Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
The injury resembled nothing like being hit by tennis balls.
> He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.
He’s still alive today, age 83.
Famous tweet about conversations with God.
[1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219
indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations
(not /s for clarification)
I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before!
(It does depend on where, of course.)
In a similar vein a 20 gallon fishtank and a small bathtub are approximately the same despite that I can't actually fit in the 20 gallon fishtank myself.
Considering all the weird encounters Star Fleet vessels encounter over the run of a TV series; who can blame him?
For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.
I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).
According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.
That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.
CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now
Or something.
People should read the comment history more critically.
Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via 18-wheeler.
Of course, it's compact because it only has to last so long. CERN's press release discusses needing a generator and a cryocooler in the truck for longer trips: https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experi...
This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...
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.
It would immediately explode.
My guess is that even in this case the lump’s positrons would immediately interact with the table’s electrons and explode.
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?
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...
Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.
Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.
(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)
Antimatter is always “armed” and is only rendered safe by containment. If containment fails, it explodes. It’s more like keeping a massive stockpile of fluorine, but somehow worse and harder to contain.
We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.
There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
Now, it's true, there's some slight issues such as radiation, food storage/production, psychological effects, and any random space rocks obliterating your craft, all of which could reasonably turn out to be enough to make it not work. We also don't have a fuel source that can provide 1g of constant acceleration for 80 years for a reasonably sized space ship, though again my memory is that nothing prohibits it from a physics perspective (this is where my knowledge/understanding get prohibitively poor. I'm not sure how the math works if you stick a thousand ion drives to a spaceship that's already in space or if you just need a huge snifter of compressed hydrogen or if you can just use nuclear propulsion but I'm pretty sure that antimatter would do it, if you could bring yourself to waste the money. But maybe we don't have a plausible way to contain it so what do I know).
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe I glossed over what's currently considered a physics, rather than engineering/economic/materials science problem, but that's what it looked like last I checked.
Edge of observable universe is something like 46 billion light-years away, even at 0.9c thats 50 billion years of travel (22 billion years experienced by the traveller)
But yes, you can travel places by constant acceleration but unfortunately it still dwarfs in comparison to those places out of our reach.
Unfortunately also, the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light so you actually cant ever reach the edge
0.9C would be reached in only a year and a half for the traveler under constant 1G acceleration. After 2.5 years you would be at .99c, and at a bit over 3.5 years you would hit .999c with a 6x time dilation compared to earth. After 6 years of acceleration it would be .99999c and Earth would be 200 years in the past. As you approach 12 years you would be going 0.9999999999c and Earth would have experienced almost 70,000 years. As you go past 16 years you would be in the millions of years and as you got past 20 years you would be in the billions of years.
Of course doing that may only be feasible with anti-matter energy storage. The next best energy source is fusion energy but it is 2 orders of magnitude less dense. Perhaps some kind of ram scoop would make that route possible but that is going beyond just speculation because we don't know if you can feasibly capture random particles at that speed even assuming you didn't explode from just hitting them in the first place.
Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.
If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.
At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
Also, now your tank is just fuel as well.
Also, if there was an accident and all those protons annihilated, the consequences would be unnoticeable except to sensitive instruments. The energy involved is about one seven billionth of the energy in a single grain of gunpowder.
Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.
Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
And, no, batteries can have outbursts but they're nowhere near as catastrophic as compressed, explosive gases or an antimatter bomb.
The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.
But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.
For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.
Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.
With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
Not the same paper, but goes into more detail.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266620272...
A slightly less insane fuel source is a micro black hole. Drag a tiny black hole behind your ship and drip-feed it any kind of mass you come across. You still get >90% mass-energy efficiency which is far beyond anything else we know of.
Besides, one of the big problems with antimatter is that it's a battery, not a fuel source. We must first collect the unimaginable amount of energy and then process it into antimatter one particle at a time. If you build a ton of factories around a star you can get meaningful production. But a black hole drive can suck up interstellar gas or any asteroids you come across. Matter is easy to get. Don't ask where the micro black hole comes from.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp
The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
Imagine the estate of this in 10 years with all the tech advancements, and all the applications it could have.
But what you can't get away from is heat dissipation.
Any life will use energy will generate heat will need to dissipate heat to maintain homeostasis.
Could you dissipate enough heat to exist at <10K, to maintain a technological civilization? Or would you be reduced to supercooling your entire environment?
Are there naturally occurring pools of liquid helium out there in the universe, maintained by natural processes, or are you left with vacuum relying on radiative cooling?
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos!
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.