Fyi, the transport and storage of antimatter is very interesting to those developing nuclear weapons. An antimatter reaction could theoretically be used to pump a nuclear warhead, enabling perhaps smaller nukes than are currently feasible. That is IF one could store and transport usable amounts of antimatter for extended periods.
CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
121–130 of 188 posts
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#122Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#123Isn’t it dangerous to transport antimatter in a truck? What would happen if it got into a bad accident?
It would be terrible. But no more terrible than a FCL of shien crap.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#124A Nobel prize is due to the first person that proves whether exporting antimatter results in negative import duties or not.
I would argue that antimatter still has the same mass as regular matter, so you have to pay regular import duties. On the other hand, if tachyons exist, they would have imaginary mass, for which the import duties would have to paid in imaginary money!
It is really a complex problem.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#125A Nobel prize is due to the first person that proves whether exporting antimatter results in negative import duties or not.
a big man came to me, tears in his eyes, great guy...Sir, he said sir, why do we let Europe screw us on anti-matter? they just make this stuff negative like it doesn't exists and they want us to pay us, when we invented the anti-matter...so unfair
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#126Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that antimatter still has the same mass as regular matter, so you have to pay regular import duties. On the other hand, if tachyons exist, they would have imaginary mass, for which the import duties would have to paid in imaginary money!
It is really a complex problem.
It’s difficult to get to the root of it.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#128Last 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.
I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures? To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
A lot of tourism is just feeling a place. You can often get better views of a place in photographs than in real life. And yet the presence feels as if it adds something.
I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.
Irrational, but real.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#129Earlier 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.
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma (see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#130Last 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.
I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures? To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
what i saw of cern was a beautiful campus with ongoing cricket matches on the lawn, lots of offices and computers, and a great cafeteria.
my brother worked down the hall from tbl, and we stopped by, but he was out. brother’s boss (mdm wu, of quark fame), was out of town too.
brother was the vms admin, and would bitterly complain that mdm wu never cleaned out her mail spool, and it was now a ruinous 40mb.
st genis is quaint and nice to visit, with views of mt blanc.