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Design Starting For Matter-Antimatter Collider

Posted by samzenpus on from the dump-the-warp-core dept.

couch_warrior writes "The Register is carrying a story on the early design efforts for the next generation of high-energy particle accelerators. They will be linear, and will collide matter and antimatter in the form of electrons and positrons. The obvious question will be: once we have a matter-antimatter reactor, how long till we have warp drive, and will the Vulcans show up for a sneak-peak?"

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong Question by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The obvious question will be: once we have a matter-antimatter reactor, how long till we have warp drive, and will the Vulcans show up for a sneak-peak?"

    Actually, I think the next question would be: "Now how can get some antimatter?"

    It's my understanding that we can only manufacture ridiculously minute quantities of the stuff, and that may take more energy to make than we'll get out of it anyways.

    1. Re:Wrong Question by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, I do call that minute. Positrons (the cheap stuff) costs ~$25 Billion per gram. "Hundreds of billions" of positrons is a few orders of magnitude less than that (to put it mildly).

  2. Duh! by andre.david · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.

  3. Re:antimatter by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Funny

    Antimatter is like matter, but with an opposite electrical charge.

    Kind of like your karma points for that comment ;)