ValnaoPlease drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time
Perfect time in history to just start transporting antimatter.
The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.
ObiniceThey just need to transfer power from the car’s inertial dampers to the containment field
those constrictors keep freezing on our starships, causing an overload.
Still though, we need a new HAZMAT category now.
its not like star trek, where they produces kgs at a time, which is nuclear level events if they “collide”
kgs
For reference, a single kilogram of antimatter reacting with regular matter would create an explosion only slightly smaller than the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, and well over a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
OR the V series, when aliens built a "anti-particle particle annhilator as a generator for humans, which was extremely volatile(because they were planning to blow it up using the same method with “grenade”.
I thought anitmatter was still mostly theoretical. Apparently they claim bananas give some off in the decay of potassium. I am skeptical they have a good handle on “antimatter” however, despite scientists claiming they have all of the answers now, just as every generation of experts claimed to have all of the answers, never being true before, but it is now, got it.
PoastRotatoThe folks at CERN have been generating antimatter (albeit in infinitesimal amounts) since at least the 90s; it’s far more than just theoretical.
I don’t doubt that, just doubt they have a good understanding of it’s role and all that.
If they completely understood it, they probably wouldn’t keep running experiments on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete unknown though.
Are you thinking of dark matter?
Not sure on dark matter and anti matter. In public schools they taught us matter came into existence by shooting matter in one direction and antimatter in another. Like they know.
Dasusby shooting matter in one direction and antimatter in another. Like they know.
Not exactly, no.
#The matter- antimatter asymmetry problem
###The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?
The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found. Something must have happened to tip the balance. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to figure out what happened to the antimatter, or why we see an asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Antimatter particles share the same mass as their matter counterparts, but qualities such as electric charge are opposite. The positively charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle to the negatively charged electron. Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy. During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, the hot and dense universe was buzzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. If matter and antimatter are created and destroyed together, it seems the universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.
Nevertheless, a tiny portion of matter - about one particle per billion - managed to survive. This is what we see today. In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why. Researchers have observed spontaneous transformations between particles and their antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay. Some unknown entity intervening in this process in the early universe could have caused these “oscillating” particles to decay as matter more often than they decayed as antimatter.
Tldr just because you didn’t properly listen or the teacher was shit doesn’t mean physicists are as ignorant about the subject as you think. No offense.
I reject the big bang. I don’t doubt there having been a bang that relatively seemed big.
Likewise I reject this leading theory.
Damn, we should let those experts who have been studying this for their entire lives that you reject the theory! They’re going to be so bummed they have to go back to the drawing board and throw out all the evidence and experiments they have done!
Hmm, who do believe, the nigh-consensus of pretty much all physicists, or… hector on the Fediverse?
I mean, one has literally millions of scientists and decades, if not centuries of established, peer-reviewed literature… and the other is a random stranger online who believes Charlie Kirk wasn’t shot for being a massive right-wing cunt, but “as the first victim of the war on Iran.”
Geez, that’s a tough one. Couldn’t possibly decide which way I’m leaning.
I’m calling it as a smooth sharks situation
I don’t give a fuck what you think. But I trust that the experts do not have all the answers which has never been wrong up until this point in time. But no you’re the smart one here.
But no you’re the smart one here.
Compared to you? Yes, I am.
If I had 1€ for everytime some cognitively limited champ says “well the scientists don’t know everything”, I’d have enough to buy a sufficient quantity of alcohol to forget I ever heard such bs.
That’s the core of science. Knowing you don’t know everything. If at any point someone in fact says they know everything, they’ve gone from a scientist to a religious lunatic.
No-one gives a fuck what you think. That’s why we read CERN and not your comments when we wish to stay informed on what’s going on in physics.
Are you still at it? Jesus bro, smoke some grass and chill out,. I didn’t read that drivel, because I don’t care what you think.
If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have answered. You’re affected, psychologically, which is why you had to reply because you think you’re “gonna get the last word”
You won’t, because eveyone is laughing at your ignorance and avoiding the subject only makes it worse.
You keep repeating “don’t care what you think”, implying you’ve given a lot of thought about how much you care and who’s thinking what.
thought anitmatter was still mostly theoretical
You thought wrong and that’s ok.
I am skeptical they have a good handle on “antimatter”
Which is more likely: you haven’t kept up to date on physics news, or the people who spend their lives doing physics don’t know what they’re doing? Be skeptical. But fix that by reading more. If someone is skeptical, but the answers exist and they stay skeptical, that’s just willful ignorance.
every generation of experts claimed to have all of the answers
No they haven’t. And no one is claiming that now.
This isn’t skepticism. This is “I don’t understand, I don’t want to understand, but I want to feel smart so I’m going to say they’re not smart”.
On the contrary, the universe, the state of matter, the mechanisms of astro physics, are the subjects most deserving of being skeptical of experts claiming to know things they have no way of knowing. Now you may be referring to some humble scientists, but the “exerts” absolutely do claim to know everything.
You dont have a good understanding of what science is. No scientist claims to know what charge is, what causes it, nor what dark matter is or dark energy.
Scientists say what they can say with reasonable certainty. If they state something, you can research why they state it, and find sound reasoning and experiment that supports it.
If you dont, you can disprove it, and then now you’re a scientist.
Just because you dont know a thing, doesn’t mean others cant know.
gandalf_der_12teI’d also like to interject that physics deals with models of how the world works, i.e. physicists make predictions about what would happen in specific scenarios. That has nothing to do with knowing what goes on underneath, because we can’t know that.
Consider quantum physics. It might be that the universe is indeed a wave and that’s just how things are. But it could also be possible that we’re living our entire lives in a simulation, whoever hosts the simulation is having a tea party and giggling at us silly being on how we’re confused by our observations. You can’t really tell these two apart, experimentally, since they would have the same outcome. So physics can’t really tell about what things are, just how they behave in certain situations. That’s why i think of physics as models, not theory (because “theory” carries a starker claim to absolute truth to me).
Why does “theory” carry starker claim absolute truth to you?
Theory, theoretical, these are not claims to absolute truth. Rules maybe, but then id say you’re more correct that they’d be rules of a model.
Relativity is a theory. Its in the name. You might not like it, but it is definitely a theory, and referred to as such by all of science. Maybe you call it model of special relativity, but you’d be the exception. However it would not be incorrect to refer to it as a model, either.
Why does “theory” carry starker claim absolute truth to you?
I think the word “theory” derives from the words “theo” (meaning god) and “ergy” (meaning work). So it’s “god’s work” literally translated.
What is meant by that is that people recognize the truth, such as truths about how the world works. The truth is called “god”, or rather, “god” in the christian context is understood to be the set of all truths. So mathematical insights and physics rules are a subset of god, because they represent truths of some sort. And applying these truths in practice, i.e. building machinery according to them is the work that people put into it. So people work according to “god”, i.e. according to rules. Like when you build a car, you have to know about thermodynamics. The knowledge makes you do the work. So it’s insight->work, or in latin/greek: “theo-ergy” or “theory” for short.
You have to remember that all these words were invented in the 1800 so it’s not unreasonable to claim that there’s a heavily christian background in them since that’s how people thought at the time.
This is the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever read. You’ve broken down a word to its roots, and then used its etymology to create a new definition of the word, and then claim that’s what the definition must be because of the etymology.
Whats the etymology of vaccine? I mean, there are so many words that have gone on to have a changed meaning from the roots of it. How a word developed and what it used to mean, does not determine the definition today.
There’s nothing theocratic about the theory of relativity. If someone says “oh I have a theory as to what happened” they are more closely saying they have a hypothesis, than they are saying they have God’s truth on the subject.
So, i question your authenticity in this discussion, because i find it hard to believe that you genuinely believe what you’re saying to me. Im skeptical you’re even a real person.
Quantum physics in no way implies everything is a wave. Physics academia is just filled with crackpot mystics who have an obsession over constantly inventing “paradigm shifts” and chasing the most bizarre interpretations of the mathematics possible and never have presented a shred of empirical evidence that their whacko crackpot claims have any basis in factual reality.
You can just split out the wavefunction into its real and imaginary parts, as two separate real-valued vectors, and convert it from Cartesian to polar form, and then it is clearly just a stochastic theory with non-classical stochastic dynamics, in fact the formula for evolving the probabilities is just the classical one + an additional non-linear term. I created a whole visualizer for this.
That is the simplified case for quantum information science / quantum computing. But you can do it in quantum physics as well, in fact doing it for particle positions is what led to Bohm developing is pilot wave theory, where the additional non-linear term is the quantum potential. We have always known that quantum mechanics is just a non-classical stochastic theory for decades, which there may or may not be an underlying deterministic reality, but there is no magic to it as if the entire world is a giant vibrating single multiverse wave.
But no one will tell you that because people are obsessed with chasing the most whimsical interpretations possible and lie to people about the mathematics that it somehow inherently necessitates their quantum woo.
Come on Hector, just go back explaining everything with baby Jesus back in your room and stop making an ass of yourself on public.
And yet that’s how you started this thread. Any chance you’ll be self aware enough to take your own feedback?
HanrahanYou an English literature major ? /s
Are you getting confused between antimatter and dark matter because antimatter has very much been proven to exist for longer than I’ve been alive.
I thought they already did this in 2024.
Protons on the move
The BASE international research collaboration, in which Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) is strongly involved, has successfully relocated protons outside of an antimatter laboratory for the first time with the help of an autonomous, open Penning trap. This breakthrough marks a significant step toward transporting antiprotons produced at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) to high-precision laboratories such as BASE-HHU, which operate independently of the research facility. As the researchers now explain in the scientific journal Nature, extremely precise measurements to compare matter and antimatter are only possible far from accelerator facilities.
Paranoid FactoidA few thousand antimatter charged particles could be used as an implosive trigger for a fusion bomb.
you’re off by something like 15-18 orders of magnitude
This is old, but you get the idea. See section 3.5.
Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: Military effectiveness and collateral effects
The paper begins with a general introduction and update to Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons (FGNW), and then addresses some particularly important military aspects on which there has been only limited public discussion so far. These aspects concern the unique military characteristics of FGNWs which make them radically different from both nuclear weapons based on previous-generation nuclear-explosives and from conventional weapons based on chemical-explosives: yields in the 1 to 100 tons range, greatly enhanced coupling to targets, possibility to drive powerful shaped-charge jets and forged fragments, enhanced prompt radiation effects, reduced collateral damage and residual radioactivity, etc.
The paper you linked says “1 microgram is sufficient to trigger one thermonuclear weapon” which corresponds to 6×10^17.
This makes your “few thousand” of by 14 orders of magnitude instead of 15, I bet you feel vindicated now.
For example, a device the size of a hand grenade with tons of TNT equivalent output
A man portable nuke has existed since the 60’s so it wouldn’t be a game changer.
LMAO, the little baby down voted you.
You’re getting the microgram statement from here. You miss the point. A millionth of a gram is feasible to make and contain right now. It was predicted by 2010 in the paper using CERN, and there are much better facilities producing since then.
You’re missing the point to be pedantic over a 20 year old paper. Because you originally thought I was arguing a pure antimatter weapon, which I wasn’t. Newer approaches reduce the antimatter requirements for such weapons even more.
This might make you wonder why antimatter is being transported around. The fact is, proposals to weaponize antimatter as a fusion trigger have been around for over 40 years, and the means to achieving that from a production and engineering standpoint seem a good bet to be available today.
Yes, but if you take the train or a private car you won’t be searched. To get it across international borders try smuggling among other cargo or by submarine, maybe even diplomatic courier.
interesting! i had wondered whether that exists. the wikipedia page on radionuclides seems to hint so since it gives 10 kg as a possible total mass of fissile material in a critical scenarion but i still had doubts till now.
it’s not a twenty year old paper, it’s a twenty two year old preprint which has all the reliability of a blog post. in 22 years, you can get born, complete all education up to masters degree and write a real paper that would be accepted in a real physics journal. the reason it’s not accepted for all these years is it is packed full of crackpot nonsense. it cites Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons ffs
RiskableTime Travelers from the future might recruit an entire school bus’s worth of geriatric retirees to prevent such a thing from exploding 🙂↕️
Great series. Glad it ended when it did.
WiddershinsIt’s a little late to have Blast Corps ready to help out but it’s never too late for a remake.
correct.