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Air Force Researching Antimatter Weapons
mlmitton writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy
How much energy is that in Burning Libraries of Congress? I'm not entirely up to speed on these new-fangled measurements. Rods an' hogsheads, for me!
...do we get to see the dilithium crystals?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
But what I really want to know is how many Libraries of Congress it could contain.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
SSFTs are now units of energy?
All your Dilithium are belong to us.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
...people, we are actually making progress towards making Star Trek: Voyager a reality. I say we petition the Air Force to stop work immediately.
NT
In other news... The air force research center suddenly dissappeared along with 200.000 square kilometers of land. Nobody from the research center was available for comment.
But destructe research wins over constructive alternatives hands down.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
space shuttle tanks?
Come on, everyone knows that the standard units for explosive power are pounds of TNT and "times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima"
I am glad it is posted here so that those that make a living on this type of research will have to wonder tonight if their funding is going to be cut due to the outing of this secret information. Sweet!
Now, how can this be used to generate steam for a power plant?
isn't this a tremendous waste of money? I'm generally pretty high on national defense, but is our biggest national security threat really that nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough?
We can not afford a mine shaft gap!
How many Libraries of Congress would that power?
Seriously, why use such a esoteric unit of measurement, especially when you're going to compare it to nuclear weapons? Would describing it in terms of megatons be too much to ask?
Should Starfleet be the one researching this? We all know they'll be using it in the future for their spacecrafts.
Alternatively antimatter may blow up just fine without any assistance. It's all theory just now. We'll have to drop a gram of it to be sure.
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Now I have to trash my photon torpedo grant application.
Just so long as North Korea does not get it!
Of course the moment antimatter comes in contact with matter you get a violent reaction, so firing antimatter without a ridiculous amount of shielding which itself would be matter, and thus set off the antimatter, would result it you dying in a spectacular display of one of the best PEBKAC's ever to grace military science. Of course this should be expected from the branch of USM that actually has their top pilots landing with the parking brakes on... "Landing sequence checklist: 1.Engage primary reasoning 2.Load common sense 3.Boot up Situational Awareness drivers 4.Begin primary thinking process"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
How many megatons yield per aircraft?
OK, now I'm scared.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If he meets his new anti-Lazarus, then the universe will explode!
Shouldn't that be -1 gram of anti matter?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and war is part of the human psyche, we may as well develop weapons that just kill cheap humans and don't fuck up the planet or start nuclear winters.
This is insane. A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall. You thought nukes were expensive? wait till you see the military budget if this gets taken seriously.
:)
I'd love to see their containment schemes so that the anti matter doesn't bump the bomb casing wall and annihilate in storage or in transit.
On a funny note this nut whom I've met in person, claims that comets are made of pure antimatter. Riiiight. That should bring production costs down
Blaze a trail to the New World
That the military is looking for smaller and more powerful weapons. Of course, this is still a long way from happening. As the article states, they are still having problems with producing antimatter and storing it.
My concern is that we use wisdom in the race to build bigger and better weapons. Do we REALLY need a weapon like this?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
units
1948 units, 71 prefixes, 28 functions
You have: grams*c^2
You want: tonnes-tnt
* 19487.022
/ 5.1316205e-05
So 1 gram antimatter + 1 gram matter is about 39 kT of TNT. Hiroshima was about 20 kT, Nagasaki was 13 kT, so one gram antimatter would release just a scosh more than both devices.
So let us use a bit more sensible units than "shuttle fuel tanks".
However, the costs of manufacturing the antimatter, and the size of the containment system, and the fail-null mode of antimatter vs. the fail-safe mode of a nuke (a nuke may leak, but it will not detonate without everything going just right), would lead me to wonder about the utility of an antimatter weapon.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...thus enabling the U.S. to finally complete its goal and take over all of the known world and become the Global Police agent it has worked hard to become these past twenty years.
Xierox
Hence this is yet another technique for transferring your tax dollars away from real security projects to the Boeing and TRW country club funds.
Antimatter-matter reaction might release vast amounts of energy, but how much energy does it take to create/store/transport/control the antimatter? Last I checked it takes a rather large particle accelerator to make antimatter. It's probably the ultimate in energy density, but it may not be all that efficient (with technology realizable in the near-future, at least).
- Would you have to store the anti-matter, or create it as you need it? The first seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything. The other requires a massive amount of energy. Is this even plausible?
/.'ers than I can tell me where to find this info (it's hard to filter reliable sources out of Google).
- What about the radiation involved? We've measured the rays that result from minor, single-atom collisions, but what happens when the collision is actually big enough to damage something?
- How do you propel something like this? Magnets? Or am I wrong in assuming anti-matter can't touch anything?
Anyways, maybe some smarter
"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
Ok, so that's bad. That's Egon-bad.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
Are we sure they're pursuing weapons? We are talking about the Air Force, and it's funny how they'd compare the relative energy to a spaceship fuel tank, of all things...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Should we work at developing antimatter weapons in the future? Do we need antimatter arms to keep MAD going or should we not open pandora's box and hope nobody else does? Keep in mind that if we don't know what the weapons are like we won't know how to spot them or screen the effectively.
So how long till we hear about a gigantic gamma-ray explosion on some small island in the south pacific that gets blamed on a meteor.
Mole problems? Call Avagadro, 602-1023
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Paraphrasing the article:
"Oh, they're safer, there'll be no fallout..."
A couple pounds of antimatter, combined with matter, and there'll be no earth to fall to.
If they succeed, this is it.
In 10 billion years, some future race will detect a gamma ray burst from the Milky Way Galaxy...
1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding
This isn't really that interesting or even unusual: Uncle Sam frequently limits what military folks can say about ongoing projects. There is a classification called "Sensitive But Unclassified", or SBU, whcih means the info is not classified as such (Secret, TS, etc.) but it is still not for public disclosure. (Years ago SBU was called "For Official Use Only" or FOUO.) Budgets are generally considered at least SBU, so it should be no suprise that the budget is not publicized.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I'm sure we're all very happy that the real world is a little more like Star-Trek, but what's the point of this? Don't the have big enough bombs already? Do they want a bomb that can blow up the entire planet in one go? Or is this just an attempt to get nuclear like destruction without the stigma of real nuclear weapons?
I just read about this. SOmething about blowing up the Pope...
a beowulf clust.... oh never mind
This is a brilliant idea. Remember, it's all wonderfull until the "other side" has their own.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
During a panel at LACon II in '84, Dr. Forward mentioned that calculations showed that an anti-matter bowling ball wouldn't go up in a blaze of light and gamma, it'd sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle for several minutes. From what I gathered, the matter and anti-matter only interact as they come into contact with each other, and even in a normal Earth atmosphere there's a limit as to how many particles touch at any given time. Also, of course, the reaction heats the air up, causing convection currents that lower the pressure. Thinking about it, I guess you'd get the fastest reaction with an anti-dust so that there's as much surface as possible.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Okay rate me off-topic, but is anyone researching the "Anti-weapons matter"?
Does this mean we're going to start invading countries which build large particle accelerators? I'm not sure invading Switzerland would be such a hot idea.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
It sounds like total hogwash to me.
It's probably a big waste of money. The efficiencies in creating antimatter are incredibly low. Nuclear power is far cheaper for virtually all applications. From the article:
With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion
The only reason I could see it being useful is if you needed an extremely high energy density. "Bullets" with a magnetically suspended speck of antimatter might be handy. They would be virtually undetectable by radar and pack a huge punch. Perhaps the low weights would be useful for space warfare?
You're thinking of _Angels and Demons_ by Dan Brown
The last person interviewed essentially says, we need to develop this energy source for space transportation as well as for making the next generation of weapons, because eventually we are going to destroy the earth.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I've been under the impression that directly exposing matter and anti-matter, while resulting in annihilation, wouldn't directly result in an explosion in the traditional sense. I thought that it would only result in the annihilation of local matter (on a 1:1 ratio) and the release of excess energy in the form of heat, light, and/or radiation.
Nukes are so last year... Would these be considered a WMD?
>Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
|official $$$|--->|"anti-matter research"|.-.-.-.->black ops/parties with hookers/government and industry bribes/etc
So yea, woo hoo anti-matter power!
Sure, it's radioactive, just like fission, but hey antimatter is cheap at $62.5 trillion per gram, and it's 10-100 times more powerful!
Not sure what the point would be in antimatter weapons, besides serious coolness. Nukes are at least stable at room temperature, and if you drop a ball of plutonium on your foot, all you get is broken toes. Wouldn't want to have a power failure anywhere NEAR antimatter.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The "Govt" already had that, it was called Bio-warfare and disease manufacturing. Problem is, stupid people keep migrating places and spreading the disease.
Please, some one tell me that they are not missing the irony of the US developing new WMDs?
Logic, macros, and more
this should be "from the stuff-that-antimatters dept."
> The first seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything.
Clearly our containment systems must be made of antimatter cats with pieces of antimatter buttered toast strapped to their backs.
And what of Lazarus?
I was under the impression that an antimatter-matter reaction followed the same law as nukes, i.e.
E=MC^2... so, for the same price, how much plutonium could you get? (bearing in mind that antimatter is the most expensive subsatance available & that the matter to react with it is effectively free & doubles the total ammount of stuff reacting) So, if you can get more than double the ammount of plutonium for the same price (assuming that you can get a 100% efficient reaction), how is it any better bang-per-buck than a conventional nuke?
Oh, yeah, what do they propose to store the antimatter in? sandwich tubs?
Why both spending all that time & money developing a totally redundant weapon, when they'd do better to use proven technology and build big H-bombs, or are they planning on dealing with a threat from outer space? like the goa'uld? or the klingons? or the vogons?
If they've got money to burn they can buy me a new computer...
FGD 135
Go ahead and tell them about the twinkie.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
When they can focus pure antimatter into a beam and fire it from a raygun, I will finally be impressed!
There goes the planet!
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Big deal, I have been working on the same thing in my basement.
I will let you know when I succeed.
Actually, it's like baking a cake. Trust me, you'll just know.
The most common sci-fi containment system is holding the antimatter in a vacuum while suspending it in a powerful magnetic field to keep it from contacting the walls of vessel holding it. I understand something similiar is done with plasma in experimental fusion reactors. It doesn't sound very portable.
Unlike regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn't eject plumes of radioactive debris. When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons collide, the primary product is an invisible but extremely dangerous burst of gamma radiation. Thus, in principle, a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military's dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called "clean" superbomb that could kill large numbers of soldiers without ejecting radioactive contaminants over the countryside.
As depressing as it sounds, this is probably a Good Thing.
If we take as fact that militaries exist to kill, then it follows logically that they will develop tools to kill as effectively as possible. That's how we've ended up with uranium fission bombs, then plutonium fission bombs, then hydrogen fusion bombs.
Someone, somewhere, will eventually decide that they need to neutralize their enemy bad enough to accept the consequences of a nuke. It may even be us -- if Bush hadn't restarted research on nuclear bunker-busters, someone else would have eventually.
So if you accept the depressing notion that use of massively destructive weapons is inevitable, you *want* this research to go forward. At least, this way, you *can* go back home.
Kind of ironic... for all the talk about "WMD"s, this would be a real Weapon of *Mass* Destruction... or at least, a Weapon of Mass Conversion Directly To Energy.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
And, as others have mentioned, a gram of this stuff will take more energy to make than all the output of all the generators in the world. The mad scientists who make this stuff (just add me to the list of would-be mad scientists) make anti matter a few atoms at a time. And use enough power to keep a small city running. Remember what a particle accelerator is?
You can color me cynical about the practicality of anti-matter as a weapon in the next century. For those keeping track, the color of cynical is somewhere between #000000 and #FFFFFF.
Dear US Air Force. Please don't blow up the planet.
Thank You,
A Concerned Citizen
Interviewer : Do you have the power to destroy the Earth?
The Tick : Egads! I hope not. That's where I keep all my stuff!
Sounds like this story comes from the same people that claim the U.S. Air Force are hiding a "Stargate", whatever that is.
The Enterprise used anti-matter fuel at the rate of one gram/second. No wonder they had warp speed.
Warp 5, Zulu.
Let's see. If we can use a small amount to power an engine and blow stuff up, I envision us having a small arms race to build a huge stealth swarm of bomb/WMD watchers to hover over the heads of those we don't like. Think AA sized battery with the energy content to fly from the US to any spot on the globe then over most of the year there. With a pay load of 2-4 D sized battery's that could cleanly wipe out New York delivered with GPS pin point accuracy and the video feed would be streamed straight to the major news outlets.
I can't wait. We can already build everything except the small power source. Small long lived power sources have just as many civilian uses as well.
Sure, it's expensive.
How do we make it less expensive?
By funding research, which seems to be what the air force is doing.
Astonishing!
I'd be shocked if this research hasn't been going on since the early days of the Cold War.
Like any technology, antimatter can be used for good or evil. Ever get a PET scan? That's antimatter right in the middle of your body. Don't worry, you won't grow a third leg or anything from it.
I'm sure the DoD is aware of this, but gamma-ray bursts can cause nuclear changes, which can create radioactive particles that linger. It's not nearly the problem of traditional fallout, and is even be "negligible" for a sufficiently large value of "negligible." Much more likely is ionization which can kill living tissue and cause chemical changes to non-living materials. This can cause buildings to become less structurally sound, for example. However, absent the "negligible" secondary radiation I mentioned above, a conquering army can roll in without wearing radiation suits.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For a balanced view, it is important to realize that anti-matter physics have yielded substantial medical and non-military benefits already. Many people probably already encountered various applications of this technology without realizing it.
For example, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a very useful clinical and medical research tool for brain and cardiac functional imaging. See: Positron Emission Tomography
Why do people make a big deal over positronium, aside from the fundamental physics that can be learned from it? Positronium, like hydrogen, is a neutral particle and as such, is unaffected by magnetic fields. It seems to me that the storage problems would increase by storing antimatter as positronium as opposed to storing it as seperate positrons and anti-protons.
Maybe they take too much stuff? By looking out into other nuclear reactions it might be easier to get a bigger bang for less heavy expensive metal which posses a long lasting health hazard. If they can get a hydrogen weapon smaller and cleaner, it might be usable to deliver to things like hardened installations burried under mountains, with only a short lived fallout. Doesn't really work with islamists. They'd be happy to be immolated in nuclear fire. But for states like Iran, North Korea, at some point they have to ask themselves if it's worth it when they can't build enough to insure the destruction of the US, and they can't dig a hole deep enough to protect what they've got.
From the US perspective, it makes some sense. Naturally, a nation would strive to insure itself at least a win-lose position from every dimension in war. A cheap way is to ally with someone who has the capability, but the US very frequently doesn't have that option.
Even outside the horror of a thermonuclear weapon which might be considered "useable", there is something to be said for making them smaller, cheaper, more maintainable, since they must exist, and so must be maintained.
What happens to a heavy ion that colliods with a positron? Most likely the result would be radioactive byproduct.
love is just extroverted narcissism
This technology should be (if it is at all) researched strictly for its energy producing potential. Why apply such technology to weaponry? It would only produce a device to kill more people faster, and who wants that? For the same reason, I never understood why anyone would want to research the rail gun.. "hey everyone, lets use this new extremely powerful new energy source to kill ourselves!" .. sigh
So when do they think a Death Star might be launched?
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
Total plutonic reversal?
-Peter
Atleast they are not researching the Omega Particle!
Now, I can sleep better at night!
Linux O Muerte!
Exactly what military threat do they envision where they need a bigger "boom" than what they have now? Every current military threat isn't a matter of having insufficient explosive power, but having difficulty ascertaining the target. This stuff may have practical use as a non-military explosive (e.g., asteroid deflection) but the U.S. military already has the necessary force to blow up anything on earth using existing technology.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Well if that's true, than the space program might be able to overcome weight limitations. More could be sent into space at a time. Antimatter could be used to accelerate lunar colonization as more materials could be rocketed to the moon per launch.
If they can store positronium, why not go all the way and store it as anti-hydrogen? That is, create an anti-atom of a positron orbiting an antiproton. Anti-helium might even be better, since it would be chemically inert too.
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
You would store it with magnetic fields, presumably. We know a lot about those. Pretty good at making them efficiently now, as well. Radiation? We're pretty good at testing radiation safely as well, but I suspect we'll just use it on some poor unsuspecting country first. Measure later. If you get a warning that we're under attack by the same type of device, just duck and cover like Tommy the Turtle.
Anti-matter can't touch matter.. but you can build anti-matter containments.. even devices, but I suspect we are very far from this, as it takes a lot of anti-matter to create something on such a large scale. We'll probably use a form of particle trickery, directing the resulting anti-matter towards matter. Viola. Weapon.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Silly putty of course! What else did you think it was for?
Don't panic/celebrate in anticipation of antimatter weapons being deployed 15 years from now.
From the article:
"about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995."
and
"With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion"
from which we can calculate that blowing up a building with antimatter will cost about 3 trillion dollars. (And tens or hundreds of millions for the equipment to confine the antimatter until you want it to detonate, but that is negligible in comparison.)
Also notice that while the antimatter may be the ultimately compact explosive, the containment equipment required will increase the size of a warhead by many orders of magnitude. No antimatter rifle bullets anytime soon.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This is insane. A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall. You thought nukes were expensive? wait till you see the military budget if this gets taken seriously.
Point of order: that's not relevant until some aliens show up and try to sell it to us. The question is, how do you create it efficiently, and what's your power source?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Time to print out a template from http://www.blackvault.com/ Thank you Mr. Greenewald.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
I know this is a _gross_ oversimplification, but 1 + -1 = 0. So... is "anti"matter just a misnomer somewhat, or am I looking at it from the wrong parabola?
I always thought it'd be funny if antimatter + matter just equalled a nifty "fop" noise and then nothing.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
...
??? Not in this country bub
So what I've done is taken this .."anti-matter" and mounted it in a giant conical cannon. I shall call it.. The "Anti-Matter Horn".
Mwa ha ha ha!
Ah, so that is the resonance cascade they were planning!
Achille Talon
Hop!
With current production methings, yes, it would. That's why there's research to try to bring that down ;) You know, funding to make the impossible possible.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The problem with antimatter is creating it. There just isn't any around, because we're in an area with lots of matter. So to create it, we have to put in energy. And guess what? This little principle called conservation of mass-energy says that we must put in as much energy to get X grams of antimatter as the X grams would give up when annihilated. What we really have is a way to store up lots of energy made by conventional means and then release it all at once, not a new clean energy source.
And releasing that much energy at once isn't even necessarily useful. Instead of creating a few grams of antimatter, you could just create a whole bunch of chemical or nuclear weapons. How many enemy cities will be so big that carpet-bombing or a nuke can't do the job?
(I won't even touch on *why* the heck we would want to destroy an entire city. You don't see cities made up of only enemy combattants, do you? For that matter, isn't it easier to get rid of "enemies" by not giving people a reason to hate you than by blasting them to smithereens?)
Till a grunt can parchute into the enemy territory, hike through 50 miles worth of jungle with it in his backpack, crawl through 10 miles of underground tunnels and vapourise an entire mountain with it.
OK, so you don't mention that it only has a 5 second fuse. You put that information in the instructions. It's not like most of them can read anyway.
Deleted
This isn't really that interesting or even unusual: Uncle Sam frequently limits what military folks can say about ongoing projects. There is a classification called "Sensitive But Unclassified", or SBU, whcih means the info is not classified as such (Secret, TS, etc.) but it is still not for public disclosure. (Years ago SBU was called "For Official Use Only" or FOUO.) Budgets are generally considered at least SBU, so it should be no suprise that the budget is not publicized.
Well, since they just telling employees not to talk about it, the proper designation is Sensitive Topic For the Uninitiated, or STFU.
That whole ying and yang thing of matter/antimatter got me thinking about my evil self in the other universe. Since I have a goatee, does that mean that my evil twin is clean shaven?
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I did NAFTA while reviewing China's MFN. It was like kissing Ross Perot.
What'll happen to the Twinkies?
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Insanity. If the power fails, it all goes up. Now if you can generate the positronium just before launch of a warhead, that may be just what you want.
On the upside (from the safety point of view), 'Although the worldwide production capacity has been growing at a nearly geometric rate since the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, the current output rate of 1 to 10 nanograms (ng) per year is minuscule compared to that of other exotic materials.' [http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/Papers/NASA_an ti.pdf] goes on to cite a current 'energy cost of $62.5 trillion per gram (g) of antiprotons.'
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
You couldn't even use magnetic or electric fields to hold the antimatter in place since these fields consist of matter particles as well.
Antimatter hand grenades--- Cheap!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
"wait till you see the military budget if this gets taken seriously"
Don't wait too long to see that budget. They don't exactly post the "black budget" on the goarmy.com homepage. If they actually think they can contain that much anti-matter long enough to be stored in a weapon without accidentally blowing up nevada then thats damn interesting. Wonder what kinda superconductors they're working with. So how long till my flying car?
In Soviet Russia, YOU destroy the antimatter.
I've often wondered what the destructive force of an anti-hydrogen fusion bomb would be, even since childhood. I wouldn't be surprised if just one could be a world wide doomsday device.
*TheDarb
This sig intentionally left blank.
This is research has two paths either great and powerful things or some sort of "nuclear mineing" ( they would use nuclear weapons to do strip mineing. The air force needs to do something better with its time. Anti-matter weapons. In a couple of years we will see this ... "Aircraft carrier vanishes in large explosion because of anti-matter containment field failing". How foolish....
Maybe it is an arm's race against the terrorists who are taking away America's liberty ?
www.mrpicassohead.com
I think everyone's spinning it wrong. The most useful thing you can do with lots of positrons would be to build an antimater-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion engine. With a good source for lots of positrons, you should be able to build nukes small enough to be useful.
I'm all for making this cheaper but the $10 trillion dollar(or whatever)/gram figure is based on the costs at Fermi Lab. They're cutting edge as far as antimatter production and we'd still have to mortgage the planet to make any meaningful amounts.
Perhaps they will be able to cut production costs by a factor of a thousand. Then a few grams would only consume the entire DoD budget.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Okay I'm just as confused as the next person about that unit of measure. But I am sure there are real much smarter people here that could enlighten us.
Could someone convert that into units of "can of whoop-ass?"
At the end of TFA:
'Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could propel futuristic space rockets.
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it." '
Oh, you mean by pursuing ever-more-super super-weapons?
And we'll escape from this problem by taking the same technology and attitudes to other planets?
I know next to nothing about this, but I'll toss this out there anyway. .
How efficiently is this stuff converted to energy once it contacts matter? Could it be used to say generate electricity (or whatever, heat/light etc..)?
It would make a great way to clean up current nuclear waste if you could get the costs of production down. Just dump some antimatter on some nuclear waste (in a controlled manner of course), and voila, energy AND less waste
Just a thought...
First I will say that I am not as well versed on real world physics of antimatter as I should be, never seemed to be all that important. I know the cost would be out of this world for such a weapon, but wouldn't one benefit be little to no fall out?
Just asking.
Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
and you'd have 0.000023 space shuttle in your head
looks like it'snot enough for orbit
.yaw ralucatceps yllear a ni lla ti dne ot detnaw ew sselnu retemirep tnemenifnoc eht evael reven dna pu tuhs ot su dlot yehT !bal eht ta ereh tnempiuqe retupmoc ruo htiw elbuort fo stros lla gnivah erew ew deciton neht tub gninnur retrevnoc rettamitan eht tog eW
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Instead of research on Anti Matter I suspect that they are doing research that Anti-Matters. But I could just be a jaded civil servant that's seen too many boondoggles...
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
Does an antimatter/matter explosion cause radioactive waste and fallout to be left behind or is it a 'clean' reaction?
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
We've been storing antimatter for decades in Penning traps.
I doubt we're going to see antimatter cheap enough to be more than a research material for decades, but when we can turn it into devices which make it impossible for anyone to field an army it essentially makes conventional warfare into suicide. Isn't that what you wanted?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government in the history of the world. The U.S. government has directly killed an estimated 3,000,000 people since the end of the Second World War in 24 military actions.
The system of violence works by creating fear in citizens so rich people can profit. Purchases of oil for war making and purchases of weapons are areas that are secret enough that those who want corruption can make huge profits.
This is only a small part of weapons research, and you only heard about it because of an accidental leak.
It's 1:20 PM. Do you know what your government is doing? No, you don't.
--
Bush: When Saudis attack, invade Iraq.
Anti-matter if it can be produced with less energy than what it produces could yield tremendous clean energy. It could also be used to create a very destructive particle beam weapon.
First, yes, anti-matter can't touch anything at all, otherwise boom. Best way to contain it would be magnetic bottles in vacuumed areas.
Second, using it as a weapon. There would not be radiation, just lots of light, because it isn't radioactive in any real sense. It doesn't leave any trace at all, just a large flash of light and then a hole where there used to be normal matter. You can't even detect anti-matter in its normal state since it doesn't emit anything. It would be like trying to detect hydrogen (easiest antimatter to make for obvious reasons).
Now, the potential for a weapon is absolute. People will worry about that, since its so easy to make as long as you have antimatter. Just make the containment field turn off as soon as it hits. Its an understandably dangerous idea, but we have to realize that its this way with any power source. First, you learn to use it without control. Then you learn to control it to fuel a power source. Take fission. First the bomb. Later, nuke plants. Now fusion. We have hydrogen bombs, we are trying to make (controlled) fusion plants now. So first we use it as a weapon, then we learn how to control it (to make the Enterprise).
Now, as a weapon, I can't imagine its the worst thing in the world. Only large, (presumably) responsible countries could make it. We have somthing close to its destructive power now with the H bomb, but this one would have no radiation afterward causing untold pain and suffereing from fallout. Just the initial flash. And we haven't used the H bomb yet, god-willing we will never use this. If the war ever comes and Mars attacks though, I would love to have something other than the common cold to fall back on.
"Risc is good..."
You can thank the Democrats for the lack of education though.
:'( "
liberal schools with no grades but "self confidence" a plenty and grades like " Math makes Katie
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Antimatter is currently the most expensive substance on earth, at $1.75 trillion per ounce.
And antimatter bombs have been proposed as far back as the 70s, but of course anything's "new" when the public hears about it regardless of when the ideas were first conceived. The militarization of space, super efficient warheads, "brilliant" weapons (as opposed to "smart"): all have been under thorough investigation by the USAF for decades. All have been underlying trends in military scientists' minds representing a natural progression in defense technology, with nothing extraordinary about them.
All of those things, in today's sensationalist world, are perceived as indicators of the US military's suddenly new drive to take over the world, when in reality, there's nothing new about them. We all gasp when we hear about them, but to the aged scientists working at Edwards, it's all old hat. The USAF's overall plans haven't changed (though they certainly have progressed), only the public's perceptions.
Can someone say "Fire Photon Torpedoes"?
From what I recall photon torpedoes have nothing to do with photons but its rather an antimatter weapon
Man, given a choice, I'd prefer to go that way than, say, from having to eat rat droppings, force-fed to me by nuns wearing nothing but rat skins and monkey entrails.
But that's just me.
I think we could improve on that by putting the cat in a anti-matter box with a anti-matter vial of anti-matter-cyanide that will open depending on whether or not an anti-matter atom decays.
A blog about stuff.
Correct me if i am wrong [which i may be since i havent been keeping up with the latest physics developments] but I though that anti-matter has only been produced for a minute fraction of a second and only a few atoms at that. I think we are a long long way off producing 1g ram that can be contained an utilised in a weapon. Give it 50-100 years and see how things are then... This is just speculative nonsense is it not?
1 normal H-bomb
1 anti H-bomb
both explode creating resp Helium and anti-Helium, which then reacts with each other.
The `anti-' name refers to the charge of the particle (electrons are assigned -1, positrons +1). So, when you say 1 + -1 = 0, you're right in the sense that e+ e- -> gamma, which is uncharged. However, the energy of the particles is always positive (negative energy/mass is not observed), so in that case E_a + E_b = E_a + E_b.
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
boilerplate sig troll response
Thanks for playing!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
What possible foreseable threat requires these kinds of weapons over ones we already have? This just doesn't make sense. I smell some boys in the lab wanting to do some expensive science, sitting around thinking "we can tell them it's weapons research... yeah, that's the ticket!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The United States of America is > YOU
Well, if *we* don't develop immensely expensive and nigh-impossible to store futuristic weapons in our cutting-edge laboratories and gargantuan particle accelerators, what's to stop a bunch of terrorists in a cave in Afghanistan from doing it?
I for one would like to welcome our anti-matter bearing conquerers
What do violas have to do with it? Did Stradivarius use antimatter to achieve his results?
~*~ Tara
In soviet russia antimatter rules you!
(argh I'm so darn sick of thse goddamn soviet russia posts)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
Nuclear weapons emit neutrons, some alpha particles, and mostly radiation. That is what is called "nuclear radiation". Now this nuclear radiation is nothing but gamma rays.
The combination of matter + antimatter gives a gamma ray. Contrary to popular views, it does not vanish, but actually energy ins emitted. This is well exemplified as the 23 times the booster energy in rockets. However the radiation (energy) is also lethal, and is of the same nature as the thermoluclear radiation. There is no difference. So I don't understand when the author says "it's doesn't emit plumes of radiation"?! What radiation is he talking about? So theantimatter weapons would be as harmful in terms of radiation damage.
Secondly - it requires billions to produce just one microgram of anti-matter. At present, antimatter costs $62.5 trillion per gram. You have to put in energy to produce antimatter. The amount of energy that needs to be later realeased. It's like you have 1 million dollar notes, and a credit card with the spending limit of 1 million. It's just a conversion into a form that is smaller. So it's not free energy, and the cost of making antimatter is huge! I don't think one would go and buy a million dollar hamburger, when he can buy a $1 burger kong.. So it's just fiction for the next 100 years - then something cheaper will come forth.
I can see it now. HEADLINE: Bush was right! WMD's found in Iraq! One half of the material used to make an Anti-matter explosives with more power than nuclear weapons has been located by experts. Insider quoted as saying, "They were literally hiding it everywhere!" -They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin
Since we can never stop fighting with each other
you mean...
Since America can never stop fighting with anyone who holds oil
???
Would you have to store the anti-matter, or create it as you need it? The first seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything. The other requires a massive amount of energy. Is this even plausible?
The only mechanisms we know of to create antimatter are UNBELIEVABLY power-hungry. The technology to manufacture even a mere gram of antimatter does not exist. So, the answer to your question -- we really have no idea. We can't manufacture meaningful amounts of antimatter at all, so the question of when it would get manufactured is something of a moot point.
What about the radiation involved? We've measured the rays that result from minor, single-atom collisions, but what happens when the collision is actually big enough to damage something?
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), but I don't believe it would be significant. Nuclear weapons have two major sources of residual radiation (fallout): fission byproducts and induced radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. Antimatter bombs wouldn't produce either. The radiation produced by a matter-antimatter reaction is high-energy gamma rays -- the explosion's extreme energy levels would probably manage to split or fuse a few atoms, and probably create very small amounts of radioactive material, but without fission byproducts or neutron flux you shouldn't see any large-scale radioactivity. The explosion would essentially look and behave just like a nuclear explosion (thermal pulse, mushroom cloud, shock wave, etc.) but without the fallout.
How do you propel something like this? Magnets? Or am I wrong in assuming anti-matter can't touch anything?
You are correct -- matter-antimatter collisions are bad news, and you can't allow the antimatter to touch any matter until the desired moment of explosion. Fortunately, antiprotons and antielectrons (positrons) are both electrically charged, and can therefore be magnetically contained in a vacuum to keep them from contacting any matter. A (very simple and dangerous) bomb design might be as simple as a containment shell with antimatter inside. You drop it on the target, the bomb ruptures and releases antimatter, BOOM.
The real problem is that the failure mode of antimatter weapons (at least ones that relied on pre-manufactured antimatter) is so damned dangerous. If the circuitry in a nuclear weapon fails, no biggie -- the bomb just doesn't detonate. Even in the worst case all that happens with a nuke is leakage of radioactive material. In fact, even an accidental critical mass isn't enough to produce a large-scale explosion -- unless you contain everything just right it just doesn't give you a big blast.
With an antimatter bomb, the opposite is true. You have to contain everything just right, because the second you don't, BOOM.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
At first I envisioned like an anti-matter bomb and that seemed pretty far out; but could almost see the military being capable of producting an antiproton beam or something that would act like an ultra powerful laser by ejecting particles as they are made. It could save money to, if you just disintegrate the enemy then you don't have all that messy and expensive clean up, kill 2 birds with one anti-stone.
Why not use positrons as a beam weapon instead of an explosive? You could shoot them at near light speed and they'd make a great ABM weapon if located in space. I dare say you could deposit a lot more energy in a short amount of time than you could with a laser.
Terrestrial use is more problematic because you have to worry about collisions with the air.
Never heard of SBU, maybe only the USAF uses it, but i've been stationed with USAF folks and on their bases and i've never heard of SBU. ;)
All your base are belong to Google.
It's a bit more than -1 + 1 = 0. In terms of net charge, you're correct. If you start with a particle and an anti-particle and get them to collide, you'll have no net charge left over.
Now, there's that other part of matter called mass. There's the rest mass of a particle (the particle has NO kinetic energy). And there's the mass associated with velocity (E=mc^2 comes from this... Kinetec Energy = 1/2 * m * v^2).
All the stuff that makes up the particles mass has an equivalent energy via E=mc^2. When you bring a particle and an anti-particle close enough that they react with each other, then the net charge of the two becomes neutral and the mass becomes so great that the new mass wants to find a more stable state. In order for the new mass to find a more stable state, it has to decay. (Now, the mass doesn't "know" or "think" about this, there are physical limits to the amount of mass that you can put into one particle.)
Since the super-particle isn't stable, it breaks up into smaller particles. It just so happens that when you bring an electron and a positron (anti-electron) just close enough that they barely touch with no excess kinetic energy beyond what is needed to make them react, then you'll get a super-particle that instantly decays into two high energy photons (gamma rays).
I'd like to request units of Empire State Building or grand canyon.
Rather than equate it to Nuclear Bombs, space shuttle tanks, etc. how about how long a gram of anti-matter could run a laptop?
I would expect that it's on the order of centuries which would make it very desireable, although having a potentially leaking anti-matter device on one's lap would make it very undesireable.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Funny how military applications get the first use of new technology.
...and the list goes on.
The refrigerator was an invention first used in naval vessels long before anyone thought of putting them in the home.
Of course, nuclear fission was also a military technology before they got to work making it a source of energy rather than one of mass destruction.
CDMA was first implemented by the US military several decades before any civilian application.
Seem that even though any practical use of antimatter is still far off, it would have a dramatically more profound impact on society as a whole if it were used as an energy source for a spacecraft rather than "yet another gun" to point at our heads.
But, the rational of fear and destruction always trumps the need for man to advance the whole of mankind. If the article is indeed correct about the mass/energy ratio, antimatter looks like a means to finally be able to colonize other rocks in our solar system and increase the changes of our civilization surviving a man-made or natural cataclysm.
A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall.
When you consider that the money itself it worthless without the work that goes behind it (people producing things that other people want/need), I'd hardly be willing to believe that the amount of money (measured as time paying people to productively create 1 gram of antimatter) would be anywhere near infinite. It might be more than exists on earth today, but that's only because the value is high and the work "hard", comparatively.
Antimatter research is extremely valuable science. Insight into the mechanisms of anti/matter annihilation, and its total (or nearly) conversion to energy, will inform science from nuclear energy to nano (femto?) tech and beyond. It's best performed in space, away from the rest of the world which it can contaminate with either annihilable (anti)material or radiation from the reaction. But budgeting the Air Force to make bombs out of it is insane. We've already got expensive ginormous bombs that scare everyone silly, and send the craziest of us into terrorism to compete. How about we just shift that Pentagon budget across to NASA? That will satisfy the aerospace bribers^Wlobbyists who are pushing this stuff, but keep them serving a sustainable market.
--
make install -not war
____________
Huh?
Iraq is too far away. We've found a much more convenient place to store all of our anti-matter!
he was appointed by the Florida Supreme Court, not the U.S.
Just a minor technicallity, as he was appointed and not voted into office...... hopefully that will be rectified in about 4 weeks..... vote Kerry!
Now the real question is how much do we need to blow up the whole planet with one single bomb?
Or how much for a "Novabomb?"
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
This raises an interesting question: why aren't "units" like "Library of Congress", "VW Bug", and "human hair" included in the "units" program?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why don't they research something useful instead, like warp engines. Then we can make a test flight in time for the vulcans to detect it and come and be friendly with us. Then we can work on cool weapons, like photon torpedos and phasers.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
[little john] OKAY! [/little john]
A star-gate is the entryway into Amanda Tapping's estate.
/.'ers and other nerds at bay.
It's purpose is to keep drooling
comets made of pure antimatter come on. Everyone knows comets are made of impure antimatter. Comets are made of antematter (the state matter is in before it's matter) and promatter (very experienced matter--similar to slashmatter, which is what I use to wipe) along with some antimatter with a dash of parme-sahn cheese.
"Captain (cough) the anti(gag)matter core (gag) is (gag) collapsing (wheeze) have to abandon (gag) weapons control (hack) can't (gag) breathe (gaaaggg)"
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Man, you don't really understand economy. Antimatter is expensive because there is virtually none of it available. Once someone finds out how to produce and store it in bigger amounts, prices will go down like SCO shares.
;).
I mean, aluminum was much more expensive then gold when it was a new discovery. If you were about to travel in time to year 1850, take a cheap aluminum spoon with you. You can probably get a good price on it
Is that as predictable and uninteresting as his more popular works?
This isn't really that interesting or even unusual: Uncle Sam frequently limits what military folks can say about ongoing projects. There is a classification called "Sensitive But Unclassified", or SBU, whcih means the info is not classified as such (Secret, TS, etc.) but it is still not for public disclosure. (Years ago SBU was called "For Official Use Only" or FOUO.
/been in and still in the USAF
There is no official classification called "SBU", only FOUO. I have never seen or heard of "SBU", and I've authored documents up to TS/SCI. Also, there is no such thing as a Air Force-wide gag order. Where did you serve? How long ago? Please mod parent down.
1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite.
The Air Force has changed to the Challenger scale quite some time ago.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
If you consider that a primary goal of both weapons research and propulsion research is concerned with fitting more energy into a smaller package, then it all makes perfect sense.
If the given quantity of anti-matter can, with its included containment system, occupy less space and weigh less than another type of energy source. Then it will definatly be advantageous to use it. The rest is simply a matter of implementation.
My greatest concern is storage. How do you make something so inherently destructive safe to store in any usable quantity.
A clean way of eradicating volumes of arabs without harmful radiactive contamination.
Where would you like the crater?
Over there. Kaboom!
Er no. Over here. Kaboom!
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Don't worry, we've got it covered. You ever see one of those aerodynamic trick gadgets where a balloon is suspended in an updraft from a fan? You push the balloon to one side, it recenters itself over the fan.
Now take out the balloon and put in a blob of antimatter. If the antimatter is too heavy to float in the breeze, duct-tape the antimatter to the balloon.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Destroy Manhattan with a device the size of a handbag.
No wonder why the Air Force turned on the "Shut-the-Hell-up" light on.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
"a powerful positron-generating accelerator under development at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash"
Whaa?? I've been going to school here for three years, and I haven't heard about them building that. Where is it hidden, The New Johnson Hall Addition?
We're a land grant school, damnit! We're supposed to be researching wheat or something!
(One interesting note is the rumor of living cows with fiberglass panels attached to their sides. No one has confirmed this secret program)
to attempt to create weapons from optic ganglea of small, common social insects.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Ok, so I have a theory that this could become the anti-big bang. The antimatter and matter collision causes an instability in the universe and rather than it contract back into itself, the antimatter instability would create a "chase" big-bang.
Consider this: the universe is growing at an infinite rate; we know this. An antimatter Big Bang originating on Earth would most likely be offset from the origin point of the original Big Bang. Thus, eventually at some point (assuming it grows in a circular fashion) the two points would intersect. My prediction is that this intersection causes the Anti-matter and true matter to scatter all over the place and a new Big Bang begins - ad infinitum (or ad nauseam depending on your state of mind).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
"This is insane. A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall."
Dude, thats easy, we just have the Federal Reserve print up a few extra of those sexy new Benjamins.
"As depressing as it sounds, this is probably a Good Thing"
This is not a good thing. One thing that keeps us from using WMDs again is that we saw how terrible they are. If we make them just as deadly but less destructive they will appear to be less terrible and the blood thirsty powers that be will have less hesitation to using them.
I think you've got it. Consider that space shuttle.
It's something like 95% fuel by weight on takeoff. Now, if your engines are burning antimatter, you can replace all that weight with payload and still reach orbit!
If the antimatter could be manufactured for a reasonable multiple of the energy cost, it would cause the cost of getting stuff into space to drop dramatically.
I you have a goatee, *you're* the evil twin. Your cleanshaven counterpart is the good guy.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
If it did, somehow the place it would be found would be the middle east.
Just as a thought - why advance military technology at all? Just get the soldiers of one side, the soldiers of the other side and let them fight it out in a big arena. Give 'em sticks and stones if you feel generous. Result: one clear winner, no civilian casualties and collateral damage and nearly no monetary expense. Would make for better television, too.
Seriously: do we really need better and better tools to kill?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Guess Bush finally found his WMD... In other news Saddam Husein starts dancing hysterically in his cell...
It's not the "bigger boom", it's the dirty fallout that takes a lot of "freindlies" allong with the boom. Remember the neutron bomb PR fallout? Kills animal life but leaves economically valuble facilities intact? The Air Force would like to avoid that, we kill the Evil Doers, destroy the facilities, while avoiding nasty radioactive fallout.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
does that mean it just doesn't matter?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
hear fucking hear.
When a technology is being actively researched for its primary possible use as a weapon, is it time to perhaps re-think? Maybe primarily researching its potential as an alternative energy source...
Does this mean that the American people have to trust the pentagon with hundreds of billions of dollars per year for secret research for secret weapons given to secret companies?
I -want- to be a defense contractor!
I hear the military plan is to create Anti-Matter duplicates of all their targets, the have them meet.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
So generating antimatter directly using current methods would be extremely expensive. More importantly, given how much energy it "contains" (via matter-antimatter annihilation), and assuming you need even MORE energy to generate it, the energy requirements would be prohibitive at best and simply unavailable at worst.
But what about harvesting antimatter? Isn't it present in cosmic rays and radiation? A large electromagnetic bubble could be used to filter out antiprotons and slow it down until it is united with positrons in a trap and stored. Since you're working in a hard vacuum, containment is less of an issue and your fields and machinery do not need to be sealed tight. It's just a variation of a bussard ramscoop. Of course it would have to be very large.
Generating antimatter requires massive amounts of energy. So why not go to the most naturally energetic object around - the Sun? Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun in some fashion. I am not an expert, but I presume at least some of the solar wind and certainly some of the solar atmosphere is composed of antimatter.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
gotta love these ignorant jackasses who have to blame Bush for everything. What a nimrod.
Why do you say sci-fi? This has been going on for decades in the particle physics community, and the Penning traps used fit on the back of a pickup truck.
I think they're most likely trying to make rocket fuel in a highly compact form. In other words, how much power can we contain in the smallest, lightest package possible?
Just like any other rocket fuel, you spend the energy here on earth to refine the fuel so you can give a vehicle the most lifting power possible.
Then the comparison to space shuttle fuel tanks would make sense.
Well, obviously. In the anti-matter containment fields. But be careful, because all hell breaks loose if the containment field gets out of alignment -- your warp drive is unlikely to function at full efficiency, and if things get bad enough it can lead to a full warp core breach. But that only happens every three or four episodes, and is usually averted at the last minute anyway, so we shouldn't have anything to worry about.
I am the man with no sig!
Wouldnt it be far cheaper for the US millitary to pay $500 to every paradise seeking suicide-bomber to go blast each other? In that line of thinking, 150lb of lard-ass idiot + 2000lbs of old chevy has a more effective yeild then 20kg of Plutonium, and there's no radition fallout.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Some salt crystals have been theorized to be able to hold an atom of anti-hydrogen in the crystal lattice.
Just think of the orbital spaceplane with an engine smaller than your laptop battery!
I think this is an incredible spin-off technolgy if they can pull it off.
This is exactly the kind of stuff that will save us from those nasty terrorists!
And this is also great because we need more junk who's default and only mode of operation is "annihilate" floating around.
Way to go!
You'd never find antimatter here on earth because as soon as it comes in contact with matter, they would obliterate each other. Same goes for space.
The research may not be related to explosives, but propulsion, hence the fuel tank equivalent.
If this were the case, and assuming its practical, it could make the space elevator unnecessary.
Thank you kindly aah... sexylicious. That was the missing keystone. I'm just brain-weary from staring at my screen all day, dealing with CSS (and I'm an EE, how'd this happen?).
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Actually, you can hold a chunk of plutonium in your hand with little side effect.
When the plutonium core of the Trinity device was delivered to the site, the commander insisted that the courier open the case containing it - he said something along the lines of "I won't sign for anything unless I have actually seen it".
So, the courier opened the case, the BC took the sphere out, held it briefly (noting the warmth and "feeling of potential"), then returned it and signed for it.
Go read "The Day The Sun Rose Twice" for the details.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hrmm, I suspect you'll want to create an Anti-matter universe around your anti-matter containing anti-matter container?
you cannot go out and mine anti-matter. Why? Mostly because if there were any antimatter around, it would have a nasty tendency to interact with all that matter and be converted to energy.
Ummmm... actually... there's plenty of anti-matter around. It's everywhere actually, poping into an out of existance all the time on a quantum scale. The tricky part is botteling it before it annihalates with the virtual matter particle that was spontaneously created with it.
Still, I bet you could get more bang out of evaporating quantum black holes. You just need a Tevatron to make them.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Who needs to know what the target is or where it is? With a big enough bomb, you're sure to get it the first time around:P
that should be, of course, -1 gram
Wake up, folks. It's bullshit.
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
Destroying it using what? Antimatter for instance?
Let's recap this:
I think that's what one calls "sustainable usage of energy".bad news: scientists are developing just another source of energy which could blow up the whole planet
good news: the same source can be used to drive a spacecraft to leave the mess behind.
I thought the standard unit of explosive power was the ton of dynamite...
Nope, it's tons of TNT, not dynamite. For some reason everybody seems to think that dynamite and TNT are the same thing, but dynamite is actually a nitroglycerin paste. TNT is entirely different.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
But he did it about his own invention -- dynamite! He was obviously right there, eh? :-)
My personal opinion is that with all the space applications I'm all for antimatter research. Give NASA's budget to DARPA for a decade and humanity will have a better space program...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
"the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
It's not a matter of discussion.
But you have to think about what's doing the holding up. In this case, it wouldn't be steam, it would be radiation pressure keeping the atmosphere from rushing in and annihilating. The actual momentum carried by gamma ray photons from the annihilation would deflect air molecules out of the way to prevent a rapid inrush.
You can calculate how much power that is per square centimeter of "exposed" antimatter.
Each photon carries a certain amount of momentum, momentum per unit time is force. So to sustain a certain pressure a certain number of photons have to be absorbed by the air per square centimeter.
The momentum carried by a photon is just E/c, where E is its energy and c is the speed of light. So to hold out 15 psi (10 Newtons per cm^2), you have to transmit 10^9 Newton-meters/second of power through that square centimeter.
So a golf ball of antimatter, sitting in the atmosphere, would emit about 4*pi*10^9 Watts, or about 10^10 Watts. The surface of the golf ball would be 10^11 times brighter than the surface of the Sun -- though of course most of that radiation would be in the form of gamma rays.
If the golf ball massed about 5 grams, it would
release 5x10^15 Joules in total, so it would indeed last a long time -- but you wouldn't want to classify it as a gentle sizzle...
You could do much better by applying more pressure to the golf ball. Putting it in the imploding shock wave of a thermonuclear bomb trigger could increase the output by something like eight orders of magnitude if you got lucky enough (it scales linearly with pressure).
http://foia.state.gov/masterdocs/12fam/12m0540.pdf
A co-worker's husband runs a Septic Tank clearing business. When we asked what a shitload was we were told "1600 gallons".
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
In a fission reaction the fallout comes from two sources. The first is the by-products of the fission reaction. I believe it is radioactive isotopes of Cesium and Potassium. This radioactive particles combine with the uranium/plutonim that did not fission and get distributed as fallout.
A pure fusion bomb, e.g. neutron bomb, has only a fusion reaction and thus theoretically produces no radioactive fallout. However in practice a fission reaction is used to create the pressure and heat needed to start the fusion reaction.
See the Special Weapons Primer at http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/index.html for more info.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
In college (1994), we would get a lot of homework. Since every teacher seemed to believe that their class was the only one you were taking during the week, they just piled the assignments on. At some point you would attempt to gauge how much you had to do...
Having just finished our calculus work, we were postulating on how much stuff you could possibly have as your workload approached infinity. Being geeks, we understood that given an infinite range of numbers, we as humans like to put names on our numbers (million, billion, etc), so at some point when you associated a name with that ungodly large number, that name would be "fuck". That worked well, since we were fond of saying we had a fucking lot of work to do.
Since we had to carry all this crap around with us every day, the weight of all this work was a fuckton.
On the rough days, you'd say you'd have a metric fuckton of work, since everything is always slightly bigger in metric.
These guys should get out more, I just saw a 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter on eBay starting at $9.99
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
We'll probably use a form of particle trickery, directing the resulting anti-matter towards matter. Viola. Weapon.
What, like THIS?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
US Military Plans Space Combat
Does anyone see a connection? In space containment is much less of a problem (though cost is still an issue).
whoops -- I mistyped the comparison with the Sun. That should read "The surface of the golf ball would appear 10^11 times brighter than sunlight". The surface of the golf ball would "only" be 2 million times brighter than the surface of the Sun.
Well...if you know their conversion values, you could put them in your units.dat file.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Anit-Matter explosions will look like just like the existing nuclear ones, but now with a big rolling circle spreading out like a Future Crew Demo or Death Star Explosion.
If the military needs a 10MT bomb they're use a nuke. It's known, reliable technology. It's even safe... at least for us.
But if the military wants to hit a target with, oh, 100T to 2000T - that's tons, not kilotons - it doesn't have a lot of options. Conventional cruise missiles can carry a few tons (actually far less but modern chemical explosives are far more powerful than TNT). Aircraft can drop heavier bombs, up to MOAB, but that requires you to actually get a heavy bomber into the area. That can take hours, it has to get past air defenses, etc. You can't just launch a bunch of cruise missiles from a submarine or destroyer and be done with it.
This is why the military was looking at "mini-nukes"... but there's a lower limit on the size of nuclear weapons and actually testing one will cause a lot of problems on the world stage. Not that this administration gives a damn about that but it is a consideration.
An antimatter bomb can be as small as you need to disable the target while minimizing the collateral damage. It doesn't even have to be explosive - an intense "sizzling" gamma ray source may even be better than an explosion. It'll kill personnel, disable electronics, wipe magnetic media, etc. without causing the infrastructure to collapse beyond any damage caused by the initial penetration.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
We knew for a fact they had matter so there must be anti-matter somewhere in there!
It floating around everyone, in tiny quantities, left over from the big bang, just like unburned hydrocarbons coming out of a car's exhaust pipe. If a space ship goes fast enough it can scoop up tiny amounts of antimatter and power itself forever.
Scientists don't know this yet because aliens to me, a Star's ignition is caused by a concentration of anti matter and normal matter, releasing energy which in turn sets of hydrogen fusion cain reaction.
One day human beings will understand how to harness and contain antimatter without blowing themsleves up, its only a matter of time!
"If not, we'll just start looking for a new laboratory!"
Yes, the plot of every Dan Brown novel can be summarized like this:
Attractive, single cryptographer/symbol researcher discovers world-shaking secret, then meets up with an attractive member of the opposite sex of similar age, and both end up chasing around a major urban area.
I guess it's kind of like scooping up liquid nitrogen in your hand. For a few brief moments it doesn't burn you, because it's too busy vaporizing from the heat of your skin and forming an insulating barrier of gas between the drop and your hand. Until your skin surface runs out of heat, of course.
It's a fun lab trick. Pour some in a cold bucket, then splash it on people. It goes poof when it hits their clothes or skin and either evaporates or bounces off onto the floor, where it sizzles and skids around for a while. Newbies always think they're going to freeze solid instantly though.
Also under the right conditions it'll chill them just enough to make girl's nipples go hard. Thin shirts and bras (or better yet, no bra) in summer works best for that.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The cost is mostly in building several million/billion/trillion copies of the equipment to run simultaneously, to pay for the energy to power those machines, to pay for the liquid helium needed to cool the superconductors to contain the antimatter, etc.
If you can make a single particle per minute, and you need to spend a million dollars to make a single machine that can operate continuously for 20 years making a particle a minute, your end result is that if you want a gram of this stuff (10^20 particles, if they were antiprotons. More for positrons) you end up spending 5*10^17 dollars (500 million billion if you like). So its 'cheap' to make a couple dozen of these things, or even a hundred thousand, but when you try to make macroscopic quantities you get hit by the huge difference in orders of magnitude between the macroscopic world and the world of nuclear interactions. I haven't done the calculation, but I wouldn't be surprised that if you want to make a gram of antimatter within a human lifespan, you'd have to cover every square centimeter of the earth with particle accelerators and have them run continuously.
You might say 'why can we only do 1 a minute when we can do nuclear reactions that give us macroscopic quantities of some byproduct?' and the answer is roughly 'the strength of the interactions we can use to make antimatter are ridiculously small compared to that'. So sure, if you could find a process with a higher amplitude that produces antimatter, you might be able to step up the production. However, thats more of a fundamental physics problem than an engineering one.
Does this mean that the States will drop an Anti-Matter bomb once to end a war, and then approx. 50 years later go into Iraq looking for them?
There is a fundamental problem with antimatter weapon, which has nothing to do with storing antimatter or any other engineering issues. Antimatter weapon does not produce "new" energy, it only stores energy which went into generating antimatter and then releases it. By comparison, nuclear explosives are "their own energy source", i.e. they release much more energy than went into their manufacturing, because we do not have to make uranium (and making plutonium from uranium takes relatively little energy). The energy balance of an antimatter weapon is similar to what a nuclear weapon would require if we had to make uranium from iron.
Nuclear bomb, in effect, stores the energy of long-gone supernovas (which did convert iron into uranium), an energy source we cannot directly tap into. We don't have such sources for antimatter, so we have to produce it with our own energy.
If we had an energy source which could generate antimatter in large quantities, we'd use whatever powers that energy source directly to make weapons, not store that energy as antimatter and then use antimatter like a rechargeable battery.
The only use of this process would be to convert a large source of energy into a very compact one. The other alleged advantage, "clean nuke", is an outright lie. The gamma radiation will interact with surrounding matter which will cause all sorts of secondary nuclear reactions and create radioactive isotopes. If it wasn't the case, the antimatter explosion would be totally ineffective, the gamma photons which do not get absorbed or scattered by matter simply fly through it without any effect. What kills you is not the gamma rays whcih went right through you, it's those which did not make it through.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Remember Voyager? Ya, ya, I know. Still this episode stands out: The Omega Directive
Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle lucid dreaming.
Weaponising this must be an absolute bitch! I mean, you can't just shoot antimatter out of a gunbarrel (or more likely accellerate it with EM fields) as-is: as soon as it hits the air you'd get interaction with real matter :)
So you'd have to encase it in it's own little containment unit which breaks on impact or gets the matter-antimatter reaction going on impact: we're talking bombs only, I'd guess.
Man, this would be damn interesting to work on...only you can just wait for Oppenheimer's thoughts to start haunting you.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Isn't this merely an attempt to circumvent the nuclear arms race by a mere technicality?
"We're not building nuclear weapons... it's *anti-matter*, not really nukes... "
Live forever, or die trying.
I have no more concept of Burning Libraries of Congress than I do of Space Shuttle Fuel tanks (with or without out maneuvering engine fuel included). I've never used either of them.
However, I was once rear-ended while driving a 1971 Ford Pinto. So I'd like to know what it is equivalent to in Fully Fueled Pinto Bombs, thank you.
Or if you can convert it to furlongs per fortnight, I can take it from there.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I smooched oil millionaires that worked for Playboy. i was pretty high on mexican weed more so than hydro.
web: eika.tzo.com
I was just thinking, isn't the formula actually something like e-mc^2*y , for kinetic energy? So what if instead of making a bomb, one could use magnetic acceleration to launch it from a satellite at close to the speed of light at the target? The air probably wouldn't collide with too many of the particles, but the ground would... Also, deploying it from a satellite would be better because it is harder to attack and if an accident occurs then it is in space, so you could safely store a lot more.
Don't get any on you!
Hmmm... I had to sign one of those when I came to work at my new company, only they spelled 'gag' "N-O-N D-I-S-C-L-O-S-U-R-E A-G-R-E-E-M-E-N-T". I guess "gag order" sounds more sinister.
With antimatter this problem is far worse, because while fission and fusion occur throughout the reaction volume, the matter-antimatter reaction occurs only on a contact surface.
It's exceedingly difficult to get a major explosion with antimatter.(Tiny ones are not hard, since the square-cube law gives you more surface area per volume as the scale shrinks.)
Also, with production technology we can reasonably foresee, antimatter is impossibly expensive for weapons applications.
Even the US military has finite budgets. The cost of burning a city down with conventional weapons is large but not infinite. We won't get the price down below US$ 60.e6/mg using foreseeable Earth-based technologies and, at 43 kT/gm of antimatter, we're talking roughly US$ 1.4e9 per kiloton !!!!!!!!! Even the Pentagon's budget isn't THAT large...
...what do you want more doomsday weapons for? You hardly play with the ones you've got!
What *kind* of antimatter are we discussing?
Positrons (anti-electrons), or antiprotons? (btw, is there any thing like anti-neutrons?) Or anti-atoms as a whole? If we're talking about positron rays, would there be any anti-matter left after a couple of meters? Or are we talking bombs by any chance?
And how are these things gonna be kept isolated from "positive" matter, anyway, so they won't be destroyed by mere contact?
IMHO, this whole antimatter business is just a bunch of crap. The most practical application of antimatter i've heard of, is smashing a couple of anti-particles in gigantic accelerators.
Wow, look at the dots in the computer, wheeeeeee!
By the sounds of it this 'anti matter' is a useless method of providing power, is fantastically expensive, is extremely hard to control and useful only in the development of more powerful weapons which could be extremely small and easy to hard.
I'm all for investigating stuff but I think there does come a point where we should do it in terms other than devising better ways to kill people.
Forget the tons of dynamite measurement, I want to know how many Volkswagens and/or Libraries of Congress 1 gram of antimatter can destroy.
if any other country in the world were doing this, they would be a hole in the ground right now. I find it very hypocritical of the USA to go around bombing the shit out of any country that they (falsey) suspect are developing "WMDs" when they are actually doing so themselves. I would certainly like to see the US "get a taste of there own medicine" so to speak.
That's on the imperial scale, which runs from boatload to assload to shitload to fuckload to mighty fuckload, with some other more esoteric units in between. The metric scale uses the base unit of the shitload with the usual prefixes - the microshitload, the kiloshitload, etc.
NOT
--Mike--
Forces from Iraq invade the United State out of fears that they were building weapons of mass destruction.
Isn't this a bit hypicritical of the USA? I mean after the reports were generally blown out of scale to create an enemy. This is as far as I'm concerned far worse. If nuclear weapons are near taboo in use why makes something so much more powerful acceptable?
I guess the military won't be happy until they have portable black hole generators on their backs to get rid of their targets. Mark this as a sad day folks.
So, where are my dilithium crystals, plasma coils, and warp cores? Oh, and subspace fields that we can use to alter the mass of an object and propel it to FTL speeds?
Besides, Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could propel futuristic space rockets.
"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."
I don't know about you, but I almost choked with my coffee...
Friend of the Wise, Brother of the Brave.
Sorry, Big Wrong here. The M14 fires the .308 (7.62 x 51mm) cartridge, which provides virtually identical ballistics to the .30-06 (7.62 x 61mm) round in the M-1. All the .308 proved was that you could put a .30-06 into a case about a half inch shorter.
It was from that mis-step that we went to the 5.56 (.223) cartridge in the M-16 that wasn't even initially intended for the U.S. Army. We were giving AR-15 (civilian model of the M16) to our more slightly statured (shorter & lighter) South Vietmese allies when some one realized that a heavy rifle with heavy ammunition that nobody could control on full-auto fire didn't make nearly as much sense in the jungle where visibility was often 15 yards or less, as did this toy rifle we were giving to everyone else.
As a result, the M16 and its derivations have now served for as long as any other service rifle in the U.S. Military.
And btw, it was the Germans back in 1941-1942 who realized that it didn't make sense for their soliders to carry 1000 metre rifles when most battles were fought at under 400 metres. A smaller, lighter, cheaper rifle with ammunition only effective out to 400 metres that allowed selective fire as well made the individual foot solider a much more effective fighter. Too bad that the USA had to learn that lesson TWICE!! (M14, before M16.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I say sci-fi because of scale. Trapping a few particles is one thing, but containing enough antimatter to make mischief with? Well...
I know the systems involved would probably scale well, but I imagine there would also be at least one additional layer of complexity because of the severe consequences that would result from a leak.
It's not a gag order, it's a reminder of the Non-Disclosure Agreement anyone with a security clearance must sign, and a reminder that certain projects will always be covered by the NDA. Not only that, any project you don't specifically know *isn't* covered by the NDA must be assumed to be covered by the NDA.
It's part of the standard security procedures, so a reminder isn't anything special unless someone makes a sensationalist statement using emotionally loaded phrases like "gag order" to describe a standard security process.
Besides, when it's a national security issue of high importance, it's pretty stupid to go blabbing or speculating about stuff you may have heard about or have a pet theory about. When it comes to weapons technology, "free speech" whackos can cry all they want but frankly they don't need to know so they'll never get the whole story.
Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power
Thank goodness. One of the biggest problems with nuclear weapons is their lack of power.
"Positive" purposes? Peh! How much work would that be?
Besides blowing stuff up could be positive! Like blowing up McDonalds toys! Let me tell you, it's a pain in the ass to do with black cat firecrackers... I don't think I've ever managed it in less than 5 or 6. Damned indestructable McDonalds toys... grumble.. grumble... I want anti-matter... grumble... grumble... grr...
I'm a gnu world man.
Why are you trying to figure this out yourself when we already know Wesley reads /.
Wesley, how do we make it go boom?
You're welcome.
It's still only a measly 2.4x10^-152 of an Illudium Q-36 charge, you puny earth creatures.
(Or Illudium PEW-36 for the stink bomb version.)
Marvin
One of the better things about anti-matter is that it can be used as a powerful propellent aboard a space vehicle to achieve staggering velocities. These theoretical types of rockets could have velocities approaching 50% the speed of light.
If you could get near that speed you could reach the nearest star system in less than a decade, and interplanetary travel to the farthest reaches of the solar system would be on the scale of weeks, not years.
At the time - and I suppose now - about the only source of anti-matter were nuclear accelerators. The speaker stepped through some concept drawings for filtering, capturing, and storing the good stuff, and how to play with it once enough had been collected to be worthwhile.
What stands out in my memory was the number of times he paused to comment "this would make a good post-grad/post-doc project". So, unless the AF has one hell of an accelerator stashed away that's somehow optimized for anti-particle creation, any practical work will have been in conjunction with the few existing big accelerators. Do some thesis doc searches with references to Fermilab, Livermore, and magnetic
bottles, and you'd have a start.
Something for the tinfoil hat people to keep in mind is that as it stands now, it takes a LOT of energy to produce enough anti-particles that would so much as sterilize a carton of milk, nevermind launch us to Pluto or send China on a Flying Leap Backward.
Oh my God! Their going to reverse the polarity! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Don't look if you ate recently.
Belay that last post.
All your base are belong to Google.
.rettamitan, ton rettamitna.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
When will we see a prize offered to spur development of civilian & commercial antimatter weapons?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Perhaps the best way would be to research the viability of capturing solar wind and converting it into antimatter on solar orbit? :)
That would solve multiple problems -- no risk to surface-based buildings, all source materials are radiated from the sun (solar panels + hyrdrogen, captured from the solar wind), containment fields would hold finished fuel, which can be picked up by a shuttle
Hm... but someone already thought of that, I am sure...
Hyperom.com
is that the terrorists SHOULD have hijacked a space shuttle.
/. and is taking notes.
It's ok, I bet Osama reads
It's called Angels and Demons!
Wow. Does SciFi really cover everything? Can't we think of new ways to kill / destroy?
-Tom
MOST of the damage from gamma rays is ionization damage -- i.e. atomic bonds are disrupted, not nucleii. Yes, there would be some nuclear interaction, but not that much.
With nuclear weapons, by contrast, the big problem is free neutrons flying around. Those are quite likely to disrupt nucleii and produce unstable (and therefore radioactive) daughter nucleii.
DNA just wants to be free...
...a goatse link.
Isnt it enough that the US is more than capable to destroy the world five times over, not counting pollution and bad movies?
Im sick of the US talking about terrorism. Im damn more frightened about those kinds of weapons in the hand of a country than terrorists killing small number of people randomly. Vote that warmonger and his evil friends to the stoneage i say!
HTTP/1.1 400
The antimatter dairy industry would thank you, and no one would have to scoop out antimatter litter boxes.
That's what we call those trucks. Honeydippers.
Mmmm-mmm what a yummy smell.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Sorry, but that tells us nothing. Apples and Oranges. First we're given a measure of nuclear power, then we're given a measure of combustion power. They can't easily be compared, unless you know that 1 nuke = X space shuttle fuel tanks (lets get out of junior high...)...
--<Mike>--
" either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn't emit radioactive fallout"
Good and bad. Good is no radioactive fallout... the long term consequences of their use, and the collateral damage, are dramatically reduced.
But thats bad too, since lower consequences will likely mean more likely to use.
The vast power of a small amount is also troubling. How easy would it be to use a small amount? Sure, any amount would cause a boom, but it might not be practical to weaponize small quantities with the difficulties of safely containing antimatter for long term use. From the article, micrograms are only equivalent to about 83 pounds of TNT, so if amounts that small can be safely and effectively weaponized it could be useful. On the other hand, how far does that initial gamma ray burst travel?
Interesting technology, but there are serious questions.
My bet's on KABOOM, but no ash or lava.
Where's my torpedo!!!
Stuff that anti-matters
Time for a sound bite change...
With all the posts talking about how much enery 1kg of antimatter releases, I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone who is worried that this is for weapons. ...), and the same country who invaded Iraq, because of supposed WMD.
Why the hell would we want antimatter weapons? 'Specially since the last time a nuke was used (correct me if i'm wrong) was in '45.
Doesn't a Nuke do more than enough damage already?
And this is coming from the country who is afraid of other countries that are starting up their own nuke programs (Iran, South Korea, India and Pakistan
Personally, I find it frightening that weapons like this are being researched. Shouldn't they be trying to work on weapons that cause less casualties and destrcution?
WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
Football Fields to the Three Halves would be the appropriate dimension to measure volume.
paintball
A Weapon of Matter Destruction?
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
They're also pursuing warp transport, light sabers, hyperspace, fusion reactors, gravitron drive, flux capicators, and terraforming.
Did I miss anything?
Wait...what about the bio-weapons division?
That will be really horrible...
duhh!
Why are they spending so much money on this shit when the Montauk project already did it?!?! They can get stuff and send it back in the past. When it meets itself in the past it will explode like antimatter due to the fact that it has a different phase. They can also trade some people to the Reptillians in exchange for a ready-made weapon. ...
Did you say there was a gag order?
Oh shit!... $%!$%!()@$*
When the hell are you going to need to destroy that much shit at once? When the land of Japan itself turns into a giant robot and threatens South Korea with its horrid bio-geo-robo-powers?
"The power of the sun...IN THE PALM OF MY HAND!"
-- Dr. Octavius. and they say movies don't predict the future.
I find your lack of faith disturbing. *Vaderlike breathing as a gimp in a black cape wraps duct tape, Dark Side out, around the offender's neck.*
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Whooah... For a second my mind thought my eyes saw:
"Anti-Matter Reich."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The thing that makes an anti-matter weapon so effective is that it will almost certainly kill whoever is dumb enough to invent one before they can release the weapon on the rest of the world.
If only nuclear weapons had worked so well, the planet would be a much safer place.
"We are pleased to report that the newly invented anti-matter weapon has killed its creator, ending the anti-matter weapon arms race."
If only nuclear weapons had worked so well, the planet would be a much safer place.
paintball
I think the most important part here is that the Air Force is interested in anti-matter research. If the government starts pouring money into the research, then maybe we will get cheap anti-matter. Anti-matter is only expensive now and there may be ways to get it cheaply. That, I think, is the most important part of this development.
Wait a minute guys... Who's carrying Weapons of Mass Destruction now?
Who is more likely to use this to actively attack other countries without being attacked first, just for the sake of politic and oil gains?
Oh, yeahm, The World Cops... Just a reminder: history reapeats itself, it's a cycle. Remember what happened to the Roman Empire. Or the Mourish after one thousand years in the Iberic peninsula. Or the Turk Otoman Empire... Yes,, downfall is something that may - and will happen...
Maybe we could start an antimatter project on sourceforge? We could call it Doesn'tMatter.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
...never let armed men with lots of money get bored...they just get ideas - big ideas.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Indeed. They eventually get their hands on everything else. Russia spies stole our secrets, spread the secrets to Pakistan when nuclear physisists were unemployed, who then sold them to Iran, Libbya, N. Korea, and who knows who else.
Spying is just too damned easy. Can't keep such a powerful geanie in the bottle forever.
Table-ized A.I.
If you strap a cat to the bottom of the elephant, and a buttered toast to the upper side of the elephant ..
..
..
Then we know that buttered toast always lands on the buttered side, while the cat lands always on its feet
So the elephant will never hit the ground, since there is no way it can land without breaking a natural law
So altitude doesn't matter - this is why there is no google unit conversion for it!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Now for the antimatter torpedos. Whats next, quantom, photon?
Assuming that 1 kW-h costs about $0.10 and that you could just put in the exact amount of energy needed to make up 1 gram of matter:
e=mc^2
e=(kg/1000) x 9x10^16
e=9x10^13 J
1 kW-h = 3.6x10^6 J
cost = $1/(3.6x10^7 J)
price = e x cost
price = $2.5 x 10^6
So 1 gram of antimatter costs about $2.5 million of energy. This is not including the costs of the equipment needed to make it, inefficiencies in its production, or any other concerns such as storage costs. In reality the cost of 1 gram of antimatter is probably in the $100 billion range per milligram, according to NASA. This means that the real price is around $10 trillion per gram.
Sapere aude!
You have to create the antimatter first by splitting normal matter - this consumes lots of energy, more than you get by combining matter and antimatter again.
So unless you use my hereby patented method to setup a deal with the Quadlipulians(, who live in the antimatter universe,) and trade matter for antimatter, this is not a power plant, although it could act as a battery, if you figured out how to extract energy from X-rays.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
It costs $0.15 to $0.20 where I live. At $0.10/KWH I'd be leaving lights on all over the house.
Considering the enormous energy generators required to get very far in space any truly warlike race would likely destroy themselves long before escaping their solar systems.
Constructing a stable containment system for antimatter would be necessary for both space propulsion and as a bomb of unimaginable power.
Lets just hope we dont turn out to be one of those warlike races.
-
antimatter costs absolutly nothing, The cost we would be paying is for the military contractors. If you could milk the tax payers for 40 years over a project where you never have to prove that you actually did anything, you just buy corporate jets, meet the president, send your son to yale and sit on your yatch, would you do it? If you said "I have antimatter in this vessel.", who would call your bluff?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
This question seems to be popping up, a lot. Well, there's a very obvious answer:
Asteroids
Hey, if helium makes your voice really high... would anti-helium make your voice really deep? That'd be cool! You could like sell it or something.
Bet you'd make a lot of money if you could find a large audience primarilly composed of, say, young males plagued with high pitched, nasaly voices. Hmm... now if only I knew of such a place...
No worries, we've all had days like that. :-)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
One of the people they talk about in the article is Kelvin Lynn, who worked on cold fusion. It's kind of sad. I guess there's only a fairly small number of scientists in the world who are willing to devote themselves to pseudoscience, so any time you hear about something flaky, it's likely to be some of the same personalities involved.
Find free books.
What, in case ANSI decides to standardize this tomorrow? Well, hot damn, I'm glad I've got a head start on this conversion software niche.
1
Well in THIS case it would have to be true anyway.
my high energy physics is a bit rusty but I am not aware that we have a universally accepted theory of WHY IS THERE MATTER MATTER EVERYWHERE BUT BAREELY A POSITRON OF ANTI-MATTER. Ask a physicist why matter/anti-matter symetry is broken. [why, when the soup of photons that was the cooling big bang began to coallesce into matter, we did not get about equal amounts of both spieces] I don't know if they can answer that. So what the AF proposes to do with your tax dollars is develop an application in an area of science where there may not be enough basic theory. For once, the Bush league, which by most measures does not know or care jack shit about basic science is going to wind up buying some. [now THAT is a reason for secrecy I would believe...they don't like being screamed at by taxpayers and laughed at by physicists]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
For some reason I'm thinking this thread has it all wrong. I bet this has nothing to do with making a bunch of anti-matter and storing it, putting it in a bomb and delivering it to a target...
Now, I know next to nothing about physics and any of this stuff but here's what I bet they are trying to figure out.
It's my understanding that anti-matter is currently made and studied today by using partical accelerators like CERN. So I'M BETTING that the military is looking at ways to perhaps fire beams of particles at targets. Or perhaps several beams that creatie the right effect when they converge with each other at the target. When they hit, or converge, perhaps they would create some (wouldn't hafta be much) anti matter, which would destroy the target matter. The scale would not HAFTA BE BIG AT ALL...
I'm thinking small here, something like a cutting laser!!! Sort of a slicing type of beam that could slice through anything as easily as scissors cutting through paper. I can't imagine our military wanting to utterly destroy destroy the opponents tank for example, if they could slice the gun and the tracks off cleanly, leaving the raw materials for us, and leaving the people alive to keep information.
I'm willing to be I'm on the right track here.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Funny, we've already managed to do that with conventional weapons in under 6 months. That, and we here at Pax Americana LLC want to take those supplies intact. Now your country on the otherhand...
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The price of that information is just slightly less than the cost of the instructions for building a General Products hull.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How to keep 1000 positrons confined in a container without touching its walls , which have electrons ? It would at least twice the energy in form of a insane high Voltage to make that happen. So i would say not impossible, but a total idiotic idea. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter : A penningtrap might do it. But ya need huge Magnetic and Electrical Field to confine the stuff in the center of the vacuum. Hmm nice...
:)"
And then suddenly El-Queida bombed the local power-station with a $10 Molotov Coctail. Oops. These defense droids must be operating on rat-brains for a long time now.
G.W. Bush : "Yeah less smoke em out! I'm a war president you know
Robert
"I'm not that good with numbers, but there's a shitload of people here"
I'm pretty sure that at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs in Berkeley CA, which happens to be controlled by the government, they have used the cyclotron to create very small amounts of anti matter. I went there several years ago, and I remember being fascinated by the fact that this stuff could release so much energy, yet had to be completely isolated.
just testing my account, please ingore
Is that enough anti-matter to destroy the world in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
it will go like this:
Nerd1: "We've got an Anti-Matter Containment Breach!"
Nerd2 "Doesn't matter"
Technician "shut up you fat dope, we're going to die!"
nerd2" I wasn't expecting some kind of Spanish Inquisition!"
Nerd1"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again."
nerd1&nerd2 "hehehehehe..snort"
"Kaboom!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Man will not rest until he (we) blows himself off the face of the planet.
It's rather tragic and sad, but then, so is humanity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
thats what we call the US of Ass in good ole europe now
Screw the antimatter, just strap the cat and toast to a dynamo. With enough of those units you could power a city, or maybe the toast and cat would cancel eachother out, as in the case of magnets..
Put that the other way round, antimatter bomb may make sense in terms of energy. Now, we know 1MT of TNT equals to about 4.6e15 J.
/yr. Say, after a decade, the scientists manage to improve the process such that the energy conversion efficiency reaches about 1%. The production of antimatter would equal to 69000 T of TNT of energy /yr.
A typical modern nuclear station is rated at 1000MW.
1000MW * 3600 *24 *365 = 3.2e16 J / yr = 6.9 MT TNT of energy
Consider the mini-nuke DoD wants to develop has about 1kT yield. A nuclear plant can give sufficient energy for make about 70 antimatter bombs. That's quite a lot and I am quite sure Pentagon is rich enough to devote more than a nuclear plant for the production if it wants.
Some may ask why small antimatter bomb matters. Mini-nuke bomb can be delivered by a cruise missile or even a 155mm cannon shell anyway... However, it paves the way for satellite based antimatter bomb program. You can load a geosync satellite, place that above whoever you don't like and annihilate at will... That's pretty evil.... but.....
OTOH, I see there may be peaceful use for this... The energy content of this is so high that it may be useful for triggering fusion reaction for electricity generation. Any physics people around here to comment on this?
1. POSITRON ENERGY CONVERSION
The modern Air Force runs on energy. The service has been using various forms of chemical energy to accomplish its objectives for the 50 plus years of its existence. Recent advances in physics are opening the door to a new realm of energy usage based on the famous E = mc2 relationship. Mass conversion to energy provides the densest source of energy known. Exploration of the possibilities of applying this source of energy storage to solving the Air Forces' problems is important and primary to accomplishing future goals. Whether in the form of antimatter research (positron production, containment and conversion) or in the area of advanced energetics, new, innovative, and efficient sources of energy are a must for future war fighting. Mr. Ken Edwards AFRL/MNAV (850) 882-8876, ext. 3387 kenneth.edwards@eglin.af.mil
We already know that the Air Force has brought naqueta back through the Stargate and it's an amazingly powerful substance.
Do we really need anti-matter when more and more G'oauld technology is falling into our hands every year. And don't forget the expedition they recently sent to the Pegasus galaxy.
Anti-matter. Bah.
Start a happiness pandemic
At last we will now be safe...
Don't GAG orders violate the 1st Ammendment to the US Consititution, and are, therefore illegal?
so, where are we to find an abundant source of antimatter? do we make it? because that would seem to be prohibitively expensive.
:)
if you were to produce a 20Kg(10Kg matter/10Kg anti-matter), how far would the gamma rays travel? this is the equivelent of a 400~MegaTon nuke. would their be a need for such a powerful bomb? in fact, is their a need for a weapon more powerful than the standard nuke?
as i see it, the nuke is only around as a massive deterent, even if it was not radioactive, their is not point in completely destroying land, it would be simply more efficient to have a non-physically destructive gamma bomb and just kill all the people. with a large gamma bomb you would be able to use the land that was nuked almost immediately. i'm not sure how you would create a gamma bomb without the corresponding BOOM! and falling of buildings though.
i feel that current deterent weapons like the nuke are sufficient, and that a antimatter bomb would have not practical use on our planet.
BUT, suppose we are not alone in the universe. What if some alien race shows up with techlogy on par with StarTrek:TNG, we KNOW that nukes don't do much to a galaxy class starships shields, but a 100Kg(2 Gigaton) antimatter missle just might
You See that! Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Eros
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I'm not sure I'm opposed to basic research into antimatter, though. I just wish that it didn't have to be classified six ways 'till Sunday.
I have a feeling that this will serve to keep interested physicists destracted from much simpler uranium enrichment.
It would burn their fingers like a son-of-a-bitch!
.yllear ton ,yllaer neeb evah dluohs tI
Sounds to me like the thing to do is to try making an "anti-neutron"(udd), since the positrons are being so unruly ;)
My guess is that antineutrons are harder to produce, since a positron would be much, much lower in mass... right?
Look behind you...
FYI, you can flat out determine the effectiveness of antimatter explosions using the google calculator.
1 kilograms in joules
Note: Use double the ammount of antimetter to calculate it
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Er, no. It was the U.S. Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court had ruled to continue recounts of undervotes and overvotes. The U.S. Supreme Court decided 5-4 to stop recounts. I think the Supreme Court decision was politically motivated, but even if Gore had won that decision, the recounts in the areas he had asked for would still have given Florida to Bush. However, if undervotes and overvotes through all the state had been recounted (as really should have happened), Gore would have the state and the election.
I am a physicist, and I was in the Penn State physics department with the physics guy in charge of this project, Gerald Smith. I didn't work with him, but scuttlebutt gets around, and the scuttlebutt wasn't good, either about him or about the project.
First: yes, as the article states, Gerald Smith was the department chair. However, he didn't stay there very long because he was a jerk.
Second: I'm much more likely to get hit by a falling safe than an anti-matter bomb. This shit is almost impossible to hold. They've been trying for years just to get enough of it so they can make an anti-hydrogen atom stable enough to see if it accelerates like a hydrogen atom under the influence of gravity. If they can't get 1, how are they going to 10^14 (i.e., 1 billionth of a gram)? And even if they make it, how are they going to store it, move it, use it? Hell, just the cryogenics alone make it non-storable. (Yes, this stuff has to stay cool, or the incredibly difficult job of storing it becomes impossible.) Oh, and if somebody says "positronium" instead of "anti-hydrogen", I say, "even harder". After all, anti-hydrogen has been made (if only incredibly briefly).
The original inspiration for making and storing anti-hydrogen was space travel, where the value would make up for the pain. Making another boom just doesn't cut it. What we have here is a scientist in need of funding, together with a bunch of schmucks without any common sense.
Steve Beach, MS in particle astrophysics, 2003.
----- Why sig when you can sign? PGP key id 7675D05E
>The M14 fires the .308 (7.62 x 51mm) cartridge, which provides virtually identical ballistics to the .30-06 (7.62 x 61mm) round in the M-1. All the .308 proved was that you could put a .30-06 into a case about a half inch shorter.
Modern gunpowder allowed the power of the 30-06 (in 1906) to fit in the smaller case of the 308. 308 is a great round and still in wide use today, however 223 cartridges weigh about half as much, mostly due to the smaller bullet. This allows your infantryman to pack twice as much ammunition with him - which is very important when using fully automatic weapons.
223 isn't horrible at distance either, if you are reasonably good you'll hit someone at 600 yards - especially since you get twice as many tries.
The next generation of ammo will be 'smart' as in the XM-29. There the tradeoff will be a larger shell that packs much more punch.
Well, these weapons are ALOT more powerful than a Nuke. Sounds like weapons of mass destruction to me. When do we invade ?? or is America lead by a Hypocracy rather than DeMOCracy
Now our sepcies has the power to destroy a small town in a convenient, 1 gram package? This kind of technology should never be researched or developed. Just imagine the consequences if such weapons were to fall into the hands of terrorists or even...*gasp*...the military. Instead of the infamous suitcase nukes, we would now have the equivalent in a soda-can sized bomb. We would enter the age of MWMDs...you heard it here first.
What is life, save a temporary victory over that which causes out inevitable death
It isn't a lie to have been honestly wrong about something.
It is a lie to claim that you know something, when you really don't know it.
There is a big difference between "We are pretty sure Saddam has WMDs" and "We know Saddam has WMDs".
That's what the military wants it for anyway. Dense energy storage.
Uh, they can't store anti-matter safely. They want to store it safely. They are doing research to store anti-matter safely. All this because anti-matter is incredibly explosive and may render nuclear bombs obsolete.
Let's hope they don't do this near my house--or even the same planet.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Maybe it's just because I grew up in the 80's which was during the height of the cold war (and the movie War Games, of course), but I've actually sat down and thought about the consequences of the U.S. duking it out with another country in a nuclear war (I live in Canada, BTW). These days, of course, it would be called a nukular war, which is a little different, but probably not any more fun.
I mean, it's not like everybody would die. Something like 40% of Americans live in rural areas, and most parts of the world would not be directly hit. But, the average family anywhere would live a pretty nasty, brutish, and short life after that. Billions would be sick from radiation sickness, which itself is torturous. There's no way current services and infrastructures would actually stay in control. The only way to maintain any kind of control in the harder hit areas would be to enforce a Saddam type rule.
And during all this, the only people mostly immune from all this destruction will be the people who pushed the button. They'll be safely tucked away in their mountain bunkers, while the rest of the world suffers the consequences.
Really, try imagining for a second, the complete collapse of society. How would you keep your family fed? How long would your ammo run out, if you bothered to stockpile any before the war? Would we even be able to find anything to eat that wouldn't kill us?
I know we all like the movie Mad Max, but is that really something to wish upon anyone?
Man, this world sucks.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Assume for a second that the Air Force might know something that "we" don't know. After all, quite a few physicists thought the A-Bomb was impossible as well.
all of these comments on energy output and calculations on new potential bombs so blind are you to the amount of death this could cause for how many people now? was millions enough for us? how about another couple million? just another statistic to you isnt it?
For Christ's sake. I'm sure the U.S. is the only country that can fund this kind of bleeding-edge massive weapons research at this point.
What the hell for? For something even more hellacious to be scared witless about after plans leak out in 30 years and we're jumping up and down about how much terrorists would like to use it against us? I can see it now: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a continental-sized antimatter disintegration! How can we not act?".
Add the automated robot army forces that Congress is demanding, and we can colonize any nation without American casualties, which is the only thing anyone cares about. Blech.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
[http://www.supafine.com/comics/news-archive-15-9- 2003.shtml|antimatter]?
[o]_O
I don't mean to sound like a raging liberal (ok.. so maybe I do..) but what good is a weapon that does that much damage? The days of armies lining up on battle fields is long over. Using a weapon like this will only increase civilian casualties. There is a reason why we don't want countries developing WMD. We should lead by example, and not development ourselves either.
I've been quietly terrified my entire life that some nitwit would discover an easy way of creating antimatter and let everyone in the bloody world build a TotalConversion bomb.
Please, paranoid U.S., don't do the research. It'd be the worse catastrophe in the history of the planet. TC bombs would not require rare radioactive materials. Just know-how. I don't know if anyone is trying for a TC bomb, but once someone dreams it up, eventually they will find a way to make it.
I was hoping to be safely dead when people started to build things I used to dream up.
Please don't do the whole let's-splice-a-kiler-virus-to-the-common-cold either. We've not spread through local space yet. One bright boy could loose the death of a world.
We don't need antimatter weapons. We really, REALLY don't. Who the hell are we fighting that we need this horror? Stem cell research is against God's Will but superbombs is okay? What crack is this country on?
Do we really want the people who can't tell the difference between Al Queda and Iraq to have this kind of power?
You will still have a "nuclear winter" where debris from the earth are blown up into the atmosphere. You will still have a shitload of gamma radiation ionizing and sterilizing everything in the blast radii.
If you want a super WMD (gee, didn't we invade IRAQ over those supposedly) that won't have alot of fallout, the "neutron bomb" is a better candidate (has little fallout and leaves buildings standing).
No this isn't about creating anything useful. Don't delude yourself.
This is all well and good for pure research, and may well lead to advances of a decent nature down the track (ie - powering spacecraft, etc)
...
BUT - the biggest operational challenge facing the US military at the moment, and for some time to come will be how to maintain a semblance of order and control over occupied cities populated by millions of pissed off ppl armed with ww2 era small arms.
If the future enemy of the US army is a 14 year old kid with an AK47 and a desire to avenge the death of his parents, then massive anti-matter bombs might be considered overkill.
For pure military applications, the R&D dollars would be better spent thinking up new and unique ways to control the minds of the masses. Maybe doping the water with MDMA would be a better option. This would also serve to make the occupied zones an attractive place for skilled IT contractors and engineers to move in
A cheaper and far more effective alternative
would be to have a serious look at re-writing the rule book on operational doctrine.
As many people have told you, you are in fact the evil twin. Don't feel too bad though, you're just "evil" in the nominal sense. Your clean shaven, "good" twin is an utter bastard.
As Stan told Evil Cartman in the Spooky Fish episode of South Park, "You know Evil Cartman, I like you better than our Cartman.".
Hmp. Very well.
"Air Force Researching Strange Quark Weapons"
The act of classifying this topic is to state categorically that a viable device(s) now exists. There is no other credible reason to classify this.
This reader would hope that Mr Linn is correct in that he found something usefull, and would also hope that this could be put to functional use as a space propellant. Electronium would seem to be a gas, and would lend itself to being used in small amounts, kind of like an exotic carbeurator. Such could be the holy mother of all rockets, and MHD power scavenged from the charged exhaust stream would easily power any ship using such a source for all its other energy needs. The only problem is, as always, storage. Good luck to all you researchers, the future awaits. It is the manifest destiny of man to claim our solar system as ours and to utilize its resources as well as those of our home world. Such would validate hope of a better future for all men and women everywhere.
See, you thought the Stardust comet chasing dust collector was for research. It is actually there to collect antimatter!
This is so if you don't vote for Bush, Cheney can vaporize you (Ref: unperson crimethink)
Many posts have mentioned that immense electrical power is required to make antimatter, as are immense particle accelerators, magnets, containment bottles with super hard vacuums etc.
Outer space has most of the expensive stuff available free.
A moon base or large orbital station could easilly produce sufficent electricity from solar collectors, and vacuum is free up there. That leaves building the machinery, which while expensive is not impossibly so. Think Superconducting Supercollider but without the need for digging the big friggin' hole for it.
Down the road a few decades this technology could become practical.
Uses are many. First is the best rocket fuel ever. Antimatter powered rockets? Small and incredibly fast, super duper cheap on reaction mass given 100% energy conversion.
Bombs? Same yeild as a nuke, but -clean-. Nice side effect of the gamma radiation is a cockroach killing zone of considerable size outside the blast effect area. One could light an antimatter device off over a city and cook the inhabitants without knocking all that much over, and without poisoning the place for 50 years.
Ultimate space-based ass kicker, antimatter rockets with antimatter warheads. Kind of like a large scale BFG 9000. Nuke 'em today, move in next week.
I'd very much like to see it not get built however. The rockets would be nice, but the temptation of a city killer that didn't knock down the city might be too much for certain world leaders.
To keep a nuclear weapon from exploding is relatively straightforward, because you have to actively push it together with explosives to make it do so. By contrast, an antimatter device desperately "wants" to explode, and you have to constantly work to keep it from doing so. The article briefly mentions the idea of storing antimatter as "positronium" putting a positron and an electron in orbit round each other. I'm no physicist, but creating a material sounds like an astounding technical feat, and there still remains the question of how stable it is.
The second point is that there is no antimatter available to us in nature; we have to make it in a particle accelerator. This is exceedingly inefficient; from what I've current accelerators are about 0.000004% efficient at doing this. According to the linked paper, physicists think they can improve this to about 0.01% with extrapolations of existing technology. Even that makes the cost of producing explosives purely using matter-antimatter reactions prohibitive.
As has been said a number of times on this thread, it makes much more sense to use antimatter as a trigger for a fusion reaction. This would provide a scalable, lightweight, and fallout-free (or almost so) weapon at orders of magnitude less expense. The containment problem would still be a serious issue, but the amount of antimatter you'd need to contain would be far, far smaller.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
So that's what the airforce has been working on to fight the Goa'uld with.
what sig?
The neutron is made of 2 down (electric charge -1/3 each) quarks and an up (electric charge +2/3), and has a magnetic dipole moment. The antineutron is made of antiquarks and has the opposite magnetic dipole moment.
Being bombarded by photons and wondering why you still exist? In a matter-antimatter annihilation, the energy and momentum are carried away by two photons. So in a photon-antiphoton annihilation, 2 photons go in, and 2 (indistinguishable) photons come out. Yawn. Not that photons interact with each other anyway.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
That's essentially what America has already. The response of its enemies? Developing nuclear weapons of their own, and resorting to terrorism...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As sarcastic as this is all going to sound, the nuke is passe. Seriously, we've lived with the things for over 50 years and it's not the harbringer of destruction it use to be. Part of that is because nobody has lit one off in anger in the last half century. That, and everybody wants one. it's the platue in weapondry. But antimatter? That's the new exotic menace. I mean come on, it's anti-matter... The name alone whispers untold amounts of devestation far beyond that of 'conventional' nuclear weapons. We're talking the stuff of legends here.
And that's ultimately the greatest use of something like this-- The mere threat of being utterly annihilated by some dark, exotic super weapon can very well be what makes the difference between saber rattling and something worse. Of course, side by side with your shiney new superweapon must be the will to actually use it. A weapon your enemy knows you won't use is absolutely worthless, regardless of how legendary it is.
That said, you're right. Space is definitely the best place for these badboys. But then, the same was probably said about nuclear weapons too-- Much too dangerous for Earth, but the evolved into a systems with serious redundancy built into them.
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The Air Force is also today talking about a new microwave weapon.
:) Some will read, "We finally have the materials where we're ready to build this generator," as, "we've had a design for this thing for sometime but we just know are understanding the materials necessary to make it work." Yeah, I'm probably feeding the conspiracy theorists.
The interesting bit is that they're using a superconductive coating in the microwave weapon. And it's about the size of a beer keg, they say, so probably not massively supercooled.
In space, this could extend the efficiency of the antimatter reactor.
And I'm sure it's just a cooincidence that this is coming out of Wright Patterson AFB, where they took the Roswell ship.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I guess USA must invade itself due to a secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction.
It would definitely make the life of a terrorist easier. Unfortunately most small and portable military technologies did, didn't they?
Except for nuclear (so far), but this one is easily detected by radiation.
I'm not against super-fuel-cells, but don't want to be cookedprovided to us, we must assume that the air force is developing weapons of mass destruction related program activit.. .err wait.. wrong.. uhmm. . yeah
Has no one read Angels and Deamons? Dont you know what will happen when the pope gets his hands on this stuff!!!
If they shut down the engines completely, you've got to have 30 minutes to warm up the anti-matter. You can't change the laws of physics.
Obligatory Star Trek / Photon Torpedo reference here.
-z-
-z-
of some TV show with the same concept...how wierd is that...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Don't think I'll be joining the Army any time soon...wouldn't want to be a valid target for this damn thing.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Look ma--no hands!
Why there is such an overabundance of matter. All of the matter in the universe is surplus, all of it particles that have not been annihilate by antimatter particles.
Why is there so much of a surplus? Is there an anti-universe just waiting to annihilate the one we live in?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
OK, OK, I know alot of these comments are jokes...but:- It's a shame that so many posters have taken the "Let's build the biggest weapon" route. If current circumstances prove anything, you can have the most technologically advanced weapon in the world, but if you don't know who to aim it at what is the point? My worry is that whichever government achieve this weapon first (because you can bet it's not only th e US who are working on this), they could get so paranoid about their 'National Defence' that they decide to use it anyway. It's great to think about the possibilities of these semi-understood sciences, but why must we always get so gung-ho about it? As a previous poster has said, why not fund a scientific research establishment instead of a military one? And yes, I have worked for a defence organisation, so I'm not a total pacifist! Just seeing things from a different perspective.
Every little step towards energy independence is a good thing...
All the torrents you could want.
The real excitement, though, is this: If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs.
This is kinda reminding me of the ep. where they talked to those Tallons who provided their neighbouring planet with an unlimited power-supply -- resulting in their destruction.
We finally find a way to create massive amounts of energy and what is it used for? Weapons.
Yay for the dumb-ass retards who came up with that bright idea.
There is 58 megatons of books there we could drop on 'the enemy'.
So, roughly speaking 1.5g of antimater, is equivelent to just dropping the entire contents of the Library of Congress, on a 1cm-odd square...
The bus. After all, its already used to describe the size of small asteroids.
Since we are talking about the amount of energy released when two particles collide, perhaps it could be expressed in terms of the energy converted by the head-on collision of two 8000kg busses travelling at, say, 50kph (metric makes the maths easier).
So the annihilation of 1g of matter and anti-matter is equivalent to 23.74e300 busses, and would probably result in the deaths of 76.63e380 passengers*
*All figures pulled directly from my ass.
Vaporize the Arabian world and, yes, the US would be able to win the war against terrorisme. I guess Bush would have already done it, if he hadn't had to keep the oil's safety in mind....
did anyone else read that as "i have a goatse..." and get conflicting images with "clean shaven..."
i think i need to get out more...
Weapons of mass destruction.
I heard that this is Duke's favorite weapon in Duke Nukem Forever...They're just waiting for the reality of this weapon to appear before releasing the game cause they want a more realistic feel for the game.
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
It may not fly, but how about we redesigntate 1g of antimater from being equivelent to 23 space shuttle fuel tanks, to just "1 can of whoop-ass".
Do we need a poll?
"How much energy is in 1g of antimatter"
a) 23 SSFT
b) 1 can of whoop ass
c) 40 MTons of TNT
d) It is exactly.... Joules
e) ummmm...
What happens if an object that touches another object is anihillated? do both objects disappear or only the one that was fired at?
I'd be shocked if this research hasn't been going on since the early days of the Cold War.
Since the first atom of anti-hydrogen wasn't created until 1995, it would shock me if it was.
The parent's post is not related in any way to its parent. The only reason that a3217055 replied to that post was so that his/her post would appear closer to the top and thus possibly accumulate more mod points. This is a form of kharma-whoring, and should not be rewarded.
A metric shitload?
That dimwit of a president of yours will soon be gone, and that money will be used to repair the already inflicted damage on your country, a litle bit might be left for it to operate on a shoestring.
the (US) Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons.
Well, shouldn't at this point the rest of the world start thinking about pre-emptively striking the US? I mean, they are openly and actively developing WMDs! These are no 'weapons related programs' (as some other countries got invaded for), this is the real thing! And even more powerful than nuclear technology!
Time to act is NOW!
Some early artificial hearts were powered that way as well.
"During the same period, Los Alamos developed a medical-grade fuel for use in cardiac pacemakers and early artificial hearts. The fuel in the artificial hearts was made of 90 percent enriched plutonium-238 and provided up to 50 watts of power. Some of the early pacemakers are still in use; some have been returned to Los Alamos' Plutonium Facility for recovery. " Link
Since alpha rads don't penetrate the skin, it's safe, as long as it doesn't fragment and get carried through the body. Still pretty scary though.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Positrons have been around for decades.
And when the terrorism you describe evolves to antimatter, it will make the "unthinkable" thinkable: nuking enemies like we now carpetbomb, gas and poison each other. Upping the ante(i) will make it that much easier, more likely, that we use those unusable weapons. Which is exactly the programme favored by that sick mass murderer, don Rumsfeld, as he changed US military policy to fit "tactical" nuke tips to missiles in his first years back at the Pentagon, under Bush. Other WMD news last week included Bush's spastic agreement with Kerry that "newkular proliferation" is the #1 threat to America's security, while Kerry trumped him with absolute assurances that he will scrap America's new nuke development programme. We're the worst source of new WMDs, and we underwrite the WMDs, especially nuclear, proliferation around the world against us. We've got to stop thinking the unthinkable, and be satisfied with the vast devastation we've already got in store in our boring old missile silos. We're the biggest terrorist on the planet, and we've got to keep the cap on the business.
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make install -not war
This sounds like the ultimate button-down weapon to me.
It would be possible to plunk down an antimatter warhead in the middle of a city and legitimately be able to claim that any sort of attempt to defuse the bomb would cause detonation. The enemy (however you define that) is forced to surrender or must abandon the city, which work out to the same thing in practical terms.
Also, of course, such a weapon would be the ultimate tool for a despotic government wishing to control its own people.
nuke the moon
Flight Director: "We've got to get more speed or our budget will be cut"
Nasa Engineer: "Aye Captain, I'll use the antimatter, but I dunno if it will be stable"
Flight Director: "Don't worry, if it blows we'll blame it on loose foam...No one will ever no"
One of the things preventing us from eliminating Iran and N. Korea as nuclear threats is the inability to neutralize their facilities without throwing up large amounts of fallout and killing many thousands downwind (not all of them enemy nationals either). If we were in a position to blow a hole in the ground and destroy their centrifuges and machine shops without contaminating the area with fission products, we'd be able to force the Teheran regime to blink.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Well, at this point it is unreasonable for them to get their hands on it. It is very hard to contain and it doesn't exist in sufficient quantities. I suppose in the future they could get some, after the proliferation of antimatter producing devices as well as suitable storage methods for large amounts of it (large relatively speaking, maybe a gram or so).
It's 'Pirsig.'
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Just out of curiosity, why does your page say "next" November? Has it just been up for a while?