Been a bit busy and out of net access while getting established here, but I need to correct a misapprehension here:
On Sun, 29 Aug 2010, Darryl or Natalia wrote: > If they can isolate anti-matter safely, though I don't know how that's > possible, we will have access to ayn amazing alternate energy. Then, > the world's elite can harness and exploit it. Um, no. The ALPHA group is one of those I am involved with on occasion. The process is pretty simple, it's just a variation on the neutral atom trap, using the same techniques - decelerations, coolings, energy transfers, laser cooling, magnetic trapping. The thing is, you irreducibly must have a multi-GeV particle accelerator to generate the anti-protons, (positrons are an easy by-product), which consumes vast quantities of energy producing large quantities of particles, a tiny fraction of which end up finding their way into the trap. The energy cost per ultimately trapped particle created is vastly more than the energy one could get out of anihilatinhg the particles in the trap; but regardless, if you could create antimatter with 100% efficiency, you still have to provide the energy to make the particle, and that's the amount you get back when you anihilate it. There is no source of new energy in this process. You just get back out what you've put in. There is no practical value to producing antimatter whatsoever, except perhaps as a very light and compact way of storing energy for propellant for small interstellar probes. Figure about 200 years development time. (Prior to that, the containment will be so massive that there will be no advantage - unlike the nonsense in the Dan Brown novel, a gram of antihydrogen, besides taking about 10^18 years to produce, would, in order to transport it, require a fleet of vehicles big enough to carry a multi-Megawatt power supply to provide power to operate the containment system, which would dwarf the containment system itself, which would aready be too large to fit in a semi). No, the really interesting questions about neutral anti-atoms are about what their properties are. How do the frequencies of the transition lines compare to those of normal atoms? Do they behave the same under application of forces - gravity, magnetic fields, etc? There is much to be revealed there, and if they are the same, or different, either outcome will be greatly illumiinating. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
