm not sure it's easy to distinguish the Hawking radiation from the stuff that comes out otherwise. I guess the Hawking radiation should be thermal but for a borderline small black hole there will be few particles.

Most antiprotons move too fast to test. Plus the charge is strong enough to overwhelm any signal from gravity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com