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High energy physics is one of the leading fields that drives scientific progress forward. Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it

High energy physics is one of the leading fields that drives scientific progress forward. Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it is one of the most efficient ways to store energy (Basically 100% of matter gets converted to energy). Now if only we could figure out a way to cheaply produce it without relying on fossil fuels.

leeoniya 13y ago
Proxima Centauri holds extremely high promise for human exploration. If we could only get there. Curing cancer will revolutionize human health. If we could only cure cancer. and so forth...
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  His comment is a little more meaningful and less redundant than that. For instance, I was aware of the difficulties in storing anti-matter, but it hadn't occurred to me why it would be such an efficient energy storage mechanism. Sure we can't store it well yet, but obviously that's one of the things scientists are going to be thinking about the most as they look to do more experiments with.
gus_massa 13y ago
Even if it were easy to produce, the problem is where to store it.
- HCIdivision17 13y ago
  Why, you use ATRAP, of course! [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton_Decelerator#ATRAP http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton_Decelerator#ATRAP
angersock 13y ago
What have been the useful benefits of this research? I don't see any obvious examples--does it help things like smaller fabrication for chips? EDIT: Folks, I'm not being a jerk here. For example, a lot of the engineering that went into missles and the space program (integrated circuits, GPS, etc.) has application elsewhere. Fundamental science research into materials and electromagnetics has given us wifi, radio, and television. Research into x-rays and radioactivity gave us medical x-rays and radiotagging of isotopes for understanding reactions. High-energy physics research seems to have no immediate or even long-term application beyond satisfying "How does this stuff hold together?"--my question about chip fabrication was specifically in regards to the idea that things like advanced lithography techniques probably are advanced by this research. The parent made this claim: High energy physics is one of the leading fields that drives scientific progress forward. I am simply asking this assertion to be justified and elaborated upon for those of us unfamiliar with those impacts.
- Crito 13y ago
  http://phys.org/news/2012-07-particle-physics-.html http://phys.org/news/2012-07-particle-physics-.html Edit: Or to be more direct, and therefore less helpful, "scientific progress" is not a measure of "things that are useful to me". Scientific progress can, and historically is, made when we expand our knowledge of the world, not exclusively when we find practical applications of that knowledge.
  - angersock 13y ago
    So, no, it does not "drive science forward"--it may, one day, lead to more interesting questions. There's nothing wrong with that, but acting like it is generating ROI today--or has in the past--is disingenuous. Without validating your assertions or disclaiming them properly you are perpetuating the sort of nastiness science is supposed to fix. EDIT: Your addition about "drive science forward" as opposed to "drive engineering forward" is a subtlety that is worth repeating.
    - rosser 13y ago
      So, no, it does not "drive science forward"--it may, one day, lead to more interesting questions. Leading to more interesting questions is, in fact, a significant part of "driv[ing] science forward".
    - girvo 13y ago
      With all respect, I got the opposite reading on this than you did. Scientific progress is just that, progress in the scientific world. That says nothing about practical applications per se, merely the increase of the worlds body of knowledge.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The question is: what WILL be the useful benefits of this research in the future. And we don't know that. That's the nature of blue sky research. But let's look back at the 19th and 20th centuries to see what value fundamental physics research has had. At the time research into electromagnetism was quite esoteric with little practical use. Yet, of course, it turned out to be hugely advantageous in many ways. Electric motors. Electric lighting and heating. Electric appliances in the home. Radio. RADAR. Television. Telephones. Etc. Electromagnetism defined the industrial advances of the 20th century and easily was responsible for literally quadrillions of dollars in economic value. Later, advances in computational theory and especially quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics enabled the electronics and computational / digital communications revolutions which gave rise to the modern internet, smartphones, personal computers, and even high-efficiency/low-emission automobiles (through micro-computer based engine control). Those technologies have been responsible for easily tens of trillions of dollars of economic value (if not hundreds or more) and are utterly dependent on advancements in basic science which at the time had very little practical use. The laser, for example, was originally lampooned as a solution looking for a problem, though of course eventually it became an important component in the backbone of modern industry and commerce. At the time absolutely none of these benefits of this research were obvious. And in many cases it took many decades up to a century or more for the benefits to be realized. But just look at the enormous RoI generated. Imagine someone in the early 20th century systematically campaigning against high-energy physics research because it had no immediate practical application. Imagine how many trillions upon trillions of modern economic activity would simply not exist today because of that short-sightedness. I could enumerate all of the practical benefits of high-energy physics research over the last, say, 2 decades but that plays into the wrong game and misses the point. Ultimately we don't know what we are missing out on by not pursuing certain categories of knowledge. And occasionally pursuit of blue sky knowledge produces not just enormous levels of RoI but absolutely civilization defining levels of return. Thus we should pursue such research with a healthy level of investment regardless of the perceived short-term applications, because the benefits of hitting the jackpot are too great to sanely do anything else. It's possible that knowledge of the higgs-field will have no practical, economic impact on human civilizations, ever. But it's also possible that it could lead to quadrillions of dollars in economic value over the next several centuries, the only way we'll find out is if we acquire that knowledge.
Florin_Andrei 13y ago
> Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it is one of the most efficient ways to store energy (Basically 100% of matter gets converted to energy). In theory, a black hole is also a 100%-efficient converter of matter into energy, via the Hawking radiation. A microscopic BH might radiate very large amounts of Hawking radiation. The bonus is that, unlike antimatter, you can make (or at least fatten up) a BH directly from ordinary matter, without spending energy as a prior step (anti-matter is energy storage, a black hole is an energy source - if you're willing to spend some dirt as "fuel"). Of course, the problem of storage is just as bad, if not worse.
- wyager 13y ago
  I hadn't thought about black holes as an energy source. Cool idea. But where does the energy actually "come from"? With M/AM interactions, the M/AM is annihilated, which creates harvestable photons. Does the energy given off by a black hole come from the change in entropy from structured matter to unstructured Hawking radiation or something? It seems almost too easy if we can just feed any old matter into a black hole and get energy out...
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    If it is a traditional black hole, it has to have a pretty large mass to have a manageable energy output (they burn faster as they lose mass). On the other side, if it is too large, the energy output is miniscule.
  - waps 13y ago
    The energy comes from virtual particles. You should think of it this way : anything has a certain chance of happening, but must follow conservation laws. Conservation of energy, conservation of mass, conservation of ... (the "real" conservation laws are more complex, but ... E.g. only mass+energy+entropy is constant, not mass, nor energy, nor entropy). But small, "short term" violations are possible. Now imagine there are particle pairs that, when added together have zero mass, zero energy, zero ... These would pop into existence in pairs everywhere and be anihilated soon after. Same is true for triples, quadruplets, ... with different probabilities. Surprise : these particles "exist" (normally for very short times). So particle a and particle b come into existence, both particles on a path that separates them from eachother. However, because opposite charges attract (and other effects related to other forces) they will fall back into eachother after a while, anihilating eachother and leaving nothing. These are generally referred to as "virtual" particles. Except of course if something comes between them while flying on their path. This results in multiple effects, like the Casimir pressure, and hawking radiation. The Casimir pressure is simpler. Suppose you have 2 straight plates, and you bring them close together. So close that these virtual particles have a good chance of impacting one but not the other. If the plates are metal, the particles will generally "merge" with it (like electrons). So a tiny percentage of the virtual particles between the plates become real. This does not affect virtual particles that are not between the plates. So there is a clear differential between vacuum interactions outside of the plates and inside. This results in a massive pressure pushing the plates together, like removing gas particles in a container results in a pressure on the outside of the container (and, in an athmosphere of large molecules, if you move plates closer together than the size of the gas molecules, there will be a pressure that pushes the plates completely together). Likewise, in black holes what comes between the particles is an event horizon. Event horizons "erase" quantum information, only the black hole as a whole has quantum information (the reason for is that black holes are physical, localized, manifestations of the end of time : they don't have an inside as far as anything outside the black hole can detect), no individual parts of a black hole have quantum state. So if an electron crosses the event horizon the charge of the entire black hole changes instantaneously, and the point charge of the electron disappears. That means the charge pulling the particles back together (assuming an e+ and e- virtual particle pair) becomes much more distant to the particle, and if it has enough speed and a convenient direction it will fly away from the black hole. Due to conservation laws the net result is that the black hole has eaten a somehow negative-mass charged particle, and the mass has decreased. A particle has been created outside of the black hole and is flying away to infinity. The vast majority of these particles are photons of a specific frequency, and, surprisingly, the smaller the black hole, the larger the effect (and the higher the frequencies). So spaceships would have to carry "heavy" black holes to get a decent output and would have to "feed" the black holes to avoid exploding (millions of tonnes as least, and you have to shovel in matter at a rate of 10+ kg per second to keep it stable. Or you could reflect hawking radiation back in). And of course, large black holes have large inertia (plus : how do you hold on to one ? Electrical fields can do it, but it would have to be a field so huge it baffles the imagination ...). A 1kg black hole would be converted into energy in less than a planck second by this effect and there is nothing, even theoretically, that can hold back that energy. Such an explosion might even do what people were "afraid" would happen with CERN's Higgs experiments and disrupt the Higgs field, causing a cascading conversion of the energy "powering" inertia into photons (the higgs field is something like a magnetic field that opposes all velocity changes in mass). If this were to happen, it would look one hell of a lot like a big bang.
yongjik 13y ago
I don't think it works like that. The only known way to make antimatter is to convert energy into matter-antimatter pairs, so basically you need the same 100% of energy to produce antimatter in the first place. (In fact, I think the current physical theory prohibits any kind of matter-antimatter conversion, but I'm not a physicist so I might be wrong.) So, if we had enough energy to make these antimatter, we could simply use the energy directly, without going through the massively inefficient step of funneling that energy into liquid helium and superconducting magnets and city-wide vacuum circles and so on.
- orik 13y ago
  we could simply use the energy directly, but I think he was talking about storing energy. >most efficient ways to store energy
  - yongjik 13y ago
    Well, maybe he did, but I parsed his phrase in the other way: > ...a way to cheaply produce it without relying on fossil fuels. It sounds like regarding antimatter as a possible alternative to fossil fuels---which it can't be. (It can be an alternative to oil tankers, I guess.)
    - xerophtye 13y ago
      Technically, all forms of energy "production" we have are basically extraction from an existing store of said energy. Try reading[0], it's about the two guys who proposed a black hole powered space ship. What they suggest is extraction energy from the sun (an existing source) and making a black hole (or maybe more from the same one), and then use that to power your ship. "With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. " [0]http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
gus_massa 13y ago
The problem is that to do something useful you don’t need only energy but low entropy. The easy way to calculate it is using the Gibbs free energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy . To produce some work and transform the radiation energy you need also a cooler heat sink to hide the entropy. The black holes are very cold, so you need something cooler. You must have a very tiny black hole with a temperature over the ambient temperature (25°C=77°F), so the heat flush from the black hole to the ambient and you can harvest a part of it as useful energy, for example with a electricity generator.

leeoniya 13y ago

Proxima Centauri holds extremely high promise for human exploration. If we could only get there. Curing cancer will revolutionize human health. If we could only cure cancer. and so forth...

TallGuyShort 13y ago
His comment is a little more meaningful and less redundant than that. For instance, I was aware of the difficulties in storing anti-matter, but it hadn't occurred to me why it would be such an efficient energy storage mechanism. Sure we can't store it well yet, but obviously that's one of the things scientists are going to be thinking about the most as they look to do more experiments with.

gus_massa 13y ago

Even if it were easy to produce, the problem is where to store it.

HCIdivision17 13y ago
Why, you use ATRAP, of course! [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton_Decelerator#ATRAP http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton_Decelerator#ATRAP

angersock 13y ago

What have been the useful benefits of this research? I don't see any obvious examples--does it help things like smaller fabrication for chips? EDIT: Folks, I'm not being a jerk here. For example, a lot of the engineering that went into missles and the space program (integrated circuits, GPS, etc.) has application elsewhere. Fundamental science research into materials and electromagnetics has given us wifi, radio, and television. Research into x-rays and radioactivity gave us medical x-rays and radiotagging of isotopes for understanding reactions. High-energy physics research seems to have no immediate or even long-term application beyond satisfying "How does this stuff hold together?"--my question about chip fabrication was specifically in regards to the idea that things like advanced lithography techniques probably are advanced by this research. The parent made this claim: High energy physics is one of the leading fields that drives scientific progress forward. I am simply asking this assertion to be justified and elaborated upon for those of us unfamiliar with those impacts.

Crito 13y ago
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-particle-physics-.html http://phys.org/news/2012-07-particle-physics-.html Edit: Or to be more direct, and therefore less helpful, "scientific progress" is not a measure of "things that are useful to me". Scientific progress can, and historically is, made when we expand our knowledge of the world, not exclusively when we find practical applications of that knowledge.
- angersock 13y ago
  So, no, it does not "drive science forward"--it may, one day, lead to more interesting questions. There's nothing wrong with that, but acting like it is generating ROI today--or has in the past--is disingenuous. Without validating your assertions or disclaiming them properly you are perpetuating the sort of nastiness science is supposed to fix. EDIT: Your addition about "drive science forward" as opposed to "drive engineering forward" is a subtlety that is worth repeating.
  - rosser 13y ago
    So, no, it does not "drive science forward"--it may, one day, lead to more interesting questions. Leading to more interesting questions is, in fact, a significant part of "driv[ing] science forward".
  - girvo 13y ago
    With all respect, I got the opposite reading on this than you did. Scientific progress is just that, progress in the scientific world. That says nothing about practical applications per se, merely the increase of the worlds body of knowledge.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
The question is: what WILL be the useful benefits of this research in the future. And we don't know that. That's the nature of blue sky research. But let's look back at the 19th and 20th centuries to see what value fundamental physics research has had. At the time research into electromagnetism was quite esoteric with little practical use. Yet, of course, it turned out to be hugely advantageous in many ways. Electric motors. Electric lighting and heating. Electric appliances in the home. Radio. RADAR. Television. Telephones. Etc. Electromagnetism defined the industrial advances of the 20th century and easily was responsible for literally quadrillions of dollars in economic value. Later, advances in computational theory and especially quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics enabled the electronics and computational / digital communications revolutions which gave rise to the modern internet, smartphones, personal computers, and even high-efficiency/low-emission automobiles (through micro-computer based engine control). Those technologies have been responsible for easily tens of trillions of dollars of economic value (if not hundreds or more) and are utterly dependent on advancements in basic science which at the time had very little practical use. The laser, for example, was originally lampooned as a solution looking for a problem, though of course eventually it became an important component in the backbone of modern industry and commerce. At the time absolutely none of these benefits of this research were obvious. And in many cases it took many decades up to a century or more for the benefits to be realized. But just look at the enormous RoI generated. Imagine someone in the early 20th century systematically campaigning against high-energy physics research because it had no immediate practical application. Imagine how many trillions upon trillions of modern economic activity would simply not exist today because of that short-sightedness. I could enumerate all of the practical benefits of high-energy physics research over the last, say, 2 decades but that plays into the wrong game and misses the point. Ultimately we don't know what we are missing out on by not pursuing certain categories of knowledge. And occasionally pursuit of blue sky knowledge produces not just enormous levels of RoI but absolutely civilization defining levels of return. Thus we should pursue such research with a healthy level of investment regardless of the perceived short-term applications, because the benefits of hitting the jackpot are too great to sanely do anything else. It's possible that knowledge of the higgs-field will have no practical, economic impact on human civilizations, ever. But it's also possible that it could lead to quadrillions of dollars in economic value over the next several centuries, the only way we'll find out is if we acquire that knowledge.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago

> Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it is one of the most efficient ways to store energy (Basically 100% of matter gets converted to energy). In theory, a black hole is also a 100%-efficient converter of matter into energy, via the Hawking radiation. A microscopic BH might radiate very large amounts of Hawking radiation. The bonus is that, unlike antimatter, you can make (or at least fatten up) a BH directly from ordinary matter, without spending energy as a prior step (anti-matter is energy storage, a black hole is an energy source - if you're willing to spend some dirt as "fuel"). Of course, the problem of storage is just as bad, if not worse.

wyager 13y ago
I hadn't thought about black holes as an energy source. Cool idea. But where does the energy actually "come from"? With M/AM interactions, the M/AM is annihilated, which creates harvestable photons. Does the energy given off by a black hole come from the change in entropy from structured matter to unstructured Hawking radiation or something? It seems almost too easy if we can just feed any old matter into a black hole and get energy out...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  If it is a traditional black hole, it has to have a pretty large mass to have a manageable energy output (they burn faster as they lose mass). On the other side, if it is too large, the energy output is miniscule.
- waps 13y ago
  The energy comes from virtual particles. You should think of it this way : anything has a certain chance of happening, but must follow conservation laws. Conservation of energy, conservation of mass, conservation of ... (the "real" conservation laws are more complex, but ... E.g. only mass+energy+entropy is constant, not mass, nor energy, nor entropy). But small, "short term" violations are possible. Now imagine there are particle pairs that, when added together have zero mass, zero energy, zero ... These would pop into existence in pairs everywhere and be anihilated soon after. Same is true for triples, quadruplets, ... with different probabilities. Surprise : these particles "exist" (normally for very short times). So particle a and particle b come into existence, both particles on a path that separates them from eachother. However, because opposite charges attract (and other effects related to other forces) they will fall back into eachother after a while, anihilating eachother and leaving nothing. These are generally referred to as "virtual" particles. Except of course if something comes between them while flying on their path. This results in multiple effects, like the Casimir pressure, and hawking radiation. The Casimir pressure is simpler. Suppose you have 2 straight plates, and you bring them close together. So close that these virtual particles have a good chance of impacting one but not the other. If the plates are metal, the particles will generally "merge" with it (like electrons). So a tiny percentage of the virtual particles between the plates become real. This does not affect virtual particles that are not between the plates. So there is a clear differential between vacuum interactions outside of the plates and inside. This results in a massive pressure pushing the plates together, like removing gas particles in a container results in a pressure on the outside of the container (and, in an athmosphere of large molecules, if you move plates closer together than the size of the gas molecules, there will be a pressure that pushes the plates completely together). Likewise, in black holes what comes between the particles is an event horizon. Event horizons "erase" quantum information, only the black hole as a whole has quantum information (the reason for is that black holes are physical, localized, manifestations of the end of time : they don't have an inside as far as anything outside the black hole can detect), no individual parts of a black hole have quantum state. So if an electron crosses the event horizon the charge of the entire black hole changes instantaneously, and the point charge of the electron disappears. That means the charge pulling the particles back together (assuming an e+ and e- virtual particle pair) becomes much more distant to the particle, and if it has enough speed and a convenient direction it will fly away from the black hole. Due to conservation laws the net result is that the black hole has eaten a somehow negative-mass charged particle, and the mass has decreased. A particle has been created outside of the black hole and is flying away to infinity. The vast majority of these particles are photons of a specific frequency, and, surprisingly, the smaller the black hole, the larger the effect (and the higher the frequencies). So spaceships would have to carry "heavy" black holes to get a decent output and would have to "feed" the black holes to avoid exploding (millions of tonnes as least, and you have to shovel in matter at a rate of 10+ kg per second to keep it stable. Or you could reflect hawking radiation back in). And of course, large black holes have large inertia (plus : how do you hold on to one ? Electrical fields can do it, but it would have to be a field so huge it baffles the imagination ...). A 1kg black hole would be converted into energy in less than a planck second by this effect and there is nothing, even theoretically, that can hold back that energy. Such an explosion might even do what people were "afraid" would happen with CERN's Higgs experiments and disrupt the Higgs field, causing a cascading conversion of the energy "powering" inertia into photons (the higgs field is something like a magnetic field that opposes all velocity changes in mass). If this were to happen, it would look one hell of a lot like a big bang.

yongjik 13y ago

I don't think it works like that. The only known way to make antimatter is to convert energy into matter-antimatter pairs, so basically you need the same 100% of energy to produce antimatter in the first place. (In fact, I think the current physical theory prohibits any kind of matter-antimatter conversion, but I'm not a physicist so I might be wrong.) So, if we had enough energy to make these antimatter, we could simply use the energy directly, without going through the massively inefficient step of funneling that energy into liquid helium and superconducting magnets and city-wide vacuum circles and so on.

orik 13y ago
we could simply use the energy directly, but I think he was talking about storing energy. >most efficient ways to store energy
- yongjik 13y ago
  Well, maybe he did, but I parsed his phrase in the other way: > ...a way to cheaply produce it without relying on fossil fuels. It sounds like regarding antimatter as a possible alternative to fossil fuels---which it can't be. (It can be an alternative to oil tankers, I guess.)
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    Technically, all forms of energy "production" we have are basically extraction from an existing store of said energy. Try reading[0], it's about the two guys who proposed a black hole powered space ship. What they suggest is extraction energy from the sun (an existing source) and making a black hole (or maybe more from the same one), and then use that to power your ship. "With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. " [0]http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

gus_massa 13y ago

The problem is that to do something useful you don’t need only energy but low entropy. The easy way to calculate it is using the Gibbs free energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_free_energy . To produce some work and transform the radiation energy you need also a cooler heat sink to hide the entropy. The black holes are very cold, so you need something cooler. You must have a very tiny black hole with a temperature over the ambient temperature (25°C=77°F), so the heat flush from the black hole to the ambient and you can harvest a part of it as useful energy, for example with a electricity generator.