5 ms·
If you were holding onto a chunk of antimatter you would probably be missing a hand.
by jwuphysics 15y ago
If you were holding onto a chunk of antimatter you would probably be missing a hand.
- swombat 15y ago1 megaton nuke is about 4000 TeraJoules of energy. 10g of antimatter yields about 10^15 Joules - i.e. 1 PetaJoule, or the equivalent of a 2+ Megaton nuke. If you were holding onto a chunk of antimatter large enough to hold onto you'd be missing half of London.
- Killah911 15y agoNot sure if that conclusion is right. It probably wouldn't result in an explosion and the energy output would probably be in the form of light. Regardless, I'm going with Stephen Hawking on this one: "If you ever meet your anti-self, don't shake hands!"
- burgerbrain 15y ago"It probably wouldn't result in an explosion and the energy output would probably be in the form of light." That's what nukes do too. Turns out that dumping absurd amounts of light (various parts of the spectrum, but certainly including visible) into the surrounding area absurdly fast tends to fuck stuff up pretty good.
- lutorm 15y agoYeah, a lot of the power output from a nuclear explosion is in gamma rays, and even air is opaque enough to gamma rays that the energy deposition heats it up to way incandescent temperatures. That's what the fireball of a nuclear explosion is: incandescent air.
- swombat 15y agoFunny that I actually managed to get the maths wrong. 4000 TeraJoules is 4 PetaJoules, i.e. 10g of antimatter is actually a 0.25 Megaton nuke. Still packs some serious punch, but I totally fail at arithmetic, it seems.
- kijinbear 15y agoNot if you're holding onto it using a magnetic field, or any other method that doesn't involve direct contact.
- Cushman 15y agoIs there any conceivable way to make such a system fail-safe?
- Fargren 15y agoNothing is fail-safe.
- Cushman 15y agoI think you misunderstand what the term means. For example, the control rods in some nuclear reactor designs are held up out of the core by electromagnets. Thus even in the event of complete power failure, the rods fall naturally, stopping the reaction. Since failure results in a safe state, this is referred to as a "fail-safe" system. By contrast, if you were holding a lump of antimatter contained by an electromagnetic field, a power failure would result is the antimatter escaping confinement and annihilating with your body, releasing an unimaginably large amount of energy nearly instantly. This is what you might call a "fail-deadly" system, because a failure results in a decidedly unsafe state.