"THERE IS NO PRACTICAL WAY TO STORE A CHUNK OF ANTIMATTER." Somebody better tell NASA... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122 Antimatter belt around Earth discovered by Pamela craft "Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts." http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4882 ---- I've asked the following sort of question before on math-fun: I realize that matter annihilates antimatter when they come into 'contact', but what is 'contact' in this context, and what are the time sequence details -- e.g., when a molecule of glucose 'contacts' a molecule of anti-glucose ? At 07:05 AM 11/13/2011, Warren Smith wrote:
There's a lot of garbage science fiction out there that has nothing to do with science, especially in hollywood... but in this post I want to demolish two sci-fi ideas that occur in works of Larry Niven (et alia) which maybe did sound achievable to the naive. But a third such idea (super strong materials) will also be considered and argued to maybe have hope.
1. Sci-fi antimatter. You just keep a chunk of antimatter magnetically suspended in vacuum or something, where it's an excellent energy source for your super-rocket, ray-gun, also an excellent mega-bomb when you turn off the magnetic levitation. Stores the maximum possible amount of energy for that amount of mass.
Actually: let's say a single normal-matter gas atom contaminates the vacuum. Hits the antimatter. Boom. Way more energy is released than you need to eject some antimatter atoms at high speed. They in turn hit the normal matter container. Boom boom boom. The resulting normal atom ejecta fly out to hit more antimatter. Etc. This is an exponentially amplifying process.
THERE IS NO PRACTICAL WAY TO STORE A CHUNK OF ANTIMATTER.
Get over it.