It’s a little late to have Blast Corps ready to help out but it’s never too late for a remake.
Perfect time in history to just start transporting antimatter.
The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.
Still though, we need a new HAZMAT category now.
They just need to transfer power from the car’s inertial dampers to the containment field
car’s inertial dampers
You mean the shocks?
those constrictors keep freezing on our starships, causing an overload.
its not like star trek, where they produces kgs at a time, which is nuclear level events if they “collide”
kgs
For reference, a single kilogram of antimatter reacting with regular matter would create an explosion only slightly smaller than the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, and well over a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Time Travelers from the future might recruit an entire school bus’s worth of geriatric retirees to prevent such a thing from exploding 🙂↕️
Great series. Glad it ended when it did.
An article concerning cerns concern
correct.
and here i was contemplating yesterday whether interstellar rockets will ever use antimatter drives and when the technology to store and transport antimatter will ever mature …
I’ve seen Angels and Demons, I know where this is going.
OR the V series, when aliens built a "anti-particle particle annhilator as a power generator for humans, which was extremely volatile(because they were planning to blow it up using the same method with “grenade”.
I thought anitmatter was still mostly theoretical. Apparently they claim bananas give some off in the decay of potassium. I am skeptical they have a good handle on “antimatter” however, despite scientists claiming they have all of the answers now, just as every generation of experts claimed to have all of the answers, never being true before, but it is now, got it.
The folks at CERN have been generating antimatter (albeit in infinitesimal amounts) since at least the 90s; it’s far more than just theoretical.
I don’t doubt that, just doubt they have a good understanding of it’s role and all that.
If they fully understood it, they probably wouldn’t keep running experiments on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete unknown though.
Are you thinking of dark matter?
Edit: I can’t believe I fell for it. A) the username is hector, a synonym for “annoy” or ”pester.” B) going through their recent comments, they keep misspelling words in quotation marks and dropping one different, very obvious spelling or grammar mistake in each comment. C) they go a little further off the deep end and a little more obstinate every time.
Not sure on dark matter and anti matter. In public schools they taught us matter came into existence by shooting matter in one direction and antimatter in another. Like they know.
Sometimes science has prevailing theories. They call them theories, because they aren’t known woth certainty. But they still teach them in school, as its our best guess.
by shooting matter in one direction and antimatter in another. Like they know.
Not exactly, no.
#The matter- antimatter asymmetry problem
###The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?
The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found. Something must have happened to tip the balance. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to figure out what happened to the antimatter, or why we see an asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Antimatter particles share the same mass as their matter counterparts, but qualities such as electric charge are opposite. The positively charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle to the negatively charged electron. Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy. During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, the hot and dense universe was buzzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. If matter and antimatter are created and destroyed together, it seems the universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.
Nevertheless, a tiny portion of matter - about one particle per billion - managed to survive. This is what we see today. In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why. Researchers have observed spontaneous transformations between particles and their antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay. Some unknown entity intervening in this process in the early universe could have caused these “oscillating” particles to decay as matter more often than they decayed as antimatter.
https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem
Tldr just because you didn’t properly listen or the teacher was shit doesn’t mean physicists are as ignorant about the subject as you think. No offense.
I reject the big bang. I don’t doubt there having been a bang that relatively seemed big.
Likewise I reject this leading theory.
Hmm, who do believe, the nigh-consensus of pretty much all physicists, or… hector on the Fediverse?
I mean, one has literally millions of scientists and decades, if not centuries of established, peer-reviewed literature… and the other is a random stranger online who believes Charlie Kirk wasn’t shot for being a massive right-wing cunt, but “as the first victim of the war on Iran.”
Geez, that’s a tough one. Couldn’t possibly decide which way I’m leaning.
Damn, we should let those experts who have been studying this for their entire lives that you reject the theory! They’re going to be so bummed they have to go back to the drawing board and throw out all the evidence and experiments they have done!
So you legitimately think the knowledge you gained from a public school science class is enough to determine that experts in the field don’t know what they’re doing?
That’s a real question, because that line of reasoning is used by climate change deniers, antivaxers, and flat earthers.
thought anitmatter was still mostly theoretical
You thought wrong and that’s ok.
I am skeptical they have a good handle on “antimatter”
Which is more likely: you haven’t kept up to date on physics news, or the people who spend their lives doing physics don’t know what they’re doing? Be skeptical. But fix that by reading more. If someone is skeptical, but the answers exist and they stay skeptical, that’s just willful ignorance.
every generation of experts claimed to have all of the answers
No they haven’t. And no one is claiming that now.
This isn’t skepticism. This is “I don’t understand, I don’t want to understand, but I want to feel smart so I’m going to say they’re not smart”.
On the contrary, the universe, the state of matter, the mechanisms of astro physics, are the subjects most deserving of being skeptical of experts claiming to know things they have no way of knowing. Now you may be referring to some humble scientists, but the “exerts” absolutely do claim to know everything.
You dont have a good understanding of what science is. No scientist claims to know what charge is, what causes it, nor what dark matter is or dark energy.
Scientists say what they can say with reasonable certainty. If they state something, you can research why they state it, and find sound reasoning and experiment that supports it.
If you dont, you can disprove it, and then now you’re a scientist.
Just because you dont know a thing, doesn’t mean others cant know.
I’d also like to interject that physics deals with models of how the world works, i.e. physicists make predictions about what would happen in specific scenarios. That has nothing to do with knowing what goes on underneath, because we can’t know that.
Consider quantum physics. It might be that the universe is indeed a wave and that’s just how things are. But it could also be possible that we’re living our entire lives in a simulation, whoever hosts the simulation is having a tea party and giggling at us silly being on how we’re confused by our observations. You can’t really tell these two apart, experimentally, since they would have the same outcome. So physics can’t really tell about what things are, just how they behave in certain situations. That’s why i think of physics as models, not theory (because “theory” carries a starker claim to absolute truth to me).
Why does “theory” carry starker claim absolute truth to you?
Theory, theoretical, these are not claims to absolute truth. Rules maybe, but then id say you’re more correct that they’d be rules of a model.
Relativity is a theory. Its in the name. You might not like it, but it is definitely a theory, and referred to as such by all of science. Maybe you call it model of special relativity, but you’d be the exception. However it would not be incorrect to refer to it as a model, either.
Come on Hector, just go back explaining everything with baby Jesus back in your room and stop making an ass of yourself in public.
Dumb people always accuse others of being dumb. That’s you.
And yet that’s how you started this thread. Any chance you’ll be self aware enough to take your own feedback?
You an English literature major ? /s
Are you getting confused between antimatter and dark matter because antimatter has very much been proven to exist for longer than I’ve been alive.
So when it comes to the concept of the science on matter progressing, you’re anti that.
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A few thousand antimatter charged particles could be used as an implosive trigger for a fusion bomb.
EDIT Source. See section 3 in general and 3.5 specifically:
you’re off by something like 15-18 orders of magnitude
This is old, but you get the idea. See section 3.5.
https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510071
EDIT: I’m getting bullshit downvotes from people who clearly won’t read the paper and don’t understand the proposed detonation model. One need not have grams of antimatter to trigger a H-H fusion detonation. A relatively small amount of antimatter is needed to trigger initial fusion of a hydrogen target, which by cascade can be used to detonate additional hydrogen. This removes the fission trigger and allows for very small fusion weapons with relatively low yields. For example, a device the size of a hand grenade with tons of TNT equivalent output - like a truck bomb in your hand. Or a rifle sized X-Ray laser is another proposed weapon.
Read the study. This technology is feasible.
The paper you linked says “1 microgram is sufficient to trigger one thermonuclear weapon” which corresponds to 6×10^17.
This makes your “few thousand” of by 14 orders of magnitude instead of 15, I bet you feel vindicated now.For example, a device the size of a hand grenade with tons of TNT equivalent output
A man portable nuke has existed since the 60’s so it wouldn’t be a game changer.
LMAO, the little baby down voted you.
I think even the TSA could tell that’s a bomb.
Yes, but if you take the train or a private car you won’t be searched. To get it across international borders try smuggling among other cargo or by submarine, maybe even diplomatic courier.
Sure. I just thought it was funny that it looks like the suitcase a cartoon character would put a warhead in.
interesting! i had wondered whether that exists. the wikipedia page on radionuclides seems to hint so since it gives 10 kg as a possible total mass of fissile material in a critical scenarion but i still had doubts till now.
You’re getting the microgram statement from here. You miss the point. A millionth of a gram is feasible to make and contain right now. It was predicted by 2010 in the paper using CERN, and there are much better facilities producing since then.
You’re missing the point to be pedantic over a 20 year old paper. Newer approaches reduce the antimatter requirements for such weapons even more.
This might make you wonder why antimatter is being transported around. The fact is, proposals to weaponize antimatter as a fusion trigger have been around for over 40 years, and the means to achieving that from a production and engineering standpoint seem a good bet to be available today.
In conjunction with you know a fusion bomb so in and of itself not something I’d be concerned about.
It’s like saying that a spark could be used to blow up a mountain, yeah it could, in conjunction with several hundred kilogrammes of C4.
