8 ms·
Antimatter has been transported for the first time
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIf containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous
- comrade1234 7mo agoWhat is that in firecrackers? Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoWolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
- schindlabua 7mo agoWhich seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
- dandellion 7mo agoDefinitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
- adonovan 7mo agoThe subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
- jona-f 7mo agoI don't think that is the case. The kinetic energy of these super-energetic particles is often compared to a tennis ball. But that energy isn't released at once, so even if it would interact with yourself, that interaction creates a particle shower that takes most of the energy with it. I don't think we can feel one of our atoms getting violently ripped apart.
- cobbzilla 7mo agoThere’s Anatoli Bugorski [1] who accidentally put his head into the path of a high energy proton beam. The injury resembled nothing like being hit by tennis balls. > He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain. He’s still alive today, age 83. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
- mastermage 7mo agoOh my god i never read this thats so cool
- dostick 7mo agoWhich kind of mosquito? European or Asian?
- api 7mo agoE=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
- nextaccountic 7mo agoindeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale) indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system
- mememememememo 7mo ago8 minutes to do a mere 1AU. Pretty slow. (not /s for clarification)
- extraduder_ire 7mo ago499.004783836 seconds. So, more like 8.32. I initially looked it up because I misremembered AU being a diameter rather than a radius.
- gopalv 7mo ago> c^2 is a big number. Famous tweet about conversations with God. [1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219 https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219
- xeonmc 7mo agoExcept the fine structure constant
- nikhilisvalid 7mo agoWolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
- tczMUFlmoNk 7mo agoWhen we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an "approximately".
- idiotsecant 7mo agoI'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)
- Zancarius 7mo agoIt's also the difference between 1lb and 6lbs also, so the analogy isn't perfect. The problem is that once you approach the limits of the average human ability, multipliers can transform something possible into something impossible. I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before! (It does depend on where, of course.)
- fc417fc802 7mo agoEven though you can't lift the 600 lb object it's still in the correct ballpark for illustrative purposes when dealing with orders of magnitude. In a similar vein a 20 gallon fishtank and a small bathtub are approximately the same despite that I can't actually fit in the 20 gallon fishtank myself.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoSorry, you're right, I misread the results (wow that makes me sound like an LLM, I'm not, I promise)
- Anonbrit 7mo agoIt's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable
- vivid242 7mo agoIt was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.
- dylan604 7mo agoBaby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the night sky
- mrexroad 7mo agoOr a warp core!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoFor 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton? For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
- fc417fc802 7mo agoChicxulub impact estimated 300 ZJ, zetta being 10^21 giving us 10^23 and 10^-10. Avogadro's constant is 6×10^23. So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters. I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly). According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend. That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.
- voidUpdate 7mo ago*184, a particle annihilates with its antiparticle and both of them are converted into energy, so 92 antiprotons will also destroy 92 standard protons. but yes, C^2 is a very big number
- steve_adams_86 7mo agoIt would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway
- techsystems 7mo agoBut we have to reroute power from life support because auxiliary systems are down!
- steve_adams_86 7mo agoOnly on the unoccupied decks!
- vee-kay 7mo ago[dead]
- mrexroad 7mo agoTry reversing the polarity
- malfist 7mo agoIf it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies for the redundancies.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- 7mo ago
- SilentM68 7mo agoTraveling the cosmos by folding space is recommended to avoid these types of issues, because "The Spice Must Flow!"
- snthpy 7mo agoFirst thing that I did was also to do that calc and I was surprised by how little energy it was.
- alansaber 7mo agoOnly 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat
- observationist 7mo agoYou (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!
- cluckindan 7mo agoThis just in: seasonal affective disorder confirmed to be caused by antiproton deficiency
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoAssume geometric scaling for production as all MBAs do and we'll have enough energy to reverse global warming by lunchtime.
- hulitu 7mo agoYMMV. I heard that they weren't able to count them correctly. And they might not even be there.
- bitbytebane 7mo ago[dead]
- luc_ 7mo agoSetting the plot for Angels and Demons... :D Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp https://archive.ph/JkeMp
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- brumbelow 7mo ago[flagged]
- imhoguy 7mo agoNext milestone: put it in Warptruck™ as fuel
- antonvs 7mo agoA certain car company CEO is about to announce the availability of that in "5-10 years"
- GolfPopper 7mo agoNonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
- sincerely 7mo agoAI slop account
- brumbelow 7mo agowtf? you're slop lol
- AlexeyBelov 7mo agoIt is. The new meta is posting LLM comments, but then if called out post a human response. So it appears as if you were just mistaken, and this was always a human posting. People should read the comment history more critically.
- chuckadams 7mo agoTell me this involved dilithium crystals. Please tell me this involved dilithium, I want to live in Gene's future.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoI definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
- MengerSponge 7mo agoSurprisingly, teleportation is easier.
- drob518 7mo agoTotally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.
- rbanffy 7mo agoMuch safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.
- the_real_cher 7mo agoHad the same thought! haha Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via 18-wheeler.
- fatbird 7mo agoImagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
- brendanfinan 7mo agohttps://home.web.cern.ch/order https://home.web.cern.ch/order
- MinimalAction 7mo agoWhat's this link supposed to be? Returns 404 now.
- brendanfinan 7mo agoOnline store for CERN-brand antimatter
- ozim 7mo agoStop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.
- post-it 7mo agoI'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.
- jayrot 7mo agoI know this is all just tongue-in-cheek, but for the record, they only drove it around for 30 min around the lab site, not on the open roads.
- ozim 7mo agoI only want to charge 1CHF for each charged particle hauled in that transport.
- ahoka 7mo agoAll I know is that you cannot transport toilet paper in tunnels.
- elil17 7mo agoYes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
- kakacik 7mo agoThere is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough dovnvotes for today
- rbanffy 7mo agoActually it should require an anti-license.
- eternauta3k 7mo agoWhat would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?
- drob518 7mo agoAnnihilated.
- rbanffy 7mo agoVery, very bright.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoIt would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
- isolli 7mo agoHow do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?
- dodobirdlord 7mo agoMass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.
- 7mo ago
- aftbit 7mo agoHow could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
- throwaway290 7mo agoThe more important question is not could we. it's should we
- aftbit 7mo agoIf we wanna do cool space stuff, the answer is definitely yes! Just maybe not here on Earth.
- csense 7mo agoFrom a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
- d_silin 7mo agoVery tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
- wiredfool 7mo agoWhen I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock) The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
- d_silin 7mo agoIf humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion. Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.
- 7mo ago
- Sardtok 7mo agoSounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
- M95D 7mo agoThe most expensive bomb ever.
- NitpickLawyer 7mo agoUnless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
- zahlman 7mo agoThe energy used in creating and containing this antimatter was many orders of magnitude greater than it would release on collision with matter.
- AngryData 7mo agoUsing anti-matter for weapons isn't that much of a benefit over a nuclear bomb other than potentially the bombs volume. You would get much less explosion per dollar versus nuclear, and our largest nuclear bombs already waste most of their energy blowing it right out into space. Its like throwing bombs at an antfarm, yeah a full stick of dynamite would completely obliterate the ant farm, but so would a quarter stick of dynamite, and throwing 100 sticks of dynamite at an ant farm may boast impressive energy levels on paper but would be a complete waste of dynamite and effort because you already destroyed it 1,000 times over.
- hulitu 7mo agoYou need to preserve the oil. Else it is useless.
- amai 7mo agoThe comic Yoko Tsuno: The time spiral from 1981 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps) is about a time traveler, who arrives from the future to prevent the creation/invention of antimatter. This is important, because in a future world war an antimatter bomb destroyed the earth. The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
- cozzyd 7mo agopssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!
- MengerSponge 7mo agoThat's a contentious statement! We're not sure if they are or aren't. More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos! https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02110 https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02110
- cozzyd 7mo agowell either way they're in opposite helicity states... but yes, Majorana neutrinos nothwithanding, there are plenty of transported positrons detected by e.g. PAMELA and plenty of antimuons that go long distances.
- hulitu 7mo agoGo away. We have (counting on fingers) ... enough money.
- d--b 7mo agoEvery time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
- M95D 7mo agoThe disadvantages of water-based life.
- saalweachter 7mo agoSo it's hard to imagine biological life (chemical life?) without water or carbon, since they're such good solvents and building blocks, but we can at least imagine electronic or mechanical life which don't require them. But what you can't get away from is heat dissipation. Any life will use energy will generate heat will need to dissipate heat to maintain homeostasis. Could you dissipate enough heat to exist at <10K, to maintain a technological civilization? Or would you be reduced to supercooling your entire environment? Are there naturally occurring pools of liquid helium out there in the universe, maintained by natural processes, or are you left with vacuum relying on radiative cooling?
- M95D 7mo agoMethane based life is considered a possibility.
- saalweachter 7mo agoMethane only gets you to 100K.
- nout 7mo agoI was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about it :(
- AStrangeMorrow 7mo agoI am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
- ck2 7mo agoantimatter is not what the average person thinks it is from science-fiction https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatter https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
- diwank 7mo agoAngels & Demons anyone?
- nimonian 7mo agoThe mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.
- 0x3f 7mo agoNot being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?
- michaelmcdonald 7mo agoRead them for what they are (fictional novels with allusions to truth and fact) and you will truly enjoy a good story!
- burkaman 7mo agoThey are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing is relatively simplistic, but that often isn't a problem when the story is good.
- xeonmc 7mo agoSee also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-o...
- Lyngbakr 7mo agoHis books are perhaps in the same category as Nickelback albums: people love to rag on them, but if you look at the sheer number of units shifted, clearly lots of folks enjoy them.
- stevenalowe 7mo agoUnclear on the size of the apparatus require to secure the 92 anti-protons - did it occupy the entire truck?
- accrual 7mo agoThere's a photo towards the end which shows the equipment in the truck, it seems to be about the size of a mini fridge or a half rack.
- jffry 7mo agoNope, it's pretty compact. The first image in CERN's photo gallery shows it being loaded into that truck: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2957407?ln=en https://cds.cern.ch/record/2957407?ln=en Of course, it's compact because it only has to last so long. CERN's press release discusses needing a generator and a cryocooler in the truck for longer trips: https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experiment-cern-succeeds-transporting-antimatter https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experi... This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-forward-antimatter-transport https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...
- dcuthbertson 7mo agoImagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
- mikewarot 7mo agoI wonder what would happen if you had a solid piece of antimatter, say a gram of anti-iron... and just set it down. Would it really annihaliate immediately on contact with air, a lab table, or anything... or would the normal forces that keep us from falling through things still be in effect? Either nothing would happen, or like molten salt in water, the joule currents would be instant and drive it all to go boom in a big way. I wonder which.
- estimator7292 7mo agoThe charges are inverted, so anti-protons are actively attracted to protons. It would immediately explode.
- munchler 7mo agoI think OP is proposing a lump of antimatter with no net electric charge. My guess is that even in this case the lump’s positrons would immediately interact with the table’s electrons and explode.
- dyauspitr 7mo agoEven without charge attraction, say anti-neutrons (I don’t know the term) would instantly resolve because neutrons are everywhere.
- andrewflnr 7mo ago
- mrcwinn 7mo agoYet Papa Johns still forgets the 20 oz soda I had ordered.
- rkagerer 7mo agoHow expensive was that shipment?
- ar_writer 7mo agoThis is quite interesting. Imagine the estate of this in 10 years with all the tech advancements, and all the applications it could have.
- amai 7mo agoThe comic Yoko Tsuno: The time spiral from 1981 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps) is about a time traveler, who arrives from the future to prevent the creation/invention of antimatter. This is important, because in a future world war an antimatter bomb destroyed the earth. The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.