Making cutting-edge science accessible to early physics students

Until very recently, physicists did not know whether antimatter falls up. Despite theoretical explanations and thought experiments implying it shouldn’t, physics is ultimately based in experiment, and it wasn’t until 2023 and the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN that we could definitively say that gravity pulls, not pushes, on antimatter in the exact same way as regular matter.

Sometimes in science, the truth is stranger than fiction, and apparent anomalies — like clocks slowing down as they approach the speed of light, or the inability to simultaneously measure a particle’s position and momentum — are often a motivator for students’ interest in physics, says Don Lincoln. Lincoln explained one of these apparent anomalies, how antimatter responds to gravity, in hopes of making frontier-level physics more accessible to students and educators.

“What I’m trying to do is to connect with every teacher’s inner child and remind them why they studied physics,” Lincoln said. “In their hectic lives, it’s easy to only see the day-to-day grind. What I try to do is a provide a re-infusion of the wonder surrounding some of the cool topics that modern science can study.”

A major question in modern physics is where all the universe’s antimatter is. According to general relativity and mass-energy equality, there should be an identical amount of matter and antimatter, but that is not the case. Understanding antimatter in any way — including how it is affected by gravity — is a clue toward answering this question.

“[CERN’s ALPHA-g] is an experiment that is bridging the gravitational fascination of the cosmos and the precision of particle physics,” Lincoln said.

He hopes that understanding some of these open questions can inspire the next generation of physicists.

“If we can feed the curiosity of young people — tell them these mysteries — they might be inspired to figure it all out. With any luck, the story I’ve told will blow their minds,” Lincoln said.

Source: “Does antimatter fall up?,” by Don Lincoln, The Physics Teacher (2026). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0330471 .