In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge, parity, and time, known as CPT reversal. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles can be generated at particle accelerators; however, total artificial production has been only a few nanograms. No macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling.
In theory, a particle and its antiparticle (for example, a proton and an antiproton) have the same mass, but opposite electric charge, and other differences in quantum numbers.
A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle–antiparticle pairs. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with the notable mass–energy equivalence equation, E=mc2.
Antiparticles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an antihydrogen atom. The nuclei of antihelium have been artificially produced, albeit with difficulty, and are the most complex anti-nuclei so far observed. Physical principles indicate that complex antimatter atomic nuclei are possible, as well as anti-atoms corresponding to the known chemical elements.
There is strong evidence that the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, as opposed to an equal mixture of matter and antimatter. This asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the great unsolved problems in physics. The process by which this inequality between matter and antimatter particles developed is called baryogenesis.
Antimatter particles carry the same charge as matter particles, but of opposite sign. That is, an antiproton is negatively charged and an antielectron (positron) is positively charged. Neutrons do not carry a net charge, but their constituent quarks do. Protons and neutrons have a baryon number of +1, while antiprotons and antineutrons have a baryon number of –1. Similarly, electrons have a lepton number of +1, while that of positrons is –1. When a particle and its corresponding antiparticle collide, they are both converted into energy.
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
- 🧡 Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread
- 💛 Read about a current topic in the news
- ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes struggle sessions over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
- ☮️ you can join the upcoming anti war rally this march
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
- 💙Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
- 💙Resources for Palestine
Theory:
the number of people who write off all "old movies" (roughly before 1985) is concerning. the 70s was an amazing decade for film, and netflix has almost nothing pre-1980
i heard that netflix even lacks 1980s horror films. the 80s were a huge decade for horror
There's never been a bad era for movies. Some of the very first moving pictures are great.
A lot of the German Expressionism films from the 20s and 30s hold up great. There are good movies from every era, but of course it's fair to criticize things like the Hays Code, DoD/CIA influence, and now shitty CGI that actively make movies worse
Sure, but there were movies that were great in part because they had to be clever to evade the Hays code. Most of the Marvel movies suck but Winter Soldier manages to combine Marvel's trademarket explosive action slop with stylish callbacks to 70s political thrillers and a bizarrely unexpected criticism of the US intelligence services and the Obama-era drone program. Like I don't know how or why it happened but they might have well replaced Robert Redford (himself a veteran of 70s political thrillers) with a black actor and made it obvious to everyone.
CGI is in a very weird place right now. It was originally developed to create things which were otherwise difficult or impossible, best shown by the stunning and still gorgeous dinsoaurs in 1994s Jurassic Park, but in the present day some studios and directors use it as both a cost cutting measure to avoid building sets and filming on location, and as a sloppy, disorderly way to avoid thinking out their production, allowing them to make constant last-second revisions even up to or after release. When it's done well it's an incredible tool, when it's done poorly it has as much weight as Hanna Barbera's worst animation. I did recently hear Neil Gaiman discuss using CGI in Sandman the way matte paintings are used - create what you can with the set, then use CGI or your matte painting to extend that out in to the background.
I dearly wish we'd get more inventive, surrealist films. CGI could, and occaisonally does, enable some truly astonishing, surreal visuals and I wish we could get more of that. Stories like Paprika or Little Nemo could be realized with CGI and it just doesn't happen that often. To much obsession with realism. : p
me but for 60s and older tbh, almost all snoozers
A lot of that is to blame on the Hays Code and the vertically integrated studio system, they really were making a lot of formulaic slop in a similar way to today. Still some good shit here and there, but the end of the 60s into the 70s let directors get a lot more creative in the US.
A lot of the films I like from the 60s are Italian cinema, such as spaghetti westerns, Italo-horror, and classic dramas like La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura. Great leftist films The Battle of Algiers and Z were from the 60s too. As far as US films go, I think most of Hitchcock's work was pretty good, and there were some solid film noirs in the 40s and 50s.
the good the bad and the ugly is outstanding, one of the greatest movies ever made. and obviously you have directors like kurosawa or kubrick (dr strangelove is his best film imo) and orson welles is famous for a very good reason
Definitely some of the greats, hard to give them all enough credit in one comment
:100-com: hot take though hitchcock is boring
Woah, careful you don't cut yourself on that edge! ; )
Srsly though, it's as much important to watch Hitchcock just to understand where he innovated so that others could build on his ideas. I use Halloween as an example of this in film a lot - Halloween might seem cliched and formulaic to a modern viewer because it originated many of the elements of horror movies that later became cliches and formulas. Likewise Hitchcock was responsible for many tropes that were solidified in later thrillers.
Yes yes I was going to invoke the Seinfeld-referencing version of that idea but thought better of it
Whats ur favourite Hitchcock? I like Birds so I can cheer for the birds
Honestly I think The Birds is the only one I've seen in full. I have this weird thing where I get a lot of knowledge from reading piles of second hand sources. Like most of what I know about Hitchcock is from reading discussions about him and his movies, not from actually seeing the movies. I've been having a really hard time with visual media the last few years. Some combination of ADHD and trauma is making it really hard to watch a movie for more than a few seconds at a time, but with text I can bounce back and forth between different things and gradually get through an article. : p
Crossfire (1947) is a pretty good film noir about how
homophobiaanti-semitism is bad (it was homophobia in the book it's based on and there's some queer coding in the movie but they had to change it to get past the censors). Film noir in general can occasionally be kinda based sometimes (though it can also have problematic themes).Nosferatu (1922) holds up surprisingly well and is aesthetic af. The cool thing about early movies is how none of the conventions we take for granted had been established, so everything was experimental. It's interesting to see what people attempted and what they focused on when there were no rules.
I saw Nosferatu when I was a teenager and it gave me the creeps for days.
i need to watch crossfire. my personal favorite film noir is probably the third man. but there's a lot of really good stuff there. also a lot of period typical attitudes about a variety of things, so be careful if that's something you don't want to see
Is this even a thing among adults
i've mostly seen it from zoomers in their early twenties
That gives you at most like a decade to actually watch movies and there's only so many movies you can watch in a decade. Most people don't get truly insufferable about their hobbies until their mid thirties, it takes time to build the necessary stockpile of knowledge.
Yeah ok. I'd say in general most people don't watch that many movies made more than 20 years before they were born. I watch a lot of movies, old and new foreign and domestic but realistically I don't watch more than maybe one a year made in that time frame as applied to me.
IDK right or wrong I think it's pretty important to contextualize these numbers rather than going the "kids these days" route.
Also Netflix sucks. If you have a library card you probably have free access to stream films on Kanopy which has a ton of great older films.
Fair enough. I don't use any streaming services, I just torrent everything but I've heard some discussion lately about the lack of variety on said services.
I was born in the mid-90s and I regularly watch movies made as early as 1960, and about one a month that's older than that.
look theres a billion movies at this point, while i wouldn't exactly endorse a hard cutoff-date regemin, you legitimately can't watch them all. like we're all working with limited time off sometimes you gotta choose with something that's a cultural touchstone for your agegroup and stuff you can maybe talk to your uncle about :shrug-outta-hecks: i'm a huge nerd and people who were simply alive in the 70s or 80s know way more about pop culture and movies
It's weird, something feels 'off' to me about movies made between roughly 1965 and 1990, but I'll happily watch anything older or newer than that.