I will take a look at this paper. The matter of CP violation is of course interesting, and it is important to understand how this discrete symmetry is violated, presumably at lower energy. I do think that solving the problem of CP violations by breaking the equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass is at best converting the problem from one form to another. Think of it from a Gauss law perspective. Consider a large mass M made with matter and a smaller mass made of antimatter m. If I were to put a Gaussian surface around the two of them the gravitation at the surface would be that of a mass M - m. Now force the small mass m into M, and BOOM you are left with a mass M - m in the center and a shell of photons of mass 2m approaching the Gaussian surface. The observer on the Gaussian surface would detect this huge pulse of radiation E = 2m and from gravity would now detect a gravitating mass M - m. Now suppose this Gaussian surface is a perfect mirror that reflects the light back to the mass M - m. The Gaussian surface measure of gravity would then have a mass M m. The interaction between matter and antimatter would increase the amount of gravitational mass.

Solving the CP violation issue with this seems to be a rather odd solution. Of course nature could turn out to be strange. Performing this experiment would be of interest, and I suspect or at least hope that nature does not turn out to be this crazy.

Cheers LC

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

    Lawrence,

    Even stranger, under the hypothesis I put forth in the essay, what the observer on the Gaussian surface experiences gravitationally as the situation within the surface to begin with depends upon the compositional nature of the observer itself. For example, if the observer were a photon, or an electron it would not experience the internal situation you set up as M - m, but as M m. Such an observer would record no change in the gravitational force throughout the process of pair annihilation and photon reflection. Yet an observer made up of quarks (or antiquarks) would. But as I noted, this may only illustrate the fact that the gravitational force depends on the compositional nature of the observer.

    I am still taken with the notion that by making use of the assumption that antiquarks exhibit antigravity a simple relationship between the mass ratio of the quark and antiquark in any given meson and the gravitational acceleration that the meson experiences can be derived that may (I repeat, may) reflect reality.

    Regards,

    Steve

    Sergey,

    I was simply going to ignore your first post with regard to rating, but after the monstrosity you just left me, may I respectfully ask you not to post me a third time on this matter. Look, it's just an essay contest, it's not the noble prize. At the same time I don't want to give you the impression that I'm beyond it all, I'm not - I would like to win as much as the next person. However, I did not enter thinking that I would win. I was happy to have simply entered before the deadline. Also I had the very good fortune of possibly making an actual discovery (see my post of 9/19/12) that I'm still in shock over. I would much rather discuss that than FQXi ranking procedures!

    Regards,

    Steve

    • [deleted]

    • Post #36

    Sergey G Fedosin is bombing entrants' boards with the same "why your rating has dropped" message. They are all dated Oct. 4... same message.

    WTH? I've seen one fine essay drop 89 (eighty-nine) positions, in "Community Rating" in the past 24 hours, and "Sergey's note" came BEFORE it plummeted. Hmm.

    The vote/scaling of this contest is quite nebulous.

    "Hackers Rule!", I suppose!

    Well??? What else is one to think? The General Public is... Watching...

      Dear Concerned Public,

      Yes I know. My essay plummeted from the top third in ranking to the bottom third in ranking (~90 positions) after I received Sergey's post. Why Sergey felt obliged to let people know that it was he who dragged down their ranking is any ones guess! Ego? It reminded me of one of Khan's lines from 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan' - "I have deprived your ship of power, and when I swing around, I mean to deprive you of your life. But I wanted you to know who it was who had beaten you."

      Drama aside, Sergey was operating within the established FQXi rules. A FQXi member might make the argument that if an essay already had a high number of good ratings, then a single very low rating would do little damage. True, but forget about Sergey for a minute.

      FQXi members should ask if there are actions essay writers might take to increase the likelihood that their essay garner a high number of ratings in the first place? It's not rocket science - First, rather than focus on a single topic, write an essay that has a little something for everyone. By so doing the essay will have a wider general appeal (and, as an added bonus, it is much easier to say a little something about several topics than something meaningful about just one). Second, once your general multi-topic essay has been accepted, just read the abstract of another authors essay, maybe view a couple of the other comments and create a short complimentary, ego-boosting paragraph to post to their essay - a nice little harmless powder-puff of a paragraph. Do so for as many essays as you can (the more the better) and lo and behold you are likely to find yourself ranked in the top 35. How so? When people get around to rating essays, the first group they are likely to choose are those who responded in a positive way to their own essay. It's just human nature. (Of course after making it into the top 35 your essay is on it's own...but at least you can say that you made it into the top 35). And no, I'm not saying that all top ranked essays used this approach, but I do think some did.

      The real problem, I think, is allowing the authors to rate the essays and have those ratings count for anything. Do FQXi members believe this system works to encourage any real discussion of the essays and the ideas they raise? Prior to October 6, how many people, for fear of a rating retribution, say what they really think? So Concerned Public, even as you go off on Sergey, realize he is a rank amateur (literally), the symptom, not the disease - and there are people out there who, unlike Sergey, are so good at gaming the system that you don't even know they are doing it!

      8 days later

      • [deleted]

      • Post #38

      Steven,

      I am at a loss as to why those of us (including myself) who hold unto the hope of gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter never got around to asking how this might apply to quarks and anti-quarks! You do, and it seems that you have been justly rewarded. It's like gravitational-spectroscopy (new word: gravitroscopy?) with kaons! A stunning bit of detective work.

      Hi Julian,

      I don't have an answer as to why no one has previously applied antigravity to antiquarks and then looked at the potential consequences. I do know that the fact that no one did left me with some open unexplored territory. Still, when I wrote the essay I had no idea that I might discover a simple relationship between the mass ratio of the quarks within a given meson and the gravitational acceleration it experiences. It now (as of mid-September) seems obvious, and if true the following should be the case:

      Pion (u, anti-d) will fall up at .28g

      Pion- (anti-u, d) will fall down at .28g

      Neutral Pion (u, anti-u or d, anti-d) will be weightless at 0g

      Kaon (u, anti-s) will fall up at .95g

      Kaon- (anti-u, s) will fall down at .95g

      Neutral Kaon (d, anti-s) will fall up at .91g

      Neutral AntiKaon (anti-d, s) will fall down at .91g

      By the way, this also implies that the gravitational effect of gluons within baryons and mesons (see my 9/11/12 post) is, despite current theory, negligible. If the numbers above are valid the implication is that the gravitational mass of a baryon or meson is simply due to the energy of the quarks that make them up. This further implies that antiprotons will simply fall up at 1g at the Earth's surface. If the AEGIS experiment is ever carried out we will learn if this is the case in reality.

      I like your concept of gravitroscopic analysis. However, even if AEGIS finds that antihydrogen falls up, and eventual improvements in precision (from 1% to say .01%) are able to determine the gravitational acceleration of the positronic component as well, it will be many more decades before we have direct data on the gravitational acceleration of mesons. They are all unstable and have lifetimes on the order of 10-8s. (The neutral pion sticks around for only 10-16s!)

      Also, I want to make it clear that the whole thing could be coincidence, as the only mesons we have 'data' on (such as it is) is the neutral kaon and antikaon. Nonetheless, the fact that the relationship between the mass ratio of the s/d quarks within neutral kaon and antikaon and the gravitational acceleration they experience actually seems to work is very intriguing.

      I have actually solicited the comments of a few appropriate fellow essay writers, as well as a few appropriate people outside FQXi the with regard to my 9/19/12 post. So far, no one I solicited has responded to the 9/19 post. Just crickets and tumbleweed... So I truly thank you for your kind words and especially for recognizing that something new and possibly noteworthy is going on here.

      Regards,

      Steve

      By the way, if you want to calculate the mass ratio of the s-quark to d-quark directly it is simply: s/d = (1 mg/m)/(1 - mg/m) = (1 .91)/(1 - .91) = 1.91/.09 = 21.2

      Recall that the value of 8.9 m/s2 ~ .91g for the gravitational acceleration of the neutral kaon and antikaon was experimentally determined in the paper: "Testing CP Conservation at KLOE" by G. Mambriani and L. Trentadue (arXiv:hep-ex/0007004v1, 3 Jul 2000) and that the s/d mass ratio is given in the Particle Data Group under Particle Listings, Quarks, Note on the Quark Masses, s/d mass ratio p. 18.

      9 days later

      Also, the value of 8.9 ± 2.7 m/s2 given as the gravitational acceleration of the neutral kaon or neutral antikaon in "Testing CP Conservation at KLOE" by G. Mambriani and L. Trentadue means that the gravitational acceleration could be as low as 6.2 m/s2 or as high as 11.6 m/s2. This still permits one to speculate, as those with 'traditional' antimatter antigravity views do, that the neutral kaon will fall at 1g = 9.81 m/s2 and the neutral antikaon will rise at 1g = 9.81 m/s2.

      However, using the hypothesis in my essay (which is that antiquarks have negative gravitational mass) we can do better. First, since the neutral kaon consists of a d-quark and an anti-s-quark and since the anti-s-quark is far more massive, we know that it is the neutral kaon that will rise and the neutral antikaon (anti-d, s) that will fall. Second, the Particle Data Group; 2012 Particle Listings; Quarks; Note on the Quark Masses; Chart for s/d mass ratio (p.18) gives a range for the s/d mass ratio from 17 to 22. Using the hypothesis in my essay we find that for neutral kaons and neutral antikaons:

      |mg/m| = (ms/md -1)/(ms/md +1) where mg/m is the ratio of the gravitational mass of the neutral kaon (or neutal antikaon) to its inertial mass and ms/md is the ratio of the mass of the s-quark to the d-quark.

      Using ms/md = 17 we find mg/m = 16/18 = .888g = 8.72 m/s2

      Using ms/md = 22 we find mg/m = 21/23 = .913g = 8.96 m/s2

      which gives us a value of 8.84 ± 0.12 m/s2 - a tolerance 22.5 times smaller than the tolerance obtained by Mambriani and Trentadue in their paper and one that does not permit a gravitational acceleration of 1g.

      2 years later

      Dear Steven,

      Would really like to catch up with you and talk about what you are up to now. Can we connect?

      Allise

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