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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!
SSFTs are now units of energy?
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.
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!
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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How many megatons yield per aircraft?
OK, now I'm scared.
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Shouldn't that be -1 gram of anti matter?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Good question. I'm curious if these will be radioactive like nukes. If you got the 'bang' without having the radioactivity, wouldn't that be _less_ scary than a nuke? I'm obviously not a quantum physicist, and I dont even play one on /.
Perhaps one of you big-brained types could enlighten me? Thanks.
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.
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- 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
No no you're thinking of naquadria.
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.
Mole problems? Call Avagadro, 602-1023
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
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.
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.
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Look for a patent infringement suit.
A bigger bomb isn't the answer. Guerilla warefare has shown you have to fight door-to-door. Daisy-cutters, as impressive as they were and 'Shock and awe' seem, upon reflection, to be greatly overrated in their effectiveness. People fear nuclear weapons, not just because they can kill so many, but because they can poison the land for years to come.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Okay rate me off-topic, but is anyone researching the "Anti-weapons matter"?
That kind of depends on what scares you more... a higher propensity to use these weapons due to low radiation or a great fear of using these weapons due to high radiation.
I'm scared shitless either way.
But destructe research wins over constructive alternatives hands down.
Given that matter + anti-matter is a purely destructive process to begin with, it isn't surprising that this is a key area of military research. On the brighter side, tons of everyday inventions funnel down from military funded projects, so it's not all doom and gloom.
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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?
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.
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.
As energy storage, maybe. But right now it takes millions of times more energy to produce a unit of antimatter than you get by annihilating that unit afterwards.
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.
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!
Silly boy - we need anti-matter weapons to secure mid-east oil supplies.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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
If you keep enough of it around to use as fuel for a power plant then you have a chance of the magnetic containment field failing and your facility converted to component atoms.
At least it won't have all that nasty residual radiation. Sure, there will be one big-ass hole in the ground, but I suppose we could just make a lake out of it.
Because of the vast amount of energy required to create antimatter. The sun is an energy source because it's there and only needs to be harnessed. Likewise sun created energies such as wind, wood and petroleum. The energy has already been created and stored.
Any energy you have to 'make' invokes the Second Law. This doesn't mean you shouldn't bother, because we still need ways to store and transfer energy, which is what we do with hydrogen, antimatter or storage batteries. The fact they are total energy negative isn't the point, it's that they put the energy where we want it in an extractable form.
And extracting energy where you want it is what weapons technology is all about.
Lots of energy. It doesn't matter what that energy cost you in energy.
KFG
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. =====
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
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.
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!
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.
Uh, basic physics, people. The Universe is comprised of matter, not anti-matter. You can make anti-matter, but it takes a heapload of energy (recall that E=mc^2 applies to anything that has mass), and 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.
So, you can use it to create a nice bomb, but it's equivalent to pumping up a pressurized bottle with a lot of air -- the only energy that's going to come out is the energy that you've put in to create the anti-matter. You make some anti-matter, find a way to confine it and later release it in a controlled fasion and you get a very nice bomb which is incredibly powerful given the mass of the active ingredients. But you cannot use it as an energy source because unlike coal, oil, natural gas and uranium, it isn't freely available: you have to make it.
This is in stark contrast with nuclear fusion and fission: there is lots of available material lying around in the ground and in the seas, just waiting to be extracted and used. While you can find ways of generating anti-matter without putting too much energy into the process (eg, by triggering nuclear decay) you just don't get that much mass very quickly. Unless, of course, you've got a right raging nuclear reaction going, and, then, well, your problems of bomb making are pretty well solved.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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 ?
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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.
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?"
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...
"How about research them...as an energy source.
But destructe research wins over constructive alternatives hands down."
Um, yeah, so? Desctructive research is cheaper, and gee, that's also the job of the airforce. What do they need an anti-matter power source for? That's like complaining that cheetahs eat animals when they could be protecting them from other predators.
"Derp de derp."
.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.
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.
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
What do violas have to do with it? Did Stradivarius use antimatter to achieve his results?
~*~ Tara
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
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).
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
What I meant was 1 burning library of congress should be enough to satisfy the current administration.
"Piter, too, is dead."
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
This raises an interesting question: why aren't "units" like "Library of Congress", "VW Bug", and "human hair" included in the "units" program?
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During WWII we found that the standard-issue rifle round (.30-06 at the time) was a lot more powerful than it needed to be. Going into the war, they expected infantrymen to be able to conduct aimed fire out to 600 - 1000 yards, so they adopted a rifle (M-1) and cartidge which was effective at these ranges. However, once they actually looked at real-world performance they found that soldiers were doing very little aimed fire and that most targets more than 250 yards away were engaged with heavy weapons.
In keeping with these findings, they redesigned the primary infantry weapon to have a less powerful cartridge that had full-auto capability to provide suppressive fire vs aimed fire. A smaller cartridge means that an infantryman can carry more rounds for the same weight. This gave us the M-14. The problem with the M-14 was that it was still too powerful for an average soldier to fire it on full auto. So, they went to an even lighter rifle & cartidge and got the M-16.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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?
What? You have a problem with Footbal Fields Squared?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
Less radioactive. Alot of what you see in a fission bomb is the "unburnt" materials being dispersed by the explosion, the fallout. This just won't exist with anti-hydrogen (I'm assuming this is the most synthesizable element). However, even with fission, not all of it exists beforehand, when you have neutrons flying fuckfast all over the place, some stick in a nucleus here and there producing what are usually small halflife radioactive elements. A m/am would produce lots of all different sorts of radiation and fast particles... there is sure to be something created that lasts longer than a split second. And of course, immediately after the explosion, everything far enough away to avoid being vaporized will be dosed heavily.
It might very well be more scary, and not just from a power perspective... assume something as big as a nuke, but as (nearly) clean as a conventional explosive. The temptation to use it might be greater, the inhibitions even less.
BTW, anyone want to speculate on H/anti-H bombs? No neutrons to shoot all over the place, but at least a few protons (I'm assuming less than 100% perfect mix). And what happens when an anti-H atom hits oxygen or nitrogen, how does that work exactly?
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?
USAF is still FOUO. The other levels are the same. There is also an unofficial classification that is used called sensitive. Basically, anything that reveals personal info is sensitive and treated as FOUO, even if it's not marked that way.
Okay, I know this is going to be a troll but what the hell...
How is obliterating a country with two or three of these babies any different that obliterating a country with tens of thousand of 500 lb bombs like we did to Germany in WWII? The net effect is the same. The only really scary thing about nukes was the effects of radiation.
We've forgotten what war is supposed to be. It's supposed to be brutal, ugly, horrible, and something we don't want to do on a regular basis. But war is also supposed to be a process by which we destroy stuff and kill people.
That's because the existence of the SBU classification is itself classified SBU. The grandparent poster has been detained and is currently "assisting authorities with their inquiries".
Now, (/me puts on MIB sunglasses), if you and the rest of the /. readers would all look over here at this pen-like object in my hand...
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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.
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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?
Wake up, folks. It's bullshit.
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).
If you think that 3 million deaths over 60 years makes the US government the worst in history, you should go back to the history books.
In African history, there were plenty of times when 3 million over 60 years would pale in comparison. Then, look into the colonial period of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. Between the numbers of natives murdered, worked to death, killed by disease, and the slaves brought in to replace them, 3 million over 60 years wouldn't look so bad at all. In fact, one particularly dark period of Belgian rule in the Congo brought about 10 million deaths over 40 years.
Germany, of course, slaughtered far more than 3 million (perhaps as high as 11 million) during WW2. The Russian gulag system would rival the 3 million mark, and that was perpetrated against it's own citizens.
I'm not in any way taking any side on any part - American or otherwise. I'm just saying that your statement of the US government being the worst in the history of the world would take an awfully skewed, narrow viewpoint to accept.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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
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.
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
You are both correct and way off base. The 5.56, while technically not as powerful as the 7.62 round has one distinct advantage over it's larger competitor. The 5.56 round "tumbles" and shreds on impact, thus causing a considerable amount more damage to the target. A 7.76 round at medium range will, if it misses a bone, pass right through the target leaving them with a good chance of living via a clean wound.
However, someone shot with a tumbling 5.56 will be more likely to sustain tremendous internal injuries that will require immediate medical attention or otherwise result in death.
The 5.56 is smaller, but much much nastier.
Correction - The bomb needs 23 space shuttles to deliver it...
--- This
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!
Not quite true. The neutron bomb was actually developed as an anti-armor technology, because tanks and their ilk are very resilient when it comes to 'normal' nuclear blasts. The fast neutron radiation from neutron bombs is excellent at penetrating armor and killing the crews of such vehicles. Unfortunately, the blast radius is roughly equivalent to the lethal radiation radius, so infrastructure still tends to be creamed by the blast. :)
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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."
Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power
Thank goodness. One of the biggest problems with nuclear weapons is their lack of power.
Don't look if you ate recently.
" 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.
3 million tutsis were slaughtered in a mere three months with nothing more than machetes.
3 million people die every single day for no reason what so ever.
Who gives a fuck about 3 million people? There are 6 billion on this planet, and thats looking to double every 25 years. What is the bigger problem here? 3 million deaths? Or 100 billion new lives?
I so tired of the ridiculous value judgement that death = bad, life = good.
We are on the verge of destroying the world. Its not because of some vast conspiracy. Its because everyone on this planet wants to keep fucking and having lots of children. Maybe if 10 million died every day, we could prevent this planet from turning into one gigantic apartment complex.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
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"
I couldn't think of it when I posted, but I found a very readable article from someone at SLAC about the mystery of m/am asymmetry
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.
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.
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
"America, we're not quite as bad as Stalin or the Nazis"
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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...