The internet is too littered with sites yammering away about shadow governments and other evil conspiracies to be able to make sense of this news blurb.

I wouldn't put it past the current Administration to cook something like this up but I wasn't aware that we were able to collect enough antimatter to be able to conduct any research involving "practical application."

wouldnt matter / anti matter explosions do nothing more than be a big firework?

no ff, just imagine an explosion of PURE energy, ripping its way towards you.
any matter the energy came into contact with would just explode instantly.

it'll be far too expensive to make any amount of antimatter. but it is indeed, very, very powerful stuff.

I can't remeber where exactly I read it, maybe a Discover magazine, but isn't antimatter super-expensive? Like hundreds of millions of dollars for a few grams expensive?

Just wondering.

EDIT: Oh, the irony.

Edited by - CODENAME on 10/5/2004 7:38:56 AM

Star Trek aside, matter is what we touch, solid, liquid and gas. How would you go about creating an oposit(sp) to any of these, and contain it. If the Star Trek version were possible, it would be as an ultimate wep. Small amounts need for a big bang. *Shakes head at scientist*

You're supposed to be able to trap it somehow in some kind of super magnetic force field thingy. Exceedingly expensive process. That's what those guys at those gigantic particle accelerators sometimes try to produce. I think there is some evidence that some extremely minute quantity of the stuff was created but
I think it was at the theoretical level only as opposed to any hard evidence.

How you're going to be able to take those research findings and develop a weapon from it is beyond me... but then I am no scientist to begin with.

you've answered your own question Ed. put it in a magnetic field container until you need to blow summat up then stop the containment and ka-boom!

evil evil evil a perversion of nature, these fools will destroy us all with their insane experiments. it should all be stopped now, weapons research, genetics, pollution and eforestation - all black science, black as the devil's heart

Hmm, this really doesn't surprise me if this is true. You'll never know what sort of shady things worl governments do, unless you work for the government.

First off, I'm very doubtfull about all this. But then, you never know...
I especially liked one quotation:

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"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."

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Yep, right on, that's what they're trying to do, if we believe the article, since if antimatter is developed, it will be used for military purposes looong before anything else. There may be simply no one left to fly those futuristic antimatter spaceships



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Have you seen the size of those electromagnetic field generators? Some weapon. It'd be as big as a house and hold some theoretical and minute quantum of anti-matter which, upon release will... what..... fizzle up a gnat?

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isn't antimatter super-expensive? Like hundreds of millions of dollars for a few grams expensive?

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The going rate, according to Wikipedia, is $25 billion per gram.

I don't see how you can realistically use antimatter as a controlled fuel. There's no way we can control magnetic fields carefully enough to let just a few positrons into the annihilation chamber at a time. You'd have to make loads of these storage devices, each with just a few particles in, and open each in turn. I only see it as a weapon. If you want cleaner, more efficient fuel, get it via nuclear fusion.

A little more info from another news source.

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times ... that of high explosive," Kenneth Edwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, noted in an address to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal "23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy." Thus "positron energy conversion," as he called it, would be a "revolutionary energy source" of interest to those who wage war.

It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck of antimatter -- even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.


Site

Correct me, but I had always thought that antimatter could only produce the amount of energy that is specified in the famous E=mc^2 equation.
So, therefore, 1 gram of antimatter + 1 gram of normal matter...
E=mc^2
E=(0.001kg + 0.001kg)(3.0*10^8)(3.0*10^8)
E= 1.8*10^14 J

Uh... maybe I should do the math before I start posting. 180 terraJoules of energy isn't insignificant.

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