CERN Scientists Capture Antimatter For Record 16 Minutes

[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?

 

[antipunt]

One of the big reasons I dislike the news and Hollywood educating people about science is that those people then go out and do really stupid and harmful things based on that faulty knowledge, like the girl who decided it was better to kill herself than die from a LHC-generated black hole, or the people who paralyze or kill car wreck victims by needlessly pulling them out of cars that they've been taught are going to explode or burst into flames at any moment (seriously, think about that for a second. Just how many explosions or crematoria have you seen on the side of the highway, compared to the number of mildly crumpled cars?)

I was actually a little annoyed during this one incident: My brother's friend crashed his car into another car across the street from ours while leaving in a hurry. I'm extremely sensitive to sound, so I started panicking because I didn't have any ear-buds. I quickly went on google and tried to find out how 'likely' it was that a car would explode, how long it would take, how loud it would be, etc. It was only then that I realized cars almost never 'explode' like they do in the movies, and when they 'do', it's more of a stream of fire rather than a 'boom'.

This was kind of a shock to me. I knew Hollywood liked to play games, but never thought that they would so blatantly cross the line between fiction and reality (I'm excluding -obviously- fictitious genres, like Disney films). With regards to damage done, I've previously focused mainly on how Hollywood altered our emotional expectations of life and/or human relationships. Twilight, a series that bred a hoard of rabid-teenage-fangirls is a shining example. There are other genres I could mention, but there's quite a few to list. I've since then been careful to prejudge where the realms of fiction/reality fall. It really does help; when you enjoy your fiction, definitely do so! But be aware that it is fiction. The consequences of ignoring this advice can retard your growth as a human being.

Also, be aware of the term, 'wish fulfillment'

 

[Riddle78]

So...Does this mean Element Zero (Eezo) exists? One more step to vindicating Mass Effect as a documentary in the future...

 

[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?

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.

I didn't mean to be offensive, I just didn't look at that link, or the CERN FAQ. I was curious if you were involved with physics in anyway. And I am not in the least afraid of anti-matter or CERN.

 

[lacktheknack]

Well that's cool i suppose, but what's the cost...I don;t want my Car to crash and the explosion creates a Black Hole...

ANTI-MATTER CARS! BRILLIANT!

...It WOULD be, except that some prick would make a hyper-souped-up version, so that instead of a small explosion (you wouldn't need much to run a car), you'd eat a quarter of the planet.

Other than that... YES! ANTI-MATTER CARS!

 

[Buizel91]

Well that's cool i suppose, but what's the cost...I don;t want my Car to crash and the explosion creates a Black Hole...

ANTI-MATTER CARS! BRILLIANT!

...It WOULD be, except that some prick would make a hyper-souped-up version, so that instead of a small explosion (you wouldn't need much to run a car), you'd eat a quarter of the planet.

Other than that... YES! ANTI-MATTER CARS!

What has my mind created lmfao

and great, one explosion would turn the world into a Blue and Green Pack-Man...

 

[linkzeldi]

Umm. . . Cool. What exactly does this have to video gaming?

 

[Logic 0]

Were one step closer to anti-lightning and it will be awesome.

 

[infohippie]

Oh, and the same goes for your thing about "theories," though let's substitute "importance of using layman's terms" with "importance of using the common, if technically incorrect vernacular that the English language has naturally evolved toward."

Is it not also the reponsibility of a science writer to educate his readers? Wouldn't it be great if the word "hypothesis" was consistently used where a layman might use the word "theory"? If this was pushed enough, Creationists wouldn't be able to say the Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection is "only a theory" and actually have people think they scored a point. Everyone would know what a theory actually is. It is important to use common vernacular, sure, but if the common vernacular is just flat-out wrong, isn't continued use of it by those who should know better perpetuating incorrect usage and thereby helping to cement aforesaid incorrect usage in the minds of the public?

As for your rebuttal to my succinct description, again, you're technically correct, but at the same time you're letting your semantics get in the way of the realization that without anything left to observe (and no one to even conceive of any observable elements), an antimatter weapon would, effectively, destroy reality.

No. It really would not. A few grams of antimatter annihilating with a few grams of matter would produce a reaction similar to a large nuclear device. It would not destroy anything more than a few dozen to maybe as much as a hundred square kilometres of landscape. If you wanted to destroy the Earth, you'd need many tonnes of antimatter at the very least.

EDIT: Fixed misattributed quote.

 

[Realitycrash]

Now get us teleportation too! Go go go!

 

[tehweave]

FUCKING SWEET! Give these men a nobel prize.

 

[Burningsok]

god dammit I want my anti-material rifle this instant!!!! >.<

 

[FalloutJack]

{1} I sincerely doubt that we are all doomed because of this.

{2} This is actually very cool.

That established, let us now commence with the concern of whether or not we are making Star Trek...or Schlock Mercenary.

 

[The Wonder of the net]

now beware of antimatter kittens!

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Yep, you heard them. We better cancel all science forever, because it could be used for EVIL! Boy am I sick of hearing that.