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Scientists Propose Collider That Could Turn Light Into Matter
An anonymous reader writes "Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light — a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorized 80 years ago. From the article: 'A pair of researchers predicted a method for turning light into matter 80 years ago, and now a new team of scientists are proposing a technique that could make that method happen in the purest way yet. The proposed method involves colliding two photons — the massless particles of light — that have extremely high energies to transform them into two particles with mass, and researchers in the past have been able to prove that it works. But in replicating that old method, known as Breit–Wheeler pair production, they had to introduce particles that did have mass into the process. Imperial College London researchers, however, say that it's now possible to create a collider that only includes photons.'"
Dudes, you are solving the problem, in reverse: we want instant energy from dirt.
Table-ized A.I.
Wouldn't it be better to actually perform the experiment first? Theories are dime a dozen. I have thought about this myself many times but I wouldn't go straight to a publication and publish my conjecture as though it is some sort of fait accomplis. Sounds more like a funding-raising exercise than serious science.
Aren't you supposed to "make light of the matter", and not the other way around?
I preface this with an admission that my serious physics studies were like 25 years ago now, but - photons are bosons, how can they "collide"?
Perfectly Normal Industries
These scientist haven't discovered how to create matter from light. That's already standard theory. What they have done is devised a clever experiment to test this.
This is a process that is already being studied. It's usually called "photon fusion" or "photoproduction". Using a laser as a source of photons instead of the usual bremsstrahlung + Coulomb field doesn't change any of the physics.
Light was already turned into matter back in 2001 by Lene Hau at Harvard.
When the light pulse disappeared, the mass of the sodium increased.
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/ha...
I believe the summary is confusing concepts. A 'proposal' for how to do something, but not actually having implemented the proposal to see if it actually works IS NOT the same as 'discovering how to do something'.
There is a huge, fundamental gap between
I suggest we try doing X to accomplish Y
and
I did X and accomplished Y
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
My first thought was 3d printer. Imagine deposing one atom tick layers of any element in any shape. eg; The Star Trek synthesiser.
But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.
How often do this happen in the "real life" universe?
What is the threshold for creating matter from light? Can there be some factor not yet discovered where some matter is re-created from light in the universe today?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.
Okay, let's say you want to make a cup of earl grey tea from energy alone. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend you are providing the cup and the only thing you need to create is 250 mL (~8 fl oz for those of us in the benighted US) of pure water at 100 C. I chose 0.95835 g/cm3 as the density of H2O @ 100 C.
Synthesizing that water from pure energy in a 100% efficient process that magically created only the appropriate molecules would require approximately 6,000 gigawatt-hours of energy, aka 2.15E16 J (hooray for e=m*c^2 being on-topic for once in forever). FWIW, the absolute minimum amount of energy required is equivalent to over 5 megatons of TNT .
For reference, the generating capacity of the entire United States is approximately 1,000 gigawatts . So, uh, in some mythical 100% efficient conversion of electricity to matter it would require the entire generating capacity of the United States for over 6 hours (line losses, oh my!) to produce the water for one cup of earl grey. If you want to stay true to concept, let's say your tea needs to be ready in 5 seconds. Okay, that represents 4.3 petawatts .
So, no, I doubt a ban will be what stands in the way of you getting your replicated earl grey.
Besides, anything that created that much power would be instantly weaponized.
So what kind of matter would be produced? Some element we are already familiar with, or something entirely new?
If you assume we have a way to convert energy into matter with 100% efficiency, then it's not far fetched to assume we'd also have a way to convert matter into energy. So, you can save yourself all the calculations, and just grab 250 grams of waste products from the ship's waste disposal system, and turn them into a cup of Earl Grey tea.
If you assume we have a way to convert energy into matter with 100% efficiency, then it's not far fetched to assume we'd also have a way to convert matter into energy. So, you can save yourself all the calculations, and just grab 250 grams of waste products from the ship's waste disposal system, and turn them into a cup of Earl Grey tea.
So, uh, at that point why are you even bothering with a matter/energy conversion? Just use the cleaned, recycled water directly. I already have a machine that can "3D print" a cup of 95 C water, and all it requires is a water reservoir and a 1300 W heating element. I have to bring my own cup, but that was already stipulated.
No matter the result, they'll surely be able to make grant money go poof at the speed of light.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't need a computer. Can can just use this vial or ink, this feather and this roll of papyrus to write message and do calculation.
Converting waste matter into energy and then into usable matter is very convenient. You literally can convert shit into food without any risk of bacterial contamination. It also eliminate all waste. No food will ever go spoil. The right amount is made when needed.
You clearly lack perspective for not seeing this.
I don't think human civilization would survive for long in a universe where a monkey could trigger instant mass energy conversion. I'm hopeful that whatever progenitor race created our universe would have had a little foresight in that regard.
You have forgotten that no process will be perfectly efficient unless someone invents some new thermodynamics. You are talking about "waste" of a few hundred grams of easily-recycled organic matter (or water) by channeling megatons worth of energy. What's a few percent of waste heat generated on a process that is pumping quadrillions of joules around? Entropy always gets its pound of flesh.
But hey! We *saved* some water we could have, you know, could have distilled into purity using today's technology by using an infinitesimal amount of that waste heat that would be inescapably generated by pumping around those megatons of energy for pointless matter/energy conversions!
A possible use for this is propulsion in space with no fuel. Even ion thrusters need fuel, and eventually run out of Xenon gas. If you can create matter in this way, it would, at least in theory, be bossible to make an engine which use only electricity from solar panels to make electron/positron pairs, and acellerate those in the opposite direction of where you want to go. Enabling satellites to stay in low earth orbit forever, and geostationary satellites to stay in position until it is time to de-orbit. And it would actually be economically feasible to de-orbit them, it will just take a very long time.
This is a good point. If we ever get to the point of being able to efficiently convert matter into energy with negligible loses, then science fiction becomes far more believable. The "scarcity" of resources equation hard wired into our biology would be irrelevant. The physics is simple, but the engineering is a real bugger.
Good to see. The analogy to theoretical physics I use is, it's the difference between Imagining you are getting laid to getting laid.
I don't really use that analogy, it just occured to me and now i am sad.
We are doomed. Dooooooomed.
My guess: Matter and energy are much of the same thing, E=mc^2 shows this. You put enough energy in a small enough space, its pretty likely that matter and antimatter condenses out of the energy.
Put two high energy photons in a small enough place....
You have forgotten that no process will be perfectly efficient unless someone invents some new thermodynamics.
Current thermodynamics works fine enough for what is suggested. Thermodynamics allows for next to ideal conversion.
true but that same progenitor might also bind those same monkey on one planet so that they don't threaten every other planet with their ways.
Do you want to go to the stars? Or do you want to be stuck on earth were 50% of the population are morons?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Please mod this up and GP down. +5 Ignorant.
Or do you want to be stuck on earth where 50% of the population are morons?
Fixed that for you.
Regards,
The other 50%
Back in 1997 at Stanford green laser light was smashed into gamma rays to produce matter.
Scientists Use Light to Create Particles
Photons of light from the green laser were allowed to collide almost head-on with 47-billion-electronvolt electrons shot from the Stanford particle accelerator. These collisions transferred some of the electrons' energy to the photons they hit, boosting the photons from green visible light to gamma-ray photons, and forcing the freshly spawned gamma photons to recoil into the oncoming laser beam. The violent collisions that ensued between the gamma photons and the green laser photons created an enormous electromagnetic field.
This field, Melissinos said, "was so high that the vacuum within the experiment spontaneously broke down, creating real particles of matter and antimatter."
This breakdown of the vacuum by an ultrastrong electromagnetic field was hypothesized in 1950 by Dr. Julian S. Schwinger, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 1965.
Emphasis mine.
Thus, we do know that we can create matter by colliding photons already. The new experiment proposed could be useful because it does not require the electron-photon collision near the detector in order to produce the gamma photons and subsequent light on light reaction. They'll be firing gamma rays through a cylinder full of black body radiation. A gamma-gamma collision would be more interesting, IMO. The new gamma or black-body radiation collision experiment should be of even lower energy than the gamma and green laser collisions which produced matter in 1997.
Why even go for a lower energy apparatus than what has been demonstrated at all? Simple: To verify the minimal energy level required to make the vacuum puke.
Total energy output of the sun per second: 3.8×10^26 J (source: wikipedia)
This amounts to 4.22×10^9 grams per second,
or about 18 million cups of tea per second.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Just curious - do you think that the 50% who are morons includes those who can't spell "where"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Not at all. In science, there is just as much validity to "we did X but didn't get Y" as there is to "when we did X, Y was accomplished." In fact, Michelson and Morley are a prime example of "we did X but didn't get Y" in 1887, and they won the Nobel prize for it in 1907.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
If you compare the energy output of a single power station today to the energy output of all the camp fires in one night of prehistoric human history, it probably seems like a massive difference.
We know that future technology will be orders of magnitude bigger / more powerful than current technology.
And it's cool to think that, maybe, when you have a warp core that powers a space ship going FTL with many millions of petawatts of energy, some star trek technology like replicators might come true :)
Current thermodynamics works fine enough for what is suggested. Thermodynamics allows for next to ideal conversion.
Gotcha. So, in order to avoid boiling some water to distill it to purity, you're going to be doing a matter/energy/matter conversion. In order to come out ahead of using a simple boiler, your ~9 petawatt (two conversions in the requisite time doubles the power) process is going to need to be 99.99999999% efficient or so.
Even a 99% efficient process would dump 90 terawatts of waste heat. The waste heat of your process would represent approximately 1/10 of the power of an average hurricane. Remember, you're claiming we would do this in order to "save energy" by not distilling a quarter liter of wastewater.
In summary: just because science develops a method that allows something to be done does not imply it will ever be the favored technology. We developed the means to create gold via atomic bombardment a long time ago, and that process will never supplant gold mining.
And it's cool to think that, maybe, when you have a warp core that powers a space ship going FTL with many millions of petawatts of energy, some star trek technology like replicators might come true :)
True, but somehow I doubt that anyone will ever be glib while wielding the power of the entire generating output of the Sun, for example (call that 100 billion petawatts). The power at that scale could destroy entire solar systems if a mishap or violent use were to occur.
If you weren't aware of the Kardishev scale, you might find it intriguing to consider the implications of a Type II civilization wielding the power of the entire Sun or to think about what a Type III civilization could accomplish.
I would think that atomic level manipulation of base materials would be far more efficient than simply trying to convert energy into the desired state of matter.
I'm afraid that we've already got everything we need to make a much more comfortable society even with "just" the technology and resources we have now. That fact that we don't shows that something else is hard-wired into our biology: how to be complete and utter assholes.
I suspect even with completely free everything we'll still find ways to have taxes and rich and poor people.
Mostly random stuff.
Tea, Earl Gray, Hot
Not entirely devoid, no, but in my experience (as a former researcher; still have the CERN employee ID card) there is still some that is free of politics. The fact that results need to be reproducible to be accepted helps. The main concern is funding. As long as you can confidently tell your backers that there is money to be made either way, or find different backers with vested interests in different results, there is no pressure to fudge results. In fact, the project I worked on (ATLAS) had no outside input asking for bias in results that I could see in any way, shape or form. Of course, if that was the case universally nobody would question vaccines, but it still happens often, especially in fields like particle physics (which this article is talking about) in which application is so far down the road that most financial backers really are looking for the spinoff technology it takes to produce the result moreso than the result itself.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
But you couldn't be bothered to capitalize Earth ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Consider this: If the power usage/content of our technology truly scales in the futre as it did from the past to the present then in the future a malfunction in the equivalent of somebody's cellphone today would have the energy to explode like a nuclear weapon. Perhaps there is a flaw in your logic somewhere?
If mankind or it's decendants ever have access to power like this it isn't going to be in the hands of individuals. It will be in the form of massive projects conducted in space far from any lifebearing planet. Even if we had the ability to give everyone a matter replicator we wouldn't because the potential for tragedy when working with that kind of energy is far too high.
Ah, but it can it also create the necessary flavoring to create something which tastes almost, but not entirely, unlike tea?
Because your way you have to start with water and end with water. If converting the matter to energy and then from energy to matter you could hypothetically start with say, trash in a landfill or silica sand or water and print your cup of earl grey or a kobe steak.
That won't happen because depositing a layer one atom thick, unless it is depositing at least on the order of tens of thousands of layers every single second, you would be waiting days or even months for an object to finish being manufactured that is only a few centimeters high.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are working from the assumption that you have some water in the first place. But what about the tea? What about the cup? What if it were a steak or some fuel?
Dudes 3D printer is essentially the star trek replicator. If you can't see how a replicator is useful you are a hopeless cause. Also, there is nothing to say the waste from inefficiency in the process has to be heat.
In an imaginary world where we can replicate anything by converting energy into matter an atom at a time we can convert matter into energy an atom at a time. It stops being scandalous to be wasteful of energy at that point. It's no longer a rare commodity.
Know what else you could do with it? Extremely high velocity space propulsion.
Well, either the math or the science. And if we were 100% sure the science would work there'd be no point in doing the experiment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Pair production from gamma rays has been observed in bubble chambers for decades. Just the reverse reaction of positron-electron annihilation.
In an imaginary world where we can replicate anything by converting energy into matter an atom at a time we can convert matter into energy an atom at a time. It stops being scandalous to be wasteful of energy at that point. It's no longer a rare commodity.
How does that follow at all? You still have to get the energy from somewhere, you can't just print batteries that are used to power the battery printing machine. The process for converting matter into energy involves either the same principles we use today (e.g. the mass deficit in fission and fusion reactions) or a source of antimatter. And even with an infinite source of energy given an imaginary world... you still have to deal with dissipating waste energy. If it turns out something needs gigawatts of power in a cubic centimeter and it is only 99.9% efficient, you're going to run into some problems.
The way I see it, it's like putting in energy to convert water to steam, pump the steam to the dispenser and then extract the energy again to condense it to water. If that energy is just stored somewhere, and used to heat the next batch of water (assuming 0 loss which goes against entropy) you only need the energy to pump the steam about.
If you have solid matter in one form, and know a process similar to boiling that converts it to energy, then pump it as 'light' to the dispenser, you then can reverse the process and end up back where you started.
The question is, how do you keep a reservoir of energy, similar to that used to turn water to steam, available to keep the matter/energy/matter conversion working.
When you consider distillation, in super slow motion, what you are doing is providing enough energy to allow one molecule of water to break surface tension, escape the van der Waals bonding and move to a condenser, where you sap the energy away leaving it to forma a liquid again.
One assumes that the future tech process will do something similar, it will atom by atom convert one material to energy, and recombine it as another material elsewhere. Then, similar to how it takes the application of energy over time to boil up a whole kettle of water, you have a steady process for doing it with matter conversion.
It's still totally sci-fi, and ludicrous, but then so to is propelling a space ship at speeds approaching c.
Um, Praxis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
That's a really awesome analysis... but I'm an engineer. Any "replicator" that I designed would probably have a water tank, since most food is mostly water. I'd probably have other hoppers full of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. The stuff you need to materialize out of light would be a small fraction of the total food: trace elements, vitamins, minerals, etc.
Now if you want it to work with other things besides biomass, well...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Since we are speaking of mythological devices here, the franchise which contains this mythical replicator has proclaimed that the ship that powers the replicators can regenerate up to 4,770,000 TeraWatts.
Go here to get your SiFi Geek On
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Makes you wonder, do we need these complete and utter assholes? They say that a statistically significant number of CEO's would pass, or fail, (depending on your POV) a standard test for psychopathy.
Was the chieftain of the old wattle and daub hut village a psychopath? Was he out for his own interests and needed to use all those around him to get it? Was his goal to provide himself with a nice big hut to live in, but in order for that to happen he needed to be charismatic and persuasive, and ultimately all the people who helped him ended up with huts (albeit smaller) to live in too.
He was an entrepreneur! He was also probably bigger and much more prone to cracking your skull if you didn't do as he asked. Better still, he probably had people on his side to do that for him.
If someone was sick, or unwilling to go along with the plans to better the society as a whole, who was responsible for lacking empathy and kill/drive these people out of the unit? It's quite possible that a certain % of the human population is, by 'design' (note, I don't mean intelligent design, just evolutionary design) supposed to be psychopathic, to be someone who, by thinking only about themselves, accidentally improve the lot of the community as a whole.
Perhaps, when we as a race have nothing more to improve upon, we can do away with this %. What worries me though, is that, because of how society is changing, many of these psychopaths are no longer working as intended, and are now working for themselves at the detriment of society as a whole. Take the MPAA as an example, they are working for themselves, and potentially improving the lot of a choice few people (their perceived tribe) but since the world is no longer made up solely of tribes, and is a complexly interlinked society, the elevation of their tribe is actually an exercise in simply trying to drive everyone else down.
Just a thought...
Sometime in the next few hours, quantum mechanics would predict a particle or two being emitted.
Oh, you want to measure that against background noise? I guess you'll need a bigger flashlight. Maybe try the big six-cell ones.
That is all.
I'm an engineer as well. The "fabricator" approach you describe is much more tenable than an energy-based replicator.
Practically speaking, what would need to be synthesized from energy? Not vitamins (those are organic compounds and you already listed the C, H, and O hoppers, to which I will add N). Technically, you don't even need an H2O tank because you have H and O hoppers. The trace stuff for biomatter is, well, trace. Easy enough to keep those elements around in hoppers as well (I can see the design review now: "Shall we use a few trace element hoppers or shall we channel a few exajoules for shits, giggles, matter synthesis, and catastrophic failure modes?")
Of course, all of this stuff is highly abundant on Earth, so I was envisioning applicability in a starship in interstellar space where there is a dearth of ambient matter. Even then, I would anticipate such a technologically advanced machine would have equally technologically advanced recycling capabilities and an appropriate loadout before departure.
Honestly, given humanity's history of running into practical efficiency limits that are far below the thermodynamic theoretical bounds, about the only thing I can think of where this technology would be useful would be for a long-haul interstellar starship that paused close to stars and converted the abundant stellar energy into potential energy via creating matter/antimatter to keep in fuel tanks for later use.
That's barely enough to satisfy British demand, let alone that of the civilized world. And we haven't even figured in energy needs for beer production, yet.
That is all.
Na, all you have to do is slow down the speed of light 100,000 times and you can produce that cup of tea with only 600 watts.
Yes lets just change a fundamental constant of the universal. Where did I leave that Higgs field manipulator...
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
If mankind or it's decendants ever have access to power like this it isn't going to be in the hands of individuals.
I hope you're right. Individuals can't even learn to use apostrophes or spell correctly, let alone manage upcoming energy/mass-conversion-capable smart phones.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
My first thought was 3d printer. Imagine deposing one atom tick layers of any element in any shape. eg; The Star Trek synthesiser.
But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.
This technology is self banning thanks to E=MC^2. How many cups of earl grey do you think you can pour out of a single warp core?
Ah, but it can it also create the necessary flavoring to create something which tastes almost, but not entirely, unlike tea?
Yes, but they're trying to refine the process such that it doesn't also create a sperm whale and pot of petunias as a byproduct.
By definition, 50% of the population are not morons.
It's like saying 50% of the population are geniuses.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well fuck it, just build an inverted spherical solar panel around the sun, crank out some Earl Grey, and blast the fucking thing near the speed of light to whatever starship ordered it. Problem solved.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
I don't think we ought to capitalize its human name. If arctic terns or geese have a name for this planet, that'd be good.
Thanks for the link. I think the ST guys let their imaginations get the better of them. That is an order of magnitude more power than the sun's radiated power hitting the earth.
In a universe like this, one would expect planetary annihilation to be commonplace rather than, say, the infantry combat seen in DS9.
Ours might not survive it...but a new one might come in with a 'bang' ...until the next evolution of monkeys figures out how to do the same thing...
--- Mercutio was right.
Nice!
You do realize your cellphone ALREADY has a powerful explosive in the back of it? It's called Lithium (it's the component in lithium ion batteries), and it REALLY does not like water. All you need to create an explosion is a multi tool, and some water.
Yet, how often have you heard about people blowing up their cell phones?
Since the industrial times, a lot of innovations have given individuals the ability to do a lot of damage if they use their tools incorrectly. Someone with a car who wants to go on a killing spree can be quite effective. Yet, mostly people don't. Because actually people are not interested in killing other people.
So long as the dirt is Uranium, then I think we have already done that. Along with a few other elements. As it turns out, it can be rather dangerous, and its largest problem is public opinion.
Before you start saying "but regular dirt", we are also talking about building a collider, which costs many many billions of dollars to look at he possibility to do these sorts of things on a level barely perceptible to human detection at all... so none of that!
You make a good point, but what about the converse? You point out how people don't make lithium molotovs from their cellphones, but how often do we read about lithium batteries in phones, laptops, iPods, etc inadvertently catching fire? Relatively frequently, right?
Now replace that with a device that can channel megatons worth of energy.
A poorly maintained vehicle might crash and kill, say, 1 to 20 people. A poorly maintained replicator might lose containment and annihilate everyone within many square km (i.e. nuclear bomb type devastation). If that were in an urban area, the death toll could be in the millions.
So when do we get the Holodeck?
If this thing works I will absolutely eat my (holographic) hat!