Baku, December 2 (AZERTAC). Scientists are developing a test for antigravity that could revolutionize the theory of physics and change the way we understand the universe.

It is the stuff of Star Trek and science fiction, a special force that allows the Enterprise to propel between stars without using any fuel at all.

But now scientists believe they may have come one step closer to investigating antimatter and the theory that it is capable of moving against gravity.

Physicists at Cern are using a special magnetic flask at the European particle physics centre to produce and store atoms of antihydrogen, or antimatter.

The Cern team plan to slowly turn off the magnetic field and see if the atoms fall up or down. If they go up, instead of down with gravity, they will have found new gravitational properties of antimatter and the entire theory of physics could be transformed.

Theories suggest that antimatter can create an anti-gravitational field that repels anything around it, which could be used to propel aircraft without using hardly any fuel or in the type of space travel featured in Star Trek that allows ships to travel between the stars.

Professor Jeffrey Hangst, a lead investigator on the team building the Alpha-2 experiment at Cern, told the Sunday Times: “Put simply, if we put antimatter into a gravitational field like that of the Earth, does it fall upwards or downwards?”

Antimatter is so difficult to investigate because it is said to explode into energy as soon as it comes into contact with the air, so must be stored in the special container where it is held by a magnetic field.

If the theory is proved, it could provide an explanation for how the universe is expanding when gravity exists and explain the big bang. According to scientific theories, every type of matter in the universe created after the big bang should have been accompanied by equal amounts of antimatter.

When the corresponding atoms meet they are believed to wipe each other out.

However scientists believe there are subtle differences between the two types of atom that allowed matter to wipe out antimatter and for the universe to develop.

The existence of antimatter was proven decades ago. For example the positron was discovered experimentally in 1932. There is no such thing as the 'theory of physics'. Equally there is no theory that antimatter is 'capable of moving against gravity'. The question being asked is whether antimatter has negative mass, and thus feels gravity from normal matter as a repulsive rather than attractive force, in the same way that positive and negative charges react in opposite ways to an electric field. This supposition has been around for decades too. I grant you that it would certainly be a startling finding if such behavior is discovered experimentally, and would cause a certain degree of re-thinking on some parts of the Standard Model.

"Antimatter is so difficult to investigate because it is said to explode into energy as soon as it comes into contact with the air". Matter/anti-matter annihilation is the fundamental principle behind a number of particle accelerators. There is nothing "said" about it. It happens.

"However scientists believe there are subtle differences between the two types of atom". No; subtle differences between the production rates of matter and anti-matter in the early universe, leading to a very small excess of matter.