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CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

arstechnica.com

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Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#31

Post by DocTomoe »

bawolff wrote: post #27
queuebert wrote: post #18

If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.

Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost. If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.

There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.

Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#33

Post by AStonesThrow »

thrance wrote: post #20
jcalx wrote: post #4

CERN preparing a portable antimatter container right around the election of a new Pope? Sounds familiar [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_%26_Demons_(film)

If I recall correctly, pope Francis was actually afraid the LHC would "open a gate to hell".

[flagged]

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#34

Post by hedora »

DocTomoe wrote: post #31
bawolff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost. If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.

There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them. Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.

Look up comparative damage stats for Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII. The nukes were nothing compared to firebombing.

Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#35

Post by thaumasiotes »

hubrix wrote: post #25
thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN. Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.

2 decimal places is the difference between employment and ownership. 100k vs 10MM. That is the comparison you really want to think about.

No, 100k and 10,000k each have one decimal place. Two decimal places is the difference between 100k and 104k.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#36

Post by db48x »

nickt wrote: post #32
modeless wrote: post #28

Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.

Not really. https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take... Not even a cool new hazmat placard.

That’s because it’s not really a hazardous material. 70 antiprotons annihilating with 70 protons releases a grand total of 2×10⁻⁸ Joules.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#37

Post by SequoiaHope »

nickt wrote: post #32
modeless wrote: post #28

Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.

Not really. https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take... Not even a cool new hazmat placard.

This thing? I think it looks super cool. An 80-20 rectangle stuffed with science stuff.

https://home.cern/sites/default/files/2024-10/1st-moving-cra...

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#38

Post by mlindner »

db48x wrote: post #36
nickt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take... Not even a cool new hazmat placard.

That’s because it’s not really a hazardous material. 70 antiprotons annihilating with 70 protons releases a grand total of 2×10⁻⁸ Joules.

That exponent is still a lot larger than I would've expected for something measured in three digits of atoms. I thought it would've been in the double negative digits.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#39

Post by krastanov »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #26
Loughla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two decimal places is a shit ton of precision though. A one inch gap is immense compared to a .01 inch gap.

[flagged]

ugh... Needing more than 4 significant digits is a pretty baseline requirement for precision physics experiments meant to falsify various candidate theories. 2 new significant digits is a vast parameter space that now can be excluded.

Needing more than 4 significant digits happens to be crucially important for mundane boring stuff like the GPS navigation in your maps app working.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#40

Post by aaxa »

ednite wrote: post #24
pezezin wrote: post #17

Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day. The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.

That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.

I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks:

- Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive.

- The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate.

- The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).

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