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Antimatter has been transported for the first time

nature.com

41–50 of 222 posts

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#44
post #24
post #22

Stop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.

I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.

I only want to charge 1CHF for each charged particle hauled in that transport.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#45

What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?

It would develop into "regions" of space that are entirely matter and others that are entirely antimatter. The boundaries between them would glow as stray particles drift between the regions and are annihilated by contact with the opposing particles.

The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!

E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#47
post #39
post #37

From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?

Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.

When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)

The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#48

What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?

It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.

How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that in firecrackers? Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.

Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#50
post #37

From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?

Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
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