Koki on 8/6/2011 at 08:48
Anti-matter bombs, FINALLY
Gingerbread Man on 8/6/2011 at 14:27
MINUTES :o
henke on 8/6/2011 at 15:02
Quote Posted by Nicker
A team of physicists in Canada
A team of Canadian physicists in the CERN laboratory in Geneve, actually.
I just finished reading Angels & Demons, and if all the bullshit that Dan Brown wrote about antimatter in that book is even half-true then this is a cool thing indeed. Antimatter could be the final solution to all our energy-woes and make sure that humanity has it
made in the shade for the next few thousands of years. Or, we might blow up the entire planet with it. One of those.
Briareos H on 8/6/2011 at 15:07
Quote Posted by henke
Antimatter could be the final solution to all our energy-woes and make sure that humanity has it
made in the shade for the next few thousands of years.
I have never read Dan Brown but I can assure you this makes absolutely no sense.
d0om on 8/6/2011 at 15:46
Antimatter costs a LOT of energy to produce. It will never be a viable form of energy unless we have a radical new fundamental physics discovery.
For the amount of energy put into creating and storing a few hundred atoms of anti-hydrogen for 16 minutes, you could have powered a small town. The energy released from annihilating the anti-matter is negligible, its only a few hundred atoms and so will have virtually no visible macroscopic effect.
Unless we find a comet made of antimatter or something similar, antimatter will never be used for energy requirements!
PS essentially nothing Dan Brown wrote about Anti-matter in that book is true. (
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html)
Quote:
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.
henke on 8/6/2011 at 16:34
Awwww. :(
june gloom on 8/6/2011 at 17:41
Serves you right for reading Dan Brown. You don't get to judge me (or anyone else) on anything at all ever again.
demagogue on 8/6/2011 at 19:28
So to physics-knowledgeable people: what's the leading theory why the universe is now made out of matter and not anti-matter, given the otherwise ostensible symmetry of the two?
As for miracle energy cure, cf. (
https://lasers.llnl.gov/) laser fusion energy.
Sulphur on 8/6/2011 at 19:54
I dunno about the leading theory because it's been more than a decade since I even looked it up, but there is one small bit of philosophy: a far-flung hypothesis that there are actually two universes, one made out of matter and another made out of anti-matter, separate and whole by their own. Whether we exist as matter or anti-matter is irrelevant because it's simple chance that led to us being one or the other - 0.5 probability and all that.
The reasoning behind the existence of two opposite universes is pretty much conservation of mass: the sum of two complete opposites is, of course, zero -- or in other words, we're part of the essential makeup of... nothing.
Pseudo-science, really. But something I found interesting from a purely existential chin-stroking standpoint nonetheless.
