When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx? Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?
Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck
“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”
Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons. In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.
https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52
But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring? Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks. The sky’s the limit.
I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero. I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state. But maybe I’m wrong. My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures. And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions. They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss. But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri. I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.
So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding. After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter. Well, where is it?
Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”? Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for. But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter. What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday. Hmmm.
Wild! Stories like this remind me that we’re living in the sci-fi novels of the mid-twentieth century (as well as all the dystopian, Brave New World stuff). Maybe bottles of delicious anti-matter will be the next tech bubble once people realize AI is just a better search engine. : D
As exotic as the bulk production of anti-matter appears to us now I think it’s inevitable that experimental research at the forefront of particle physics will eventually stumble upon some unexpected basic truth about the universe that will catapult us into a new level of technology (or completely destroy us).
Well, we didn’t start an endless chain reaction of atom splitting back in the 1940s, so… we’re probably safe.
I don’t know Tyler. We’re stumbling around in the dark. Let’s hope the Lord is feeling kindly toward us.
I pray the same thing. Goodness!
So I was curious, how much energy is that if all 92 precious antiprotons are annihilated. So we go to E=MC^2. Mass is that of 92 antiprotons plus the 92 protons they annihilate. Mass of a proton (and I presume an antiproton, I’m not going to try to put one on a scale…) is ~ 1.67 x 10 -27 Kg (units matter, ask my Chemist wife), Speed of Light is 2.99 X10^8 M/S C^2 8.94X10^6 M^2/S^2. 184 protons/antiprotons mass 3.07X10^-2 Kg so E=2.74×10^-8 KG*M^2/S^2. The unit for KG*M^2/S^2 is joules, the unit of energy in the MKS system so we… Read more »
Tregonsee, thanks for crunching the numbers. It sounds like that CERN delivery truck won’t have to worry about being blown up if it hits a huge bump and jostles all 92 anti-protons into normal matter. I remember reading that the amount of binding energy that was released by the Hiroshima bomb reduced the overall mass of U235 by the equivalent of the mass of 2/3 of a paper clip. No anti-matter involved but the good old E = Mc^2 still applies when binding energy is released. So we’re looking at a ratio of about one to 10^20 atoms between that… Read more »
Firecracker averages 250 joules per google. So multiply by 10^8th (100,000,000) gives you 2.74 joules so another couple of orders on magnitude, call it 92 protons x10^10th, 920 billion protons and you’ll hurt your finger.
“But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship”
Yeah, and the refrigerator breaks down and not a repairman to be found. Don’t cha just hate it when that happens?
And that is why I’m gonna skip the first few generations of star ships. But sometime in the 45th century AD my brain in robot body will be taking the first luxury trip to Andromeda. My cabin will be POSH; port outbound starboard home!
Maybe old movies would make better watching. At a 100,000 LY/hr, I the blue shift will absolutely ruin the view. Take the wormhole, it’s faster, and being inside out is entertaining the 1st couple of times.
I’ll avoid the blue shift. I’ll let them animate the port hole in my cabin with a video of Tahitian girls doing their native dances.
Why not take A. Bertram Chandler’s Idea and gang up a mess of interacting gyroscopes into a time-twisting Manschenne Drive? Ahead in Space, but ASTERN in time(but never FULL astern. Of course, if something goes wrong you could wind up stranded on a primitive planet a million years in the past, and become your own ancestor…