youtube.com/watch?v=lXKt7UVjd-I
ponyus
January 11, 2011, 10:12pm
2
agreed that was awesomely unexpectable!
but i never understood what antimatter was good for… could someone enlighten me?
Kemp
January 11, 2011, 10:50pm
3
Combining matter and anti-matter releases a huge amount of energy with no by-products (both of the things you’re adding are annihilated).
ponyus
January 11, 2011, 11:03pm
4
ah, so new energy source? then its a good thing.
exept we cant capture it and make any use of it yet, right?
Kemp
January 11, 2011, 11:10pm
5
Anti-matter created by us lasts almost no time at all before recombining with stray particles of matter or simply dissolving into energy (and when I say no time at all, I mean amounts of time so small we almost can’t tell we created it in the first place). If we could make it last longer then containing and controlling it should be easy enough as it is charged. In fact, the video showed that it followed the Earth’s magnetic field lines when travelling out into space.
(I haven’t checked sources recently, this is from memory.)
Yes, and i found how much:
…On the flip-side, imagine a weapon weighing 1 gram. That’s the weight of a button – taken from, say, a shirt – that is capable of delivering 21.4 kilotons of explosive energy. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 exploded with an energy of around 15 kilotons. That should be a sobering thought for everyone…
“Mamma Mia”
What about make it? Well:
[i]
…To produce antimatter on earth with any conceivable technology costs far, FAR more energy than it yields, making it completely inefficient.
Antimatter has been observed for some 80 years now (despite what Dan Brown would have you believe), thanks to Paul Dirac’s discovery – on the back of his famous Dirac Equation – of the positron.
So far, Antihydrogen has been produced in tiny quantities CERN, Geneva, simply for the purposes of experimentation.
Thankfully, to produce the single gram needed to legitimize Brown’s novel or to cause us to fret over an Antimatter Holocaust is a process that would currently take an excess of hundreds of thousands of years. To finance this operation, you would need incredibly deep pockets. How does a $1,000 Trillion price tag sound? So far, these obstacles prevent us from blowing each other to bits or securing a stable, ecological friendly existence on our planet…
[/i]
So, forget the idea about antimatter armageddon, for now…
And how we can find it?
…For the antimatter dream/nightmare to be realised, we’d need to find a way to harvest it naturally from space. High Energy Particle Collisions (like those due to happen again at CERN in November of this year) occur naturally in our upper atmosphere and are expected to create antiparticles on a regular basis, though the atmosphere of Jupiter, our gassy, giant meteor shield is tipped to be the top producer in our solar system. Perhaps harvesting antiparticles from Jupiter could open the door for us…
[/i]
YAY! apparently we will have future in space, but we need a higher technological level for travel to Jupiter without the crew go crazy. What about the CERN?
…“Antiprotons trapped with positrons at CERN can make several hundred atoms of Anithydrogen every second. To make a nanogram would take a thousand centuries. To fill a toy balloon, let alone make a gram, would take more time that the universe has existed.”…
[/i]
Ouch…
EDIT:
LOL
