Posted on 09/18/2002 11:47:20 AM PDT by blam
Scientists claim antimatter breakthrough
Scientists have announced the first large-scale production of antimatter.
A team based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva say they have developed a large amount of the substance.
Antimatter is a reverse form of ordinary matter. When the two kinds of matter meet they annihilate each other in an enormous burst of energy.
It's this process which provides the power source for Starship Enterprise in its film and TV space adventures.
Physicists have made only very small quantities of antimatter before. But the CERN team say they have made at least 50,000 atoms of anti-hydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of normal hydrogen.
They admit the achievement will not lead to starship-style warp drives - at least not in the foreseeable future.
But it could help scientists answer some of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the universe.
Team member Professor Michael Charlton from the University of Wales at Swansea said: "This is a milestone that has opened up new horizons, to enable scientists to study symmetry in nature and explore the fundamental laws of physics which govern the universe."
He says it will also help scientists address what happened to the antimatter created in the Big Bang.
According to Nature, the CERN scientists used sophisticated electric and magnetic field traps and ultra-low temperatures to generate the anti-atoms.
Story filed: 19:02 Wednesday 18th September 2002
All right!! Time to go where no man has gone before!!!
Well, duh!?!
How long until Scott Ritter denies it?
Yes, but it's a safe bet that more energy was spent to produce the anti-matter than would be released in a matter/anti-matter reaction.
Indeed it does. Both are based on the equivalence between matter and energy. In atomic energy--whether fission or fusion--it is only the differences in the masses of the before and after products that are converted to energy. The percentage difference as a mass fraction is fairly small. In a matter/antimatter collision, everything is converted to energy!
I think that's probably true. But, even if it is, wouldn't it be useful to have such a concentrated source of energy?
A team based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva say they have developed a large amount of the substance.
In unrelated news, Geneva disappeared in an enormous explosion, with an estimated yield of almost six gigatons. This is 100 times as powerful as the largest nuclear detonation recorded, which was in 1961 off of the island of Novaya Zemlya.
A scientist at FermiLab, in Illinois, was on the telephone with a researcher the CERN lab at the time of the explosion. He states that the last words he heard on the phone before the detonation were "Hey, Hans, HOLD MUH BEER AND WATCH THIS!"
Something like the Hormone Replacement Stuff that Art Bell advertises. :^))
Last time I went to the Olive Garden for dinner, I heard and saw things that led me to believe that this is so...
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