Antimatter

[Billy the Kid]

New news to me. What does everyone think?

 

[Pete Harcoff]

I think it's kinda neat (straight out of sci-fi), but I'm holding my breath for any practical applications yet. It'll be pretty cool in 10 years or so to see what impact this kind of research has on everyday living.

 

[Hector Medina]

Anti-matter is ridiculously theoretical [wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth] that trys to fill in the holes in the Big Bang.

There is 0 evidence to anywhere near prove anti-matter or the Big Dud(I mean Bang)

"Beam me up?"

In Christ,

Hector

 

[lithium.]

antimatter is something that people will be talking more and more about in the next few years, with all the energy crisis that is going are in the world, antimatter could be used to help put us in space cheaper and it would be a cleaner energy, but don't get me wrong we will not be seeing space ships like in startrek anytime soon we just don't have the technology yet.

 

[Lacmeh]

Hector, antimatter is proven to exist. You even can observe it in particle accelerators. But then I guess, this is only a huge conspiracy.

 

[David Gould]

Exactly - they make the stuff. That is the point of the article - now they have made so much of it, they can test fundamental theories about the universe.

I suppose quantum physics is nonsense also?

And relativity?

Is newton's stuff "allowed" or is that way too radical and sci-fi?

Or do we have to go back to Aristotle?

 

[blader]

Originally posted by Hector Medina
Anti-matter is ridiculously theoretical [wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth] that trys to fill in the holes in the Big Bang.

How can it be theoretical when just recently it was all over the news that they've been making the stuff in laboratories? A couple of thousand of atoms of the stuff, in fact.

I think you should go back to the Teen forum so you could make fun of "silly evolution" on a more fitting level than here in the science forum.

 

[ocean]

The only theory hector believes in is the conspiracy theory.

 

[Duane Morse]

Playing with fire can be dangerous.
They considered the possibility of the first atom bomb explosion destroying the planet, or maybe it was the atmosphere. They considered it a distinct possibility, but considered the risk acceptable.

I wonder what could happen with anti-matter if they do not get it just right in the first try.

 

[DNAunion]

In modern laboratories like CERN or Fermilab in Illinois, physicists accelerate antiprotons or positrons produced by nuclear reactions to the speed of light and collide them with conventional particles to produce tiny starbursts of primordial energy, recreating forms of matter and energy unseen since the big bang.

DNAunion: Talk about pulling the rug out from under the laws of physics – accelerating an object with positive rest mass to the speed of light! Sorry Einstein, you had it all wrong! Nah, the author did (note: two "paragraphs" later the author did phrase it correctly, adding the qualifier "near light speed").

Anyway, yeah, interesting results.

And no, I don’t think we have to worry about an anti-atom bomb destroying the Earth. That would require confining large amounts of anti-atoms – keeping them separate from ordinary atoms. And as the article mentioned, once the anti-protons and positrons combined to form anti-atoms, they became electrically neutral, and thus were no longer restrained by their former electric “cage”: they wondered around and soon contacted normal matter in their surroundings at which point – poof - no more antimatter.

It would seem that plain old anti-matter - and not anti-atoms - would be easier to confine. Yet we've had anti-matter at our disposal for decades and have not yet created an anti-matter bomb that could destroy the Earth.

 

[WinAce]

It is still a mystery, cosmologists say, why the universe seems to be overwhelmingly composed of normal matter.

Can anyone enlighten me on *how* anyone can know if a distant star is composed of hydrogen or anti-hydrogen, if they should emit the same light frequencies and things, like the article goes on to say?

 

[ocean]

"plain old anti-matter"?

I don't think we could ever destroy the earth, no matter what we do.

 

[David Gould]

Originally posted by WinAce
Can anyone enlighten me on *how* anyone can know if a distant star is composed of hydrogen or anti-hydrogen, if they should emit the same light frequencies and things, like the article goes on to say?

I think at least part of the reasoning goes like this: our world is made up of matter. Things near it must be also, or we would be seeing little bursts of energy all the time as matter and anti-matter particles annhilated one another.

This holds true as we go further out from the earth - if the star nearest ours is antimatter then we should be able to see some sort of boundary where antimatter and matter keep meeting and annhilating.

As we keep going further and further out, this boundary is still not evident.

So the two theories are that either all the anit matter is in one very distant part of the universe or it is extremely rare, if not non-existant except when artificially produced.

The chances of anti-matter all being gathered in one section of the universe is not large, as it is affected by gravity the same way, has electric charges that attract matter and so forth.

There are probably other lines of reasoning that are better than this but this is not too bad, I think.

 

[Kookaburra]

I agree with you DNAunion, and I also think if it would be a renewable energy source in the future, go for it (government funding, etc), but if it's pointless experimentation, why do it?

 

[David Gould]

Originally posted by Kookaburra
I agree with you DNAunion, and I also think if it would be a renewable energy source in the future, go for it (government funding, etc), but if it's pointless experimentation, why do it?

It is difficult to predict exactly what is pointless experimentation....

Lorenz worked out some pretty cool maths for solving problems in multiple dimensions. Of course, it was just an exercise for him, being a pure mathematician, and a pretty pointless exercise from soem perspectives at that.

But when Einstein wanted to treat time as a fourth spatial dimension, he needed some way of doing it. And there was Lorenz's maths just sitting there waiting for him.

Now scientists are finding it useful to work int ten dimensions...

As for experimentation, if we knew for certain what results we were going to get there would be no point doing it....

 

[WinAce]

Thanks, David Gould. Just when I think there might be something that stumps people, such as whether something is matter or anti-matter, they find a way to infer its existence and test... now I remember why I loved reading about science as a kid

Does anyone have any links or books for further reading on the antimatter content of space and the reasons behind it? I have some additional questions--would our instruments be able to detect tiny amounts of antimatter annihilating, would the two types of matter separate into isolated solar systems, with each one becoming ever more purified to one type of matter with each passing year as any matter not in the predominant category blew up on contact with the other type, etc...

 

[Joe Meert]

Originally posted by WinAce
Thanks, David Gould. Just when I think there might be something that stumps people, such as whether something is matter or anti-matter, they find a way to infer its existence and test... now I remember why I loved reading about science as a kid

Does anyone have any links or books for further reading on the antimatter content of space and the reasons behind it? I have some additional questions--would our instruments be able to detect tiny amounts of antimatter annihilating, would the two types of matter separate into isolated solar systems, with each one becoming ever more purified to one type of matter with each passing year as any matter not in the predominant category blew up on contact with the other type, etc...

JM: Well, Rees discusses it briefly in "Before the Beginning".  The instruments can already detect antimatter and matter annihilating in particle accelerators, but in order to detect it at a distance, there would have to be a rather significant amount of anti-matter present.  One notion is that the amount of matter and anti-matter formed in the big bang was nearly equal, but with a slight excess of matter.  Thus we have a universe made up of matter rather than antimatter.  I don't think, though I might be wrong, that there could be any significant amount of anti-matter present in our Universe.

 

 

[crazyfingers]

Originally posted by Hector Medina
Anti-matter is ridiculously theoretical [wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth] that trys to fill in the holes in the Big Bang.

There is 0 evidence to anywhere near prove anti-matter or the Big Dud(I mean Bang)

"Beam me up?"

In Christ,

Hector

DNFTT