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Miniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
by impossiblefork 10mo ago
Miniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
- fooker 10mo agoNot before efficiently converting a large amount of mass into usable energy.
- GenerWork 10mo agoHow could we harness this energy and make it usable?
- einpoklum 10mo agoYou could pen a carefully-worded a letter of demands and send it to some Billionaire? A bit on the risky side, but - hey, you only live once etc.
- fooker 10mo agoIf I knew that, I'd probably have more important things to do than comment it here.
- remarkEon 10mo agoYou use it to boil water.
- 0-_-0 10mo agoIt's almost a meme at this point
- fooker 10mo agoThe real question is if we'll get back hole or antimatter powered steam engines before GTA 6
- Symmetry 10mo agoYou can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
- jjmarr 10mo agoBut you want that to happen in space and to control the output of energy. Otherwise you just have a bomb.
- fooker 10mo agoThe difference between a bomb and a reactor is just clever engineering.
- jojobas 10mo agoIt's much easier to make a fission reactor than a fission bomb, and much easier to make a fusion bomb than a fusion reaction. They are not even that similar.
- Symmetry 10mo agoIt's way easier to make a fission bomb than a fission reactor. I reactor has to stay in the very narrow window where it's critical but not prompt critical. Even pure fission bombs can be marvels of engineering but the simplest gun-type bomb is easier to build than the simplest nuclear reactor.
- jojobas 10mo agoWithout a precisely timed neutron initiator you'll get a fizzle. Either way, gun-type bombs require highly enriched uranium. A simple reactor can be literally just brickwork of natural uranium and graphite. Reactors are much much simpler to pull off, which is why US had the first reactor whole 2.5 years before a nuclear bomb.
- Symmetry 10mo agoSomething that explodes with the force of 100 tons of TNT is still a bomb, even if it isn't a bomb as impressive as the one you were hoping for. And getting the reactor you're thinking of to the point that it worked without exploding took a lot more effort than you're suggesting.
- idiotsecant 10mo agoIn the same way that atomic weapons and radioisotope generators both convert mass into energy. It's just a matter of slightly different timescales.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aeve890 10mo agoMinor nit-pick but Hawking Radiation hasn't been observed and remains a theoretical prediction.
- FridayoLeary 10mo agoIt's pretty widely accepted though. He himself hated the idea so you can expect he did the calculations thoroughly.
- 21asdffdsa12 10mo agoI love that major scientists had a intense hatred for the concepts forced upon them by the universe. Einstein and quantum mechanics come to mind
- antonvs 10mo agoIt's a pretty fundamental prediction though, and it's been derived in many different ways, all of which give the same prediction. It's closely related to the Unruh effect, which is a direct consequence of pure QFT. The Unruh effect describes how an accelerated observer sees a different vacuum from an inertial observer - they see radiation that the inertial observer doesn't. Hawking radiation is essentially this same effect, except that "acceleration" is replaced by "gravity" (Einstein's equivalence principle.) There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic intuition. For Hawking radiation to be wrong would require some fundamental changes to GR, QFT, or both.
- MaxikCZ 10mo agoA lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong :). Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting
- antonvs 10mo ago> A lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong For example? What I mean by “fundamental” is that we have very strong reasons to believe in the correctness of a prediction, because e.g. it follows mathematically from more than one model (in this case), and doesn’t involve dependence on uncertain physics. > Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting These kinds of attitudes don’t seem to me to involve an interest in science. You don’t appear to actually have much understanding or knowledge of what we’re discussing. You’re just looking for a fix.
- IsTom 10mo agoThat's the point, evaporation turns matter into energy. You can tune power by chosing mass of the black hole and then feed it regular matter at a steady rate.