CERN Scientists Capture Antimatter For Record 16 Minutes

[Alar]

I can imagine how freaking excited those scientists must have been... did they literally jump from a few seconds to sixteen minutes? Something tells me they might've been hoping for a minute at best, and then they get this? There must have been fanboy and fangirl squeeing that one typically only hears at a major announcement during an anime convention!

 

[Xaio30]

What we need right now is antistupid. Preferably in huge quantities before the few remaining smart people are overrun and humanity goes back to the caves.

This!
A billion mother f*cking times, this!

Seriously, embroid that with golden thread on the biggest piece of cloth you can find and I will wave it until my bones break and my brain explodes.

 

[Android2137]

Scientists, why?! Why are you all so determined to kill us all?! Someone hold me. I'm scared.

 

[ImprovizoR]

I want this to allow warp speed in the future!

Seriously though this is really exiting. I can't wait to find out what they'll learn about it.

 

[McMullen]

Many, many, many words.

Well, I'm feeling particularly appeasing today and don't want to pen a counterpoint to examine the nature of a relative conception of reality, so I've edited out the bit about exploding the thing.

I was tempted to replace it with "which would almost certainly create awesome superheroes," but you'd likely take offense at that too, wouldn't you Captain Buzzkill?

The creation of superheroes isn't so bad. Very few people would mistake that for a real thing.

I'm not sure what you mean by "relative conception of reality". I have a sneaking suspicion that you are trying to throw words around that let you pretend it's impossible to be right or wrong about something, but that may be because I've recently reread Cryptonomicon

If you think pointing out misinformation in a news article is a buzzkill, then I'm just going to have to be thankful that you edited out what you did and hope that you get bored of journalism quickly and move on to other things.

 

[Hungry Donner]

It should be noted here that nuclear bombs and antimatter have very little to do with each other, other than that both are capable of releasing a lot of energy in a short amount of time by converting mass to energy.

That's a good point, I shouldn't have jumped from one to the other without clarifying.

Despite it's enormous energy-release capabilities, it doesn't work well as a source of fuel because 1) it's hard to make, 2) you can't store it in conventional containers without it combining with them, and 3) the second law of thermodynamics says that, as with all fuels, in the process of making antimatter from scratch you lose more energy than you would get back from it.

Antimatter might be useful for portable power sources. You can't send an interstellar probe out of the system with a massive solar array, but you can use a massive solar array here on Earth to power a device that makes antimatter.

But this only makes sense if there's a low-energy trick to storing the stuff. Otherwise you'd need a conventional generator to power the storage device, so why not use the conventional generator to power the probe instead.

I have to imagine we'll have nuclear fusion figured out well before any practical applications for antimatter arise.

 

[Antari]

So when Cern vanishes in a blink of light we'll know what it was atleast.

 

[Lonan]

Can someone please explain to me what an "anti-matter bomb" is, and whether it has any chance of coming to exist in reality or whether its just some joke made by the OP?

Very unlikely as you would have to be able to store anti matter which is not possible at the moment. Basically when matter and anti matter combine they release lots of energy to make your own equation to find out how and do this.

1 gram of matter and 1 gram of anti matter would result in a bomb of a yield 86 tonnes of TNT. For playing around to see how powerful you can get just take the value of Matter so say 1kg and the speed of light squared 9*10^16 and multiply by 2. That is the energy. For tonne TNT yield then divide than by 4.184*10^9.

Could you provide a citation for what you've said about anti-matter? Or failing that, be willing to tell me what your profession is?

 

[Leppy]

"...in 2004, the annual production of antiprotons at CERN was several picograms at a cost of $20 million. This means to produce 1 gram of antimatter, CERN would need to spend 100 quadrillion dollars and run the antimatter factory for 100 billion years." I'd stop worrying.

 

[McMullen]

Scientists, why?! Why are you all so determined to kill us all?! Someone hold me. I'm scared.

Scientists don't want to kill you. They've probably saved or improved your life many times over, both before and after you were born. This journalist and others like him, along with Hollywood and various others, sometimes have a difficult time writing things that are interesting and so they find cheap ways to create drama to engage their readers/viewers. Science, because it is often poorly understood by much of the general public, is a spooky enough thing to many people that it lends itself to these tactics the way old mansions lend themselves to horror films.

CERN is not, nor is anyone else, producing antimatter for an energy source or weapon. It is far too impractical, difficult, and expensive to do so. Its greatest value is for use in medical equipment to help diagnose diseases (like I said earlier, science generally tries to save or improve lives rather than end them) and work out some flaws in our current understanding of the universe.

I highly recommend taking any news story about science with a huge bag of salt unless it's from a site or publisher that is specifically dedicated to helping the public understand science. Most news organizations are very unconcerned with accuracy in such stories, and many of the writers on this site like to completely make things up in their stories, even while they complain about mainstream journalists making things up about video games.

If you're curious, a few posts back you should be able to find a link to a faq on the CERN site explaining what antimatter is, what it behaves like, why they are making and studying it, and why no one in their right mind would or could ever use it as a power source or weapon.

 

[Keava]

Wait. Wait. Didn't they did that like month ago? PopSci [http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/cern-physicists-trap-antimatter-full-quarter-hour-eclipsing-previous-efforts] had article about it happening on 3rd May. Im bit confused? Maybe they got stuck in time loop? *enter dramatic music*

 

[vrbtny]

The first thing I would do if I worked at CERN would be to turn to my co-worker and say "I dare you to stick your hand in there."

Ninja'd

 

[McMullen]

Can someone please explain to me what an "anti-matter bomb" is, and whether it has any chance of coming to exist in reality or whether its just some joke made by the OP?

Very unlikely as you would have to be able to store anti matter which is not possible at the moment. Basically when matter and anti matter combine they release lots of energy to make your own equation to find out how and do this.

1 gram of matter and 1 gram of anti matter would result in a bomb of a yield 86 tonnes of TNT. For playing around to see how powerful you can get just take the value of Matter so say 1kg and the speed of light squared 9*10^16 and multiply by 2. That is the energy. For tonne TNT yield then divide than by 4.184*10^9.

Could you provide a citation for what you've said about anti-matter? Or failing that, be willing to tell me what your profession is?

Try the CERN faq. The link to it was posted on the second page. Failing that, the equations here are very straightforward and you can do them yourself. You need the equation E=mc^2 (Energy=mass*the speed of light squared), the value for the speed of light, and the rate at which CERN produces antimatter, which you can get from the above-mentioned link. Don't take my word for it, google is your friend.

The important thing here is that even though a gram of antimatter can destroy a city, it takes an unimaginable amount of atoms of a substance to make a gram of it (in hydrogen's case, somewhere around 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms (Avogadro's number times the molar mass of hydrogen, google is your friend), and CERN can only produce antimatter a few atoms at a time, and has no way to store them for any great length of time. As the article states, 300 atoms held for 16 minutes before losing them all is a huge record.

BTW I'm not the guy you were responding to, just happened to be in the area. I'm a science illustrator.

Edit: Whoops, molar mass of hydrogen is more like 2 grams/mol than 1, so that big number should be 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, not 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

My bad.

 

[ResonanceSD]

I will admit that the possibility of a resonance cascade senario is extremely unlikely, but why do we have to wear these ridiculous ties?

I for one welcome our new combin-


Wait, wait, I for one welcome the opportunity to be GORDON FREAKING FREEMAN.

 

[Android2137]

Scientists, why?! Why are you all so determined to kill us all?! Someone hold me. I'm scared.

Scientists don't want to kill you. They've probably saved or improved your life many times over, both before and after you were born. This journalist and others like him, along with Hollywood and various others, sometimes have a difficult time writing things that are interesting and so they find cheap ways to create drama to engage their readers/viewers. Science, because it is often poorly understood by much of the general public, is a spooky enough thing to many people that it lends itself to these tactics the way old mansions lend themselves to horror films.

CERN is not, nor is anyone else, producing antimatter for an energy source or weapon. It is far too impractical, difficult, and expensive to do so. Its greatest value is for use in medical equipment to help diagnose diseases (like I said earlier, science generally tries to save or improve lives rather than end them) and work out some flaws in our current understanding of the universe.

I highly recommend taking any news story about science with a huge bag of salt unless it's from a site or publisher that is specifically dedicated to helping the public understand science. Most news organizations are very unconcerned with accuracy in such stories, and many of the writers on this site like to completely make things up in their stories, even while they complain about mainstream journalists making things up about video games.

If you're curious, a few posts back you should be able to find a link to a faq on the CERN site explaining what antimatter is, what it behaves like, why they are making and studying it, and why no one in their right mind would or could ever use it as a power source or weapon.

...I meant it as a joke.

 

[ProjectTrinity]

Ohgosh, my sciencetardation is at its best here.

I need a re-explanation.....in composer language. That means, pretend you're talking to a 7 year old when I ask: What does this mean, what does it do, and how can it benefit me us?

 

[McMullen]

Scientists, why?! Why are you all so determined to kill us all?! Someone hold me. I'm scared.

Scientists don't want to kill you. They've probably saved or improved your life many times over, both before and after you were born. This journalist and others like him, along with Hollywood and various others, sometimes have a difficult time writing things that are interesting and so they find cheap ways to create drama to engage their readers/viewers. Science, because it is often poorly understood by much of the general public, is a spooky enough thing to many people that it lends itself to these tactics the way old mansions lend themselves to horror films.

CERN is not, nor is anyone else, producing antimatter for an energy source or weapon. It is far too impractical, difficult, and expensive to do so. Its greatest value is for use in medical equipment to help diagnose diseases (like I said earlier, science generally tries to save or improve lives rather than end them) and work out some flaws in our current understanding of the universe.

I highly recommend taking any news story about science with a huge bag of salt unless it's from a site or publisher that is specifically dedicated to helping the public understand science. Most news organizations are very unconcerned with accuracy in such stories, and many of the writers on this site like to completely make things up in their stories, even while they complain about mainstream journalists making things up about video games.

If you're curious, a few posts back you should be able to find a link to a faq on the CERN site explaining what antimatter is, what it behaves like, why they are making and studying it, and why no one in their right mind would or could ever use it as a power source or weapon.

...I meant it as a joke.

Ah. Poe's law strikes again. There should be a game built around that concept.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

I swear I read this on here months ago... exact same picture, too (one on the front page of the site)... >_>

 

[skotconcarne]

In the words of George Takei, "Oh My!"

This is huge! No, not huge... bigger then huge! So big my brain can't even comprehend the gravity of it. The understanding of our very existence has changed forever. The power this can yield could change how humanity as a whole enters the future. Simply mind blowing.

 

[Goblorke1]

Awesome!
Personally, I didn't really think we could be entirely sure that anti-matter even existed until we were able to contain it for more that a fraction of a second.
And now we have.
Nice.

On a slightly off-topic note, it has been mentioned that we have had nuclear, fusion and now possibly anti-matter power? It just strikes me as funny that all of these more or less work the same way:
Coal power: We're going to burn coal so it can get water really hot and the steam will turn a turbine.
Nuclear power: We're going to split the atom! The resulting energy released from will get water really hot and the steam will turn a tubine.
Fusion power: We're going to create a small star! The energy released from this small star will... get water really hot and the steam will turn a turbine.

... You get the idea. Am I the only one who thinks this funny?