[HN Gopher] Antimatter has been transported for the first time
___________________________________________________________________
Antimatter has been transported for the first time
Author : leephillips
Score : 311 points
Date : 2026-03-25 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| comrade1234 wrote:
| What is that in firecrackers?
|
| Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a
| mosquito in flight
| schindlabua wrote:
| Which seems suprisingly high given that it's _92 protons_
| worth of antimatter!
| dandellion wrote:
| Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and
| you can actually feel it hit your skin.
| adonovan wrote:
| The subject of this story is a single proton that you
| would definitely feel if it hit you:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
| api wrote:
| E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| 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
| mememememememo wrote:
| 8 minutes to do a mere 1AU. Pretty slow.
|
| (not /s for clarification)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| 499.004783836 seconds. So, more like 8.32. I initially
| looked it up because I misremembered AU being a diameter
| rather than a radius.
| gopalv wrote:
| > c^2 is a big number.
|
| Famous tweet about conversations with God.
|
| [1] -
| https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219
| xeonmc wrote:
| Except the fine structure constant
| nikhilisvalid wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the
| kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| When we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one
| sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an
| "approximately".
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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)
| Zancarius wrote:
| 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.)
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.
| Anonbrit wrote:
| It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire
| cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable
| vivid242 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Baby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the
| night sky
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J _per proton_?
|
| For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems
| to the forward shields anyway
| techsystems wrote:
| But we have to reroute power from life support because
| auxiliary systems are down!
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Only on the unoccupied decks!
| malfist wrote:
| If it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies
| for the redundancies.
| alansaber wrote:
| Only 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat
| observationist wrote:
| 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!
| cluckindan wrote:
| This just in: seasonal affective disorder confirmed to be
| caused by antiproton deficiency
| luc_ wrote:
| Setting the plot for Angels and Demons... :D
|
| Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp
| brumbelow wrote:
| "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
| imhoguy wrote:
| Next milestone: put it in Warptruck(tm) as fuel
| antonvs wrote:
| A certain car company CEO is about to announce the
| availability of that in "5-10 years"
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" _is_ pretty SF. More
| grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| sincerely wrote:
| AI slop account
| brumbelow wrote:
| wtf? you're slop lol
| zahlman wrote:
| 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_.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Tell me this involved dilithium crystals. Please tell me this
| involved dilithium, I want to live in Gene's future.
| rbanffy wrote:
| No. That would have created a warp field around the container.
| antonvs wrote:
| She canna take much more, cap'n
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of
| teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
| drob518 wrote:
| Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott
| yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock
| onto the antimatter.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Much safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Surprisingly, teleportation is _easier_.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Had the same thought! haha
|
| Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via
| 18-wheeler.
| fatbird wrote:
| 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.
| brendanfinan wrote:
| https://home.web.cern.ch/order
| MinimalAction wrote:
| What's this link supposed to be? Returns 404 now.
| brendanfinan wrote:
| Online store for CERN-brand antimatter
| ozim wrote:
| 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.
| post-it wrote:
| I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking
| regulations here.
| jayrot wrote:
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| I only want to charge 1CHF for each charged particle hauled
| in that transport.
| ahoka wrote:
| All I know is that you cannot transport toilet paper in
| tunnels.
| elil17 wrote:
| 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.
| kakacik wrote:
| There is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough
| dovnvotes for today
| rbanffy wrote:
| Actually it should require an anti-license.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter
| look like?
| drob518 wrote:
| Annihilated.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Very, very bright.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| 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.
| isolli wrote:
| How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from
| us?
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| 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.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| 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.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| 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)
| a-priori wrote:
| 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.
| aftbit wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The more important question is not could we. it's should we
| aftbit wrote:
| If we wanna do cool space stuff, the answer is definitely
| yes! Just maybe not here on Earth.
| csense wrote:
| 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?
| d_silin wrote:
| Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms.
| A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
| wiredfool wrote:
| 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.
| d_silin wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| Not with that attitude, we're not!
| d_silin wrote:
| 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).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn
| everything into Hawking radiation.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?
| nkrisc wrote:
| I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation
| to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.
| adrianN wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship
| yibg wrote:
| 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?
| goda90 wrote:
| Use the antimatter as an electricity source to power ion
| thrusters, maybe?
| jjmarr wrote:
| > 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.
| ..
| daveguy wrote:
| The always excellent PBS Space Time recently did an episode
| on antimatter drives:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eA4X9P98ess
| BiraIgnacio wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most
| common cause of launch delays.
|
| With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| 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.
| queuebert wrote:
| 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.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the
| form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of
| fuel.
| amelius wrote:
| The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your
| spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| A very different problem then the one I proposed an
| answer to, no?
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| teiferer wrote:
| > 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...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| They are; something with no energy content can have no
| volatility either.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| 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_.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| micw wrote:
| You can easily put it into an antimatter tank ;-)
| antonvs wrote:
| Only if you wear antimatter gloves while doing it.
|
| Also, now your tank is just fuel as well.
| micw wrote:
| You can throw matter on it. But this needs to be confined
| carefully...
| nomel wrote:
| 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?
| bovermyer wrote:
| 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.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country
| before you destroy some other.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| That's just an engineering problem as well.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| But they were wrong and we were right!
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| garciasn wrote:
| 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...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.)
| garciasn wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| Sardtok wrote:
| Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
| M95D wrote:
| The most expensive bomb ever.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| 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...
| zahlman wrote:
| The energy used in creating and containing this antimatter was
| many orders of magnitude greater than it would release on
| collision with matter.
| cozzyd wrote:
| pssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!
| MengerSponge wrote:
| 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
| cozzyd wrote:
| 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.
| d--b wrote:
| 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.
| M95D wrote:
| The disadvantages of water-based life.
| nout wrote:
| I was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about
| it :(
| NanoWar wrote:
| One cannot image what would happen if antipasti and pasti
| collide!
| rmujica wrote:
| oh, the canolli!
| spbaar wrote:
| I make a pasta/antipasta joke every time I'm at an italian
| resteraunt and no one ever laughs :(
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Annihilation of Italian food is nothing to laugh at, and is
| in fact a tragedy
| dylan604 wrote:
| I thought the entire point of being given a plate of
| Italian food was to annihilate it, followed by some
| tiramisu.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| 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
| ck2 wrote:
| antimatter is not what the average person thinks it is from
| science-fiction
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
| diwank wrote:
| Angels & Demons anyone?
| nimonian wrote:
| The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a
| special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.
| 0x3f wrote:
| 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?
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| Read them for what they are (fictional novels with
| allusions to truth and fact) and you will truly enjoy a
| good story!
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| xeonmc wrote:
| See also:
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-
| fun-o...
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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. :)
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I'm currently writing a review/analysis of this book, so this
| was certainly a funny story to run into.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| Unclear on the size of the apparatus require to secure the 92
| anti-protons - did it occupy the entire truck?
| accrual wrote:
| 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.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The charges are inverted, so anti-protons are _actively
| attracted to_ protons.
|
| It would immediately explode.
| munchler wrote:
| 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.
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