Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Antimatter has been transported for the first time

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 222 posts

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#171

Post by jona-f »

adonovan wrote: post #156
dandellion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.

The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/

I don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#172

Post by dyauspitr »

estimator7292 wrote: post #161
mikewarot wrote: post #157

I wonder what would happen if you had a solid piece of antimatter, say a gram of anti-iron... and just set it down. Would it really annihaliate immediately on contact with air, a lab table, or anything... or would the normal forces that keep us from falling through things still be in effect? Either nothing would happen, or like molten salt in water, the joule currents would be instant and drive it all to go boom in a…

The charges are inverted, so anti-protons are actively attracted to protons. It would immediately explode.

Even without charge attraction, say anti-neutrons (I don’t know the term) would instantly resolve because neutrons are everywhere.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#174

Post by fc417fc802 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #20
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous

For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton ? For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...

Chicxulub impact estimated 300 ZJ, zetta being 10^21 giving us 10^23 and 10^-10. Avogadro's constant is 6×10^23.

So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.

I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).

According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.

That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#176

Post by cobbzilla »

jona-f wrote: post #171
adonovan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/

I don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.

There’s Anatoli Bugorski [1] who accidentally put his head into the path of a high energy proton beam.

The injury resembled nothing like being hit by tennis balls.

> He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.

He’s still alive today, age 83.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#177

Post by dostick »

dandellion wrote: post #31
schindlabua wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.

Which kind of mosquito? European or Asian?

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#178

Post by vee-kay »

techsystems wrote: post #114
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway

But we have to reroute power from life support because auxiliary systems are down!

[dead]

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#180

Post by mechanicalpulse »

malfist wrote: post #142
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway

If it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies for the redundancies.

None of it matters if the controls aren’t responding. You’ll know, too, because they make that sad static beepy noise like some sort of Tactile Control Panel ACKnowledgement failure.
Post reply on HN