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I call bullshit. The cost is not "very high", it's astronomically high. (Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) Just because the "gunpo

by rubypay 16y ago

I call bullshit. The cost is not "very high", it's astronomically high. (Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) Just because the "gunpowder" is expensive doesn't stop the production of containment vessels or delivery mechanisms: http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-10-04/news/17447495_1_antimatter-physicists-paul-dirac http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-10-04/news/17447495_1_antima... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon Additionally, "antimatter" can include positrons, which are much cheaper to produce than antiprotons. My advisor also worked on creating antimatter traps at government labs, but none of the projects had any kind of defense related purposes. Your advisor may not have been involved in all imaginable projects related to antimatter. There are only a handful of interesting research questions about antimatter that exist at reasonable scales. Most of those are either fundamental physics or medical in nature. Along with research into directly producing weapons, antimatter can also be used to initiate (micro)fusion, and has been researched for space travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_catalyzed_nuclear_pulse_propulsion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_catalyzed_nuclear_pu...

icegreentea 16y ago
While I kinda agree with the spirit of your comment (we'll get there someday), there's a few problems with the specifics. A pure (or high percentage) positron weapon would be very hard to handle. The repulsive forces would be enormous. As in we have a hard time containing the equivalent mass of electrons. And that's without worrying about annihilation. And really, I think RK's response was spurred on more by rubypay's tone/phrasing. The original phrasing easily sounds like we're on the verge of practical anti-matter weapons. Which we're not.
DevX101 16y ago
No knock on you and your research which seems pretty cool, but it really saddens me that motivation for government spending into this research is to build a bigger, better, more lethal weapon. I wish the energy supply rationale were the real motivating factor for funding here.
RK 16y ago
(Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) If that's not trolling, I don't know what is. I will remind the gentle readers that I even edited my post (with a tag) for correctness almost immediately. Just because the "gunpowder" is expensive doesn't stop the production of containment vessels or delivery mechanisms: Actually that's exactly why such a project doesn't make sense. Kind of like building a fancy castle to put your Holy Grail in before you've found it. Read any of the articles or commentaries based on actual science, they say that such a weapon is so far fetched from an engineering stand point, that it's not worth pursuing. Ref.: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD... Or the same wikipedia article you linked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon Your advisor may not have been involved in all imaginable projects related to antimatter. Thank you for ignoring my edit. I'm not saying that any of this is impossible, just that it's horribly impractical, needing probably an order(s?) of magnitude more than Manhattan Project level of effort.

by rubypay 16y ago

icegreentea 16y ago

While I kinda agree with the spirit of your comment (we'll get there someday), there's a few problems with the specifics. A pure (or high percentage) positron weapon would be very hard to handle. The repulsive forces would be enormous. As in we have a hard time containing the equivalent mass of electrons. And that's without worrying about annihilation. And really, I think RK's response was spurred on more by rubypay's tone/phrasing. The original phrasing easily sounds like we're on the verge of practical anti-matter weapons. Which we're not.

DevX101 16y ago

No knock on you and your research which seems pretty cool, but it really saddens me that motivation for government spending into this research is to build a bigger, better, more lethal weapon. I wish the energy supply rationale were the real motivating factor for funding here.

RK 16y ago

(Comments like this make me want to stop reading Hacker News.) If that's not trolling, I don't know what is. I will remind the gentle readers that I even edited my post (with a tag) for correctness almost immediately. Just because the "gunpowder" is expensive doesn't stop the production of containment vessels or delivery mechanisms: Actually that's exactly why such a project doesn't make sense. Kind of like building a fancy castle to put your Holy Grail in before you've found it. Read any of the articles or commentaries based on actual science, they say that such a weapon is so far fetched from an engineering stand point, that it's not worth pursuing. Ref.: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD... Or the same wikipedia article you linked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon Your advisor may not have been involved in all imaginable projects related to antimatter. Thank you for ignoring my edit. I'm not saying that any of this is impossible, just that it's horribly impractical, needing probably an order(s?) of magnitude more than Manhattan Project level of effort.