"how many Wales' would that devastate?"
Depends on how close the device is to the wedding party.
So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing? …
I got seriously annoyed by the sloppy coverage of this by BBC R4 news last night, partly repeated on the Roday programme this morining.
Crime number one - repeated on the Today programme. Stating that antimatter is the opposite of matter (whatever that would be). It's not - if it was it would have odd properties like negative mass. Instead it's material made from a bunch of sub-atomic particles that have the reverse electric charge (like the electron/positron particle/antiparticle pair). Some neutral particles, like anit-neutrons are made up of antigluons which carry this property (and some are their own antiparticles).
Crime number two - stating this was the first time antimatter had been created. It's not - antiparticles with mass count as matter. Instead, these were the first captured antiatoms.
Crime number three - stating that when matter and antimatter encounter one another they produce nothing. Wrong. They produce a lot of energy in the form of photons. Indeed if if didn't do that, then there wouldn't be much of a story to be made about a matter/antimatter bomb.
This might seem immaterial, but it's not - it's fundamental. Shame on you BBC. Puns fully intended.
"Instead it's material made from a bunch of sub-atomic particles that have the reverse electric charge (like the electron/positron particle/antiparticle pair)"
More correctly, opposite quantum numbers.
You need inverse spin, inverse electric charge (+/-), inverse color charge (blue/antiblue), inverse baryon number, inverse hypercharge. Did I forget anything?
I'm not sure all those quantum properties apply to all sub-atomic particles, but fair enough. It's been nearly 35 years since I did anything like quantum chromodynamics, and I'm not sure it stuck then. My memory is failing, but not so badly as to spot sloppy reporting by the BBC.
Heaven knows what Fox News makes of it. Probably reported as a new terrorist threat.
These techniques (keeping atoms cool (IE slow moving) and pushing them about seem to a key bit of quantum computer research.
AFAIK they tend to use lasers to move neutral atoms around.
Now anti-matter quantum computer *would* be impressive.
Not very compact but *any* attempt to hack it would probably shut it down with a 100m crater.
Now that's what I call *effective* security.
" in fact it would take 300 billion years by his estimates."
Before the Haber process was invented, producing ammonia in industrial quantities was very difficult. To fuse hydrogen and nitrogen required a lot of heat and pressure.After the Haber process, using iron as a catalyst, it was all much easier.
What happens when they figure out what makes antimatter tick? Do we get an anti-Haber process?
The 1/3g of mass was what they couldn't account for when they'd done all the sums, representing mass that was " destroyed " not that which had merely fissioned and
dispersed explosively.
The first atom bomb was exploded at Amolgordo, New Mexico in the Trinity test of July 16th 1945, more than 65 years ago, btw.
Surely we must have an intermediate step from going from existing nuclear technology straight to antimatter. I propose that we finish the development and commercialization of "Back to the Future"-style Mr. Fusion!! Once society has that much cheap energy, everyone with a decent backyard will have an antimatter-producing collider!!
Then we can worry about someone evaporating the Vatican.....
Lewis, if the boffins at CERN can't get below 1 degree Kelvin, they need to have a chat with the boffins at the ultra low temperature physics dept at my old University- Lancaster. They've got into the micro Kelvin range:
http://www.physics.lancs.ac.uk/research/condmatt/ult/dilut.htm
Silly boffins, they should have popped along the road to Morecambe, it's even colder there.
Hmm,
Its more likely that someone will figure out how to harvest the naturally occurring antiparticles present in the solar wind (iirc something in the order of a gram per day) and this increases when there is a large solar flare.
So a superconducting magnetic scoop could be used to channel them into a collector where they can be stored and hopefully used for scientific research or propulsion.
AC, because he doesen't want a visit from the Inquisition..