None of it matters if the controls aren’t responding. You’ll know, too, because they make that sad static beepy noise like some sort of Tactile Control Panel ACKnowledgement failure.
I don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.
indeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale)
indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations
I'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)
It's also the difference between 1lb and 6lbs also, so the analogy isn't perfect. The problem is that once you approach the limits of the average human ability, multipliers can transform something possible into something impossible.
I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before!
Even though you can't lift the 600 lb object it's still in the correct ballpark for illustrative purposes when dealing with orders of magnitude.
In a similar vein a 20 gallon fishtank and a small bathtub are approximately the same despite that I can't actually fit in the 20 gallon fishtank myself.
It was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.
Chicxulub impact estimated 300 ZJ, zetta being 10^21 giving us 10^23 and 10^-10. Avogadro's constant is 6×10^23.
So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.
I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).
According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.
That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.
“Antimatter in a truck” is great headline material, but the actual advance is portable precision instrumentation.
CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now
It almost could be a Hollywood movie in the vein of Sorceror. Couple of grizzled CERN vets transporting a volatile load of antimatter across a post-apocalyptic wasteland while being chased by energy terrorists.
This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...
I wonder what would happen if you had a solid piece of antimatter, say a gram of anti-iron... and just set it down. Would it really annihaliate immediately on contact with air, a lab table, or anything... or would the normal forces that keep us from falling through things still be in effect?
Either nothing would happen, or like molten salt in water, the joule currents would be instant and drive it all to go boom in a big way. I wonder which.
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.
Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.
Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap.
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon.
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
> According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.
Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.
(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)
Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?
Antimatter bombs are not a realistic technology. Aside from the unsolved technical issues - many, and fatal - no country has the GDP needed to make 1g of antimatter, which would make an explosion around 40kT.
We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.
There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.
When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.
Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
My memory is that 1g of constant acceleration grants sufficient relativity to make it to the edge of the known universe in a current human lifespan.
Now, it's true, there's some slight issues such as radiation, food storage/production, psychological effects, and any random space rocks obliterating your craft, all of which could reasonably turn out to be enough to make it not work. We also don't have a fuel source that can provide 1g of constant acceleration for 80 years for a reasonably sized space ship, though again my memory is that nothing prohibits it from a physics perspective (this is where my knowledge/understanding get prohibitively poor. I'm not sure how the math works if you stick a thousand ion drives to a spaceship that's already in space or if you just need a huge snifter of compressed hydrogen or if you can just use nuclear propulsion but I'm pretty sure that antimatter would do it, if you could bring yourself to waste the money. But maybe we don't have a plausible way to contain it so what do I know).
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe I glossed over what's currently considered a physics, rather than engineering/economic/materials science problem, but that's what it looked like last I checked.
You don't need new physics for interstellar spaceflight - 16 km/s of dV is enough. you don't even need to go that much faster to slowly spread among the stars. There are a lot of smaller bodies all the way from Sun to Alpha Centauri. As long as you hop between them within reasonable time in a few thousand years you can become a true interstellar civilization, while going at much-slower-than-light velocity (similar to Polynesian colonization of Pacific).
> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.
At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
How is it possible to make as hard of vacuum as they did? I assume it's not perfect, so what's the trick? Does the magnet setup create a volume that's simultaneously high probability for antimatter and low for everything else?
Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.
Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
Any compressed gas fuel is inherently dangerous. There's a video of a CNG-fueled bus falling off a lift and sending a fireball through the maintenance facility.
Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.
Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.
The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.
But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.
For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.
Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.
Not familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
> Various antiproton-powered rocket systems have been proposed. All of which rely on the particles released to supply direct thrust or to heat a working fluid by interparticle collisions or by heating a solid core first [14]. There is also the possibility to use the heated working fluid to generate electricity for electric propulsion systems [14].
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
my absolutely-non-expert guess is that it would work much like any other fuel? Combine with matter, get a lot of head out of it and use that in the best way we know.
I don't like antimatter because it's the most volatile fuel possible. If power is ever interrupted for any reason for any amount of time, the entire mass explodes.
A slightly less insane fuel source is a micro black hole. Drag a tiny black hole behind your ship and drip-feed it any kind of mass you come across. You still get >90% mass-energy efficiency which is far beyond anything else we know of.
Besides, one of the big problems with antimatter is that it's a battery, not a fuel source. We must first collect the unimaginable amount of energy and then process it into antimatter one particle at a time. If you build a ton of factories around a star you can get meaningful production. But a black hole drive can suck up interstellar gas or any asteroids you come across. Matter is easy to get. Don't ask where the micro black hole comes from.
They are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing is relatively simplistic, but that often isn't a problem when the story is good.
I just read Angels and Demons. My take is that it is quite gripping and entertaining, and has no other virtues. The prose is just ok, and everything built above that is increasingly nonsensical. However, I'll endorse burkaman's reply as an equally accurate and more charitable review. :)
His books are perhaps in the same category as Nickelback albums: people love to rag on them, but if you look at the sheer number of units shifted, clearly lots of folks enjoy them.
I am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
It would develop into "regions" of space that are entirely matter and others that are entirely antimatter. The boundaries between them would glow as stray particles drift between the regions and are annihilated by contact with the opposing particles.
The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.
It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.
Great explanation. One thing to add: annihilation happens with a very specific energy. Even if it was very far away and redshifted and dim, a "bubble" with a very uniform color (photon energy) would be plainly visible.
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
Unless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
You (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!
Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
well either way they're in opposite helicity states...
but yes, Majorana neutrinos nothwithanding, there are plenty of transported positrons detected by e.g. PAMELA and plenty of antimuons that go long distances.
Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
So it's hard to imagine biological life (chemical life?) without water or carbon, since they're such good solvents and building blocks, but we can at least imagine electronic or mechanical life which don't require them.
But what you can't get away from is heat dissipation.
Any life will use energy will generate heat will need to dissipate heat to maintain homeostasis.
Could you dissipate enough heat to exist at <10K, to maintain a technological civilization? Or would you be reduced to supercooling your entire environment?
Are there naturally occurring pools of liquid helium out there in the universe, maintained by natural processes, or are you left with vacuum relying on radiative cooling?
Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous
It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway
If it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies for the redundancies.
None of it matters if the controls aren’t responding. You’ll know, too, because they make that sad static beepy noise like some sort of Tactile Control Panel ACKnowledgement failure.
But we have to reroute power from life support because auxiliary systems are down!
Try reversing the polarity
Only on the unoccupied decks!
What is that in firecrackers?
Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable
Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
I don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.
There’s Anatoli Bugorski [1] who accidentally put his head into the path of a high energy proton beam.
The injury resembled nothing like being hit by tennis balls.
> He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.
He’s still alive today, age 83.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
Which kind of mosquito? European or Asian?
E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
> c^2 is a big number.
Famous tweet about conversations with God.
[1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219
Except the fine structure constant
indeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale)
indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system
8 minutes to do a mere 1AU. Pretty slow.
(not /s for clarification)
499.004783836 seconds. So, more like 8.32. I initially looked it up because I misremembered AU being a diameter rather than a radius.
Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
When we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an "approximately".
I'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)
It's also the difference between 1lb and 6lbs also, so the analogy isn't perfect. The problem is that once you approach the limits of the average human ability, multipliers can transform something possible into something impossible.
I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before!
(It does depend on where, of course.)
Even though you can't lift the 600 lb object it's still in the correct ballpark for illustrative purposes when dealing with orders of magnitude.
In a similar vein a 20 gallon fishtank and a small bathtub are approximately the same despite that I can't actually fit in the 20 gallon fishtank myself.
It was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.
Baby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the night sky
Or a warp core!
For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton?
For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
Chicxulub impact estimated 300 ZJ, zetta being 10^21 giving us 10^23 and 10^-10. Avogadro's constant is 6×10^23.
So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.
I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).
According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.
That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.
“Antimatter in a truck” is great headline material, but the actual advance is portable precision instrumentation.
CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now
Yeah, it's really impressive to me that they can make antiparticles, put them in a container, count them, transport them and count them again.
Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
It almost could be a Hollywood movie in the vein of Sorceror. Couple of grizzled CERN vets transporting a volatile load of antimatter across a post-apocalyptic wasteland while being chased by energy terrorists.
"More grounded..." I see what you did there ;P
“I have had it with these anti-matter protons on this anti-matter truck!”
Or something.
Next milestone: put it in Warptruck™ as fuel
A certain car company CEO is about to announce the availability of that in "5-10 years"
AI slop account
wtf? you're slop lol
I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
Much safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.
Surprisingly, teleportation is easier.
Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.
Had the same thought! haha
Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via 18-wheeler.
Unclear on the size of the apparatus require to secure the 92 anti-protons - did it occupy the entire truck?
Nope, it's pretty compact. The first image in CERN's photo gallery shows it being loaded into that truck: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2957407?ln=en
Of course, it's compact because it only has to last so long. CERN's press release discusses needing a generator and a cryocooler in the truck for longer trips: https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experi...
This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...
There's a photo towards the end which shows the equipment in the truck, it seems to be about the size of a mini fridge or a half rack.
I wonder what would happen if you had a solid piece of antimatter, say a gram of anti-iron... and just set it down. Would it really annihaliate immediately on contact with air, a lab table, or anything... or would the normal forces that keep us from falling through things still be in effect?
Either nothing would happen, or like molten salt in water, the joule currents would be instant and drive it all to go boom in a big way. I wonder which.
The charges are inverted, so anti-protons are actively attracted to protons.
It would immediately explode.
I think OP is proposing a lump of antimatter with no net electric charge.
My guess is that even in this case the lump’s positrons would immediately interact with the table’s electrons and explode.
Even without charge attraction, say anti-neutrons (I don’t know the term) would instantly resolve because neutrons are everywhere.
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.
Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.
Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon.
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will.
Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.
According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...
> According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.
Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.
(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)
Please do take it up w/Doser from CERN and/or the author of the source article; I just was parroting what he was quoted as saying.
Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.
That's just an engineering problem as well.
Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?
Antimatter bombs are not a realistic technology. Aside from the unsolved technical issues - many, and fatal - no country has the GDP needed to make 1g of antimatter, which would make an explosion around 40kT.
We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.
There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.
But they were wrong and we were right!
Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.
Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
Interstellar flight is a new physics problem, not a smash-the-tiny-rocks-together-to-make-bigger-bang problem.
We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
My memory is that 1g of constant acceleration grants sufficient relativity to make it to the edge of the known universe in a current human lifespan.
Now, it's true, there's some slight issues such as radiation, food storage/production, psychological effects, and any random space rocks obliterating your craft, all of which could reasonably turn out to be enough to make it not work. We also don't have a fuel source that can provide 1g of constant acceleration for 80 years for a reasonably sized space ship, though again my memory is that nothing prohibits it from a physics perspective (this is where my knowledge/understanding get prohibitively poor. I'm not sure how the math works if you stick a thousand ion drives to a spaceship that's already in space or if you just need a huge snifter of compressed hydrogen or if you can just use nuclear propulsion but I'm pretty sure that antimatter would do it, if you could bring yourself to waste the money. But maybe we don't have a plausible way to contain it so what do I know).
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe I glossed over what's currently considered a physics, rather than engineering/economic/materials science problem, but that's what it looked like last I checked.
You don't need new physics for interstellar spaceflight - 16 km/s of dV is enough. you don't even need to go that much faster to slowly spread among the stars. There are a lot of smaller bodies all the way from Sun to Alpha Centauri. As long as you hop between them within reasonable time in a few thousand years you can become a true interstellar civilization, while going at much-slower-than-light velocity (similar to Polynesian colonization of Pacific).
Not with that attitude, we're not!
> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion
Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.
> ideal spacecraft fuel
If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
Antimatter is a completely different story.
The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.
At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
You can easily put it into an antimatter tank ;-)
Only if you wear antimatter gloves while doing it.
Also, now your tank is just fuel as well.
You can throw matter on it. But this needs to be confined carefully...
How is it possible to make as hard of vacuum as they did? I assume it's not perfect, so what's the trick? Does the magnet setup create a volume that's simultaneously high probability for antimatter and low for everything else?
Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.
They are; something with no energy content can have no volatility either.
Surely you understand there's a difference?
Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.
Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
Any compressed gas fuel is inherently dangerous. There's a video of a CNG-fueled bus falling off a lift and sending a fireball through the maintenance facility.
Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
Which is why we generally don't use highly volatile fuels in vehicles, like I just said?
And, no, batteries can have outbursts but they're nowhere near as catastrophic as compressed, explosive gases or an antimatter bomb.
If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.
Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.
Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.
The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.
But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.
For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.
Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.
You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.
The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.
A very different problem then the one I proposed an answer to, no?
Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most common cause of launch delays.
With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
Not familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
> Various antiproton-powered rocket systems have been proposed. All of which rely on the particles released to supply direct thrust or to heat a working fluid by interparticle collisions or by heating a solid core first [14]. There is also the possibility to use the heated working fluid to generate electricity for electric propulsion systems [14].
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
Not the same paper, but goes into more detail.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266620272...
The always excellent PBS Space Time recently did an episode on antimatter drives:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eA4X9P98ess
Use the antimatter as an electricity source to power ion thrusters, maybe?
my absolutely-non-expert guess is that it would work much like any other fuel? Combine with matter, get a lot of head out of it and use that in the best way we know.
Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?
I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship
I don't like antimatter because it's the most volatile fuel possible. If power is ever interrupted for any reason for any amount of time, the entire mass explodes.
A slightly less insane fuel source is a micro black hole. Drag a tiny black hole behind your ship and drip-feed it any kind of mass you come across. You still get >90% mass-energy efficiency which is far beyond anything else we know of.
Besides, one of the big problems with antimatter is that it's a battery, not a fuel source. We must first collect the unimaginable amount of energy and then process it into antimatter one particle at a time. If you build a ton of factories around a star you can get meaningful production. But a black hole drive can suck up interstellar gas or any asteroids you come across. Matter is easy to get. Don't ask where the micro black hole comes from.
Angels & Demons anyone?
I'm currently writing a review/analysis of this book, so this was certainly a funny story to run into.
The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.
Not being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?
They are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing is relatively simplistic, but that often isn't a problem when the story is good.
See also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-o...
I just read Angels and Demons. My take is that it is quite gripping and entertaining, and has no other virtues. The prose is just ok, and everything built above that is increasingly nonsensical. However, I'll endorse burkaman's reply as an equally accurate and more charitable review. :)
His books are perhaps in the same category as Nickelback albums: people love to rag on them, but if you look at the sheer number of units shifted, clearly lots of folks enjoy them.
Read them for what they are (fictional novels with allusions to truth and fact) and you will truly enjoy a good story!
I am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
The more important question is not could we. it's should we
If we wanna do cool space stuff, the answer is definitely yes! Just maybe not here on Earth.
How expensive was that shipment?
https://home.web.cern.ch/order
What's this link supposed to be? Returns 404 now.
Online store for CERN-brand antimatter
Setting the plot for Angels and Demons... :D
Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp
I was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about it :(
I make a pasta/antipasta joke every time I'm at an italian resteraunt and no one ever laughs :(
Annihilation of Italian food is nothing to laugh at, and is in fact a tragedy
I thought the entire point of being given a plate of Italian food was to annihilate it, followed by some tiramisu.
One cannot image what would happen if antipasti and pasti collide!
oh, the canolli!
What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?
It would develop into "regions" of space that are entirely matter and others that are entirely antimatter. The boundaries between them would glow as stray particles drift between the regions and are annihilated by contact with the opposing particles.
The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.
It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?
Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.
Great explanation. One thing to add: annihilation happens with a very specific energy. Even if it was very far away and redshifted and dim, a "bubble" with a very uniform color (photon energy) would be plainly visible.
There's a great episode about this on History of the Universe yt channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJGaqe5t14g
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
Very, very bright.
Annihilated.
Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
Unless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
The energy used in creating and containing this antimatter was many orders of magnitude greater than it would release on collision with matter.
The most expensive bomb ever.
Only 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat
You (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!
This just in: seasonal affective disorder confirmed to be caused by antiproton deficiency
Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
Yet Papa Johns still forgets the 20 oz soda I had ordered.
pssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!
That's a contentious statement! We're not sure if they are or aren't.
More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02110
well either way they're in opposite helicity states... but yes, Majorana neutrinos nothwithanding, there are plenty of transported positrons detected by e.g. PAMELA and plenty of antimuons that go long distances.
Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
The disadvantages of water-based life.
So it's hard to imagine biological life (chemical life?) without water or carbon, since they're such good solvents and building blocks, but we can at least imagine electronic or mechanical life which don't require them.
But what you can't get away from is heat dissipation.
Any life will use energy will generate heat will need to dissipate heat to maintain homeostasis.
Could you dissipate enough heat to exist at <10K, to maintain a technological civilization? Or would you be reduced to supercooling your entire environment?
Are there naturally occurring pools of liquid helium out there in the universe, maintained by natural processes, or are you left with vacuum relying on radiative cooling?
Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
Tell me this involved dilithium crystals. Please tell me this involved dilithium, I want to live in Gene's future.
No. That would have created a warp field around the container.
She canna take much more, cap'n
antimatter is not what the average person thinks it is from science-fiction
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
Stop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.
Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
There is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough dovnvotes for today
Actually it should require an anti-license.
I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.
I know this is all just tongue-in-cheek, but for the record, they only drove it around for 30 min around the lab site, not on the open roads.
I only want to charge 1CHF for each charged particle hauled in that transport.
All I know is that you cannot transport toilet paper in tunnels.