A team of Welsh physicists are trying to discover if an apple made of anti-matter would fall from a tree upwards instead of downwards.
The man who discovered gravity, Sir Isaac Newton, was said to have been inspired by an apple falling his head to find out why things fell to Earth.
Now the Swansea-based scientists from the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) project at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) want find out if anti-matter particles would fall away from Earth instead of towards it.
Anti-matter is the mirror of ordinary matter but with an exactly opposite electric charge.
Anyone with even the merest knowledge of Star Trek knows if matter and anti-matter meet they explode in a titanic energy burst.
In the Star Trek world, currently animated by the impending release of the latest movie in the long running sci-fi franchise, Star Trek into Darkness, this phenomenon powers “warp drive” engines speeding James T Kirk et al to the stars.
But Dr Dirk van der Werf, one of the Swansea University physicists involved in the anti-matter gravity experiment, has bad news for Trekkies.
He said: “I don’t want to sound negative but unfortunately it takes really vast amounts of energy to produce anti-matter.
“In fact, you would use more energy trying to make anti-matter than it could produce.
“Also in the movie Angels and Demons based on the Dan Brown novel, people attempted to blow up the Vatican using anti-matter.
“Currently, it would take hundreds of years to produce enough anti-matter to blow anything up.”
Dr van der Werf said: “The findings of this direct experimental test on gravity and anti-matter are important because it is the first step towards answering some key questions about the nature of the universe.
“While there is no direct practical application for discovering if anti-matter is affected by gravity in the same way as matter; that is not to say it could never be useful.
“For instance, the internet came about as a result of the need to communicate large amounts of theoretical research being done at Cern.
“And tiny amounts of anti-matter are being used today in medical scanners.
“You never know where research will lead but there is a fundamental need to understand how the universe works and that understanding may be of help in the future.”
The gravity experiment has involved tiny amounts of artificially created anti-matter being suspended in magnetic traps with detectors being used to try to discover in which direction the anti-matter particles travel once the magnets are turned off.
The detection process is complicated by “annihilation flashes” put out when the anti-matter particles collide with ordinary matter.
So far, the tests have been inconclusive but more will be carried out.
Dr van der Werf said: “We will be continuing our experiments with the ALPHA team in 2014 to gain more data and we hope to test whether antimatter responds to gravity by falling down.
“Although it is unlikely, if we find that antimatter falls upwards, we would have to rethink our views on the way that the who universe works.”
The collaborative research at Alpha including the Swansea team has been published this month in the scientific journal Nature Communications, describing the start of first direct tests of how antimatter is affected by gravity.
Dr van der Werf is part of a Swansea team involved in the Alpha project which includes Professor Mike Charlton, Dr Stefan Eriksson, Dr Niels Madsen, postdoctoral researcher Dr Aled Isaac and student Silvia Napoli.
The project previously scored a pioneering breakthrough by trapping 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen for more than 16 minutes – a significant improvement on past efforts.
Swansea University’s Prof Charlton, Dr Madsen, Dr van der Werf and Dr William Bertsche were winners of the American Physical Society’s 2011 John Dawson Award for their work on the breakthrough.
Prof Charlton said: “Our anti-hydrogen measurement was an historic achievement in anti-matter science.
“They are both the culmination of many years of effort for the Swansea team, and a launchpad for a bright future studying the properties of atoms made entirely from anti-matter.”