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 big way. I wonder which.
The comic Yoko Tsuno: The time spiral from 1981 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps) is about a time traveler, who arrives from the future to prevent the creation/invention of antimatter. This is important, because in a future world war an antimatter bomb destroyed the earth.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
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?
I am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
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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 big way. I wonder which.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
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?
Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp
Imagine the estate of this in 10 years with all the tech advancements, and all the applications it could have.
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...