CERN Scientists Capture Antimatter For Record 16 Minutes

Macgyvercas

Spice & Wolf Restored!
Feb 19, 2009
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Earnest Cavalli said:
My only hope is that the idea of an antimatter bomb (which could literally explode reality) proves too existentially horrifying for anyone to ever actually build such a thing.
Well, while an anti-matter bomb would be extrodinarily powerful, hydrogen bombs are quicker and cheaper to produce. I'm not quite sure anyone wants to wait the estimated two billion years to build up enough anti matter for even the explosive yield of Little Boy.

Source: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html

EDIT: Ninja'd on the link. Damnit.

EDIT 2:

klaynexas3 said:
i hope this will be used as a power source, not as a weapon. it has the same ability as everything else however, to do great good and great evil.
Anti matter can't be used as an energy source, since it takes far more energy to create than it gives off when it's destroyed.
 

Moonlight Butterfly

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Mar 16, 2011
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The guy they got to talk about this on the BBC news was hilarious he looked like he hadn't slept for three months, hadn't shaved and his shirt looked like it was from the bottom of a laundry basket. He was still talking like a child who had been fed candyfloss constantly for 3 days.

I think he was probably the best demonstration of the excitement over this event.
 

Sonic Doctor

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Jan 9, 2010
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arc1991 said:
Oooh so it can be used as a new Energy source?

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...
I'm willing to bet that you have never watched any Star Trek.

Because matter and anti-matter reactions are what are used by starships for energy to power warp engines.
 

Versuvius

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Apr 30, 2008
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Hungry Donner said:
arc1991 said:
what is Anti-Matter o_O
It's sort of negative matter; if you combine a particle and it's anti-matter equivalent (electron and anti-electron, proton and anti-proton) the net result is 0 matter. A nuclear bomb sends out high energy particles and waves and this disrupts matter, anti-matter annihilates it.

The process of annihilation releases a lot of energy so theoretically matter/anti-matter reactions could be used as an incredible power source, but for now the process of creating an containing anti-matter is prohibitive.
Protons are anti-electrons.
 

Buizel91

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Aug 25, 2008
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Sonic Doctor said:
arc1991 said:
Oooh so it can be used as a new Energy source?

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...
I'm willing to bet that you have never watched any Star Trek.

Because matter and anti-matter reactions are what are used by starships for energy to power warp engines.
Neh, never took an interest in it, only seen the new movie, it was all right, other than that i have only seen 1 or 2 episodes.
 

emeraldrafael

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Jul 17, 2010
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yeah, I wouldnt rely on humanity to "trust itself" to not do something because its terrifying. that seems more all the reason to make it.

But meh, it will be nice to see the scientific advancement before the US/Russia/EU/whoever gets it first and starts using it as the "settle down or else" option of policing the world.
 
Jun 11, 2008
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Versuvius said:
Hungry Donner said:
arc1991 said:
what is Anti-Matter o_O
It's sort of negative matter; if you combine a particle and it's anti-matter equivalent (electron and anti-electron, proton and anti-proton) the net result is 0 matter. A nuclear bomb sends out high energy particles and waves and this disrupts matter, anti-matter annihilates it.

The process of annihilation releases a lot of energy so theoretically matter/anti-matter reactions could be used as an incredible power source, but for now the process of creating an containing anti-matter is prohibitive.
Protons are anti-electrons.
No they are not. An anti matter particle has the same mass and charge. A proton is made up of uud quarks and is a hadron(feels strong force) and a baryon(has 3 quarks). An electron is a lepton(is to current an elementary particle).
 

Versuvius

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Glademaster said:
Versuvius said:
Hungry Donner said:
arc1991 said:
what is Anti-Matter o_O
It's sort of negative matter; if you combine a particle and it's anti-matter equivalent (electron and anti-electron, proton and anti-proton) the net result is 0 matter. A nuclear bomb sends out high energy particles and waves and this disrupts matter, anti-matter annihilates it.

The process of annihilation releases a lot of energy so theoretically matter/anti-matter reactions could be used as an incredible power source, but for now the process of creating an containing anti-matter is prohibitive.
Protons are anti-electrons.
No they are not. An anti matter particle has the same mass and charge. A proton is made up of uud quarks and is a hadron(feels strong force) and a baryon(has 3 quarks). An electron is a lepton(is to current an elementary particle).
..Correct. I fail physics forever! Was thinking of positron.
 

Korolev

No Time Like the Present
Jul 4, 2008
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An anti-matter weapon is a long way off - and I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to try to build one. Anti-matter is always ready to become pure energy, upon any contact with matter - so if anyone built an anti-matter weapon, they'd have to learn to live with keeping one, and that's a prospect that would scare any potential user. Imagine if nuclear weapons could explode with maximum force at the slightest disturbance or failure! No country would keep them! Nuclear weapons are of course, kept, because they are very stable, but you can't have a "stable" anti-matter device. One slip up, and it goes boom and it would take you along with it.

Plus, there's no economically feasible way to create one - we can only produce a couple of hundred particles of anti-matter at a time. An anti-matter bomb that's worth a damn would have to have at least a couple of grams of the stuff, and that's too far beyond our abilities to create.
 

Damien Granz

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Apr 8, 2011
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Hardcore_gamer said:
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?

Also, "exploding reality"? What does that even mean?
In an extremely layperson nutshell, and forgive this for not being super accurate, the particles and antiparticles are attracted to each other in such a way that disassembles both into their most basic parts, and translates some of those parts into a large amount of energy, similar to, but on a much different scale than how splitting an atom works.

It doesn't really 'get rid of' either, energy and matter are the same thing similar to ice and steam, but obviously if your body happens to be translated to energy you're not gonna be alive for it, even if junk that was 'you' still 'exists' in some fashion.

However, current technology has absolutely no way to even remotely cost effectively recreate this phenomena, so that energy can't realistically be used for practical (or murderous) uses. The economic resources used in creating antimatter is currently higher than the gains that come of using it.

As pointed out by others, nuclear weapons are still more dangerous in practical use for that very reason.
 

Sonic Doctor

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Jan 9, 2010
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arc1991 said:
Sonic Doctor said:
Neh, never took an interest in it, only seen the new movie, it was all right, other than that i have only seen 1 or 2 episodes.
Well, it would take awhile to watch everything, with there being 5 different series(Star Trek, ST:The Next Generation, ST: Deep Space 9, ST: Voyager, and Enterprise, all together well over 1000 episodes) and then 9 other movies other that the new one.

I traditionally watch most of all of that every year, because I just love the technology and universe.

Edit: Don't go by the new movie as what all of Star Trek is like. The movie in my opinion was really messed up, besides the movie was in an alternate Star Trek universe from everything else.
 

Angnor

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McMullen said:
Earnest Cavalli said:
Snipped for length
However, it is vital when doing so to make sure that such simplifications retain a connection to reality. Yours do not. Antimatter bombs are as far from being feasible as traveling through time or faster than light, and even if they were feasible, they wouldn't necessarily be any more destructive than nuclear bombs (yes, if you make enough antimatter, you can destroy the earth, but a suitably rich and idiotic civilization could probably do the same thing much more cheaply with a big enough hydrogen bomb). Antimatter detonations do not destroy reality, technically, figuratively, or in any other sense, any more than nuclear weapons do.
This I think well sums up the point. It's not that we couldn't destroy our reality with antimatter, it's that we've been living with the ability to do so for quite a while now with other, cheaper means. The 'concern' over an antimatter bomb smacks rather more of knee-jerk fear-mongering than reporting.
 

savandicus

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Jun 5, 2008
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Icarion (aka Stockholm) said:
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."
I'm not quite sure your imagining the size of the equipement in Cern at the right scale. Its not the kind of thing you can stick your hand in.



Note the size of the people.

But on a less pedantic note, Good job guys, i'm CERNtain that this is will result in many theories being shattered and many new ones taking their place.
 

Magikarp

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Jan 26, 2011
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Don't worry about a black hole; Gordon Freeman works there. He'll sort it out.
 

McMullen

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Earnest Cavalli said:
McMullen said:
On second thought, maybe it's best that you just don't report on science stories at all. You fail physics forever.
I was wondering how long it'd take to illicit this reaction.

Technically, you're correct (the best kind of correct), but you seem to be missing the point that the key aspect of reporting on scientific results is not to explicitly illustrate every detail, but is instead to break the concept down into terms which are more easily understood by the general public.

I could have penned a report that explained exactly how an antimatter weapon might work, but it would take days and clock in at tens of thousands of words. Who is going to read that?

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.

(If you'd like, I can also convincingly argue my point philosophically via incredibly pretentious allusions to Soren Kierkegaard, but again, who wants to read ten thousand words that really only function as evidence that I'm very, very bright?)

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."

Happy?
One last thing: Read the comments here. You see how many people commenting here think that this will be a bad thing because of antimatter bombs? Even though I and like four or five others have been explaining how antimatter bombs are impossible/completely impractical even if they were possible, some with links to a page describing in detail exactly why this is so? That is why you should avoid saying things that are not true and point out things that are true instead. I know reality sometimes isn't as exciting or dramatic as Hollywood, but since we live in reality, it's probably a good idea to report the news as it pertains to reality, rather than to Hollywood.

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'm all for making things interesting, as long as it doesn't make people stupid or dangerous. A world without the possibility of antimatter bombs or earth-devouring black holes is less dramatic than one with that possibility, but if people are going to get their legislators to block research into antimatter or things like it because their news is full of shit, or fanatics start bombing the LHC or killing the scientists working on it because they are convinced they're saving the world, I think a slight decrease in news-borne drama is a small price to pay for avoiding those scenarios.
 

The Lugz

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Sonic Doctor said:
I traditionally watch most of all of that every year, because I just love the technology and universe.
holy crap, how do you manage to get anything done!!

also, i'd love to see a 'stark reactor' kind of technology come from this or a tng universe star-drive for the I.N space-station

can you imagine that? a tng drive module bolted to the space-station, it would be epic :D

people go on about bombs, but seeeriously..
do we need an antimatter bomb? really? we can pretty-much blow the planet in half as it is we're really just approaching the point of a planetary self destruct button.
 

Rattler5150

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Jul 9, 2010
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for an explanation on anti matter ,

In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron or e+) and an antiproton (p) can form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing matter and antimatter can lead to the annihilation of both in the same way that mixing antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle?antiparticle pairs.

thanks wikipedia