Antimatter bomb

Thank you mig12.

That is the logical thinking here that I'm looking for. And its a good point. It would only be affective against it's specified oppisite.

Although I have no idea what the affects are of mutaul anilation of anything other than hydrogen and anti-hydrogen. So I wonder what iron and anti-iron would do? Assuming it could exist..... but I do know it wouldn't simply dissapear.

I've read that nuclear fusion is predicted to use about 25% of its fuel to convert to energy, while and antimatter reactions would yield 100% turning all of the fuel used into energy instead of a mere fraciton liek fission or fusion.
So anti-matter= a better source of energy

In a antimatter-matter reaction all of the atoms used in the rection wold be cxonverted to pure energy, thus leaving no traces except the forms that the pure energy takes, such as heat and light.
A little earlier in this thread someone mentioned something about antimatter being used in airplanes be cause is creates artificial lift via lack of gravity.This COULD be done butin would take enormous amounts of antimatter(enough to egual the weight of the plane) to make the plane weightless. This is not a smart idea and would never be used because if the plane experianced the slightest bump the antimatter would collide with its container and would more than likely desrtoy most of the surronding area.(exa. a gram of antimatter has a destructive power of 20kilotonnes
a Learjet weighs 5053 kg,a nd if you added 1000kg for the container to hold the animatter and anitmatter itself,thats a lot of antimatter)

wat you all are not realizeing is that the government will realize how to make it into a weapon and when they do no one can tell what they will do with it use it or not the government are to nosey with things they dont fully understand.in my personal opinon i think they are close to finding out how to use it and will use it and i plan on finding out. if you want to talk more about this im me at shadowXamb

IF MATTER TOUCHES ITS ANTI-MATTER THEN IT CREATES A DEVASTATING EXPLOSION ... (BIGGER THAN A NUCLEAR) BOMB

Originally posted by Indefatigable
Anti-matter is only going to react with its corresponding oppisite.

The reaction of hydrogen and anti-hydrogen is basic one h311 of an explosion. It doesn't cause things to dissolve or disappear. An anti-hydogen isn't going to affect other matter just because its the oppiste of hydrogen. So an "anti-matter bomb" has to be specified what matter/anti-matter it contains. And it needs to have both the anti-matter and corresponding oppisite matter to work. You can't just have an anti-hydrogen and get the same affect with out bombarding it with hydrogen.

I know I'm partially redundant, but alot of these facts are being ignored.

They're being ignored because you're (mostly) wrong. Positrons will only react with electrons, and anti-protons will only react with protons (and anti-neutrons with neutrons), yes, but that's all that matters. Antihydrogen, being made of an antiproton surrounded by a positron, will react with any element. The positron will annihilate an electron, and the antiproton will annihilate a proton.

Doesn't make a lick of difference if you're reacting mercury and anticobalt, the antimatter will annihilate just fine with any matter. It only matters on a subatomic scale. You'd only run into problems, if the required subatomic elements weren't present, like trying to react antineutronium with hydrogen.

since everything but hydrogen, and absurd isotopes of other elements have all three important subatomic particles, any antimatter should be able to react with any matter, save for pure antineutrons with pure hydrogen.

Just to produce 1 gram of antimatter, it takes 100 billion years. The Sun likely produces far more than CERN ever will, and it can only produce half a kilogram a day, which is no where near as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It would take at least 3 or 4 thousand years for us to figure out a way to get anywhere near the sun, let alone extract the antimatter before it annihilated itself with some matter. There is no need to worry about destroying the world with antimattter since the amount we will be able to produce for the next 1 thousand years will not be enough to blow up a sturdy, well-built house. CERN has only been able to generate a million atoms of antimatter in all the time it has ever created antimatter, which would be harmless to touch with your hand. With our current methods, it would cost more energy to generate antimatter than to make a bomb out of antimatter. We ought to be worrying about hydrogen bombs and other nuclear weapons instead of petty antimatter bombs.

Nobody (in the white world, anyway) ahas attempted to produce large amounts of antimatter. NASA have sponsored studies on antimatter as rocket fuel, and it looks possible to produce much larger amounts that hitherto.
A dedicated production facility would probably cost billions, but would produce enough for weapons applications. Initialy you would not even be talking kiloton yield, but we don't really need a replacement for nuclear weapons --the advantage of antimatter weapons is that they can be scaled right down to the tactical level and below.

reply to post by ShatteredSkies


I agree, The problem with everyone nowadays is that they are trying to think up new ways of being hard, rather than thinking that when the next generation are running the place are they really going to want to have to clear up our mess??

We should act now to appease the mess made so far by us and those before us, once we have done that we can concentrate on making this world an easier place to live with each other in our diversity through appreciating each others beliefs!!!

Ummmmm.....good luck with that. Unless you want to start playing with humans genetic codes or something, thats just human nature.

Originally posted by Anonymous ATS
reply to post by ShatteredSkies

 

I agree, The problem with everyone nowadays is that they are trying to think up new ways of being hard, rather than thinking that when the next generation are running the place are they really going to want to have to clear up our mess??

We should act now to appease the mess made so far by us and those before us, once we have done that we can concentrate on making this world an easier place to live with each other in our diversity through appreciating each others beliefs!!!

While its interesting to talk about anti-matter bombs... the anonymous poster got it right. Here is a little bit of information on antimatter. I pulled out the best tidbits:


Antimatter facts

Is antimatter truly 100% efficient?
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you start from two equal quantities m/2 of matter and m/2 of antimatter, then the energy output is, of course, exactly E=mc2. Mass is converted into energy with 100% efficiency.

But that is not the point: how much effort do you have to put in to get m/2 grams of antimatter? Well, theoretically E=mc2 because half of the energy will become normal matter. So you gain nothing.
But the process of creating antimatter is highly inefficient; when you dissipate energy into particles with mass, many different - also short-lived - particles and antiparticles are produced. A major part of the energy gets lost, and a lot of the stable antimatter-particles (e.g. positrons and antiprotons) go astray before you can catch them. Everything happens at nearly the speed of light, and the particles created zoom off in all directions. Somewhat like cooking food over a campfire: most of the heat is lost and does not go into the cooking of the food, it disappears as radiation into the dark night sky. Very inefficient.

and this:

The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.

An Anti-matter bomb sounds good.... at least if you can get 1 gram of antimatter together. A teaspoon-full would not destroy the Earth, but it would make one heck of an explosion:

To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):

E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.

This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.

Why won't this scenario happen?

At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need 6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years! It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.

So... unless we can find an inexhaustible suppply of anti-matter. We are out of luck. Maybe we can find some in another part of the galaxy? Sadly, no.....

Antimatter could only become a source of energy if you happened to find a large amount of antimatter lying around somewhere (e.g. in a distant galaxy), in the same way we find oil and oxygen lying around on Earth. But as far as we can see (billions of light years), the universe is entirely made of normal matter, and antimatter has to be painstakingly created.

So...I guess anti-matter bombs will remain unattainable. Which is fortunate. Why would we want to detonate one in the first place?

It is called the hydrogen bomb.

It is a little appreciated but true fact that in the process of the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, the splitting of the atom not only causes a cascade effect of atoms being split, but during the process, antimatter comes into existence and immediately anhilates with matter. The process has been compared to the peeling off of a glove of the table of elements with antimatter elements on the inside, during the peeling the glove is pulled inside out.

I wouldn't take the CERN answer too seriously. As has been pointed out eslewhere, they are forbidden to do military research and they are very uinhappy with the idea that anything they do can have military spin-offs.

If you do a quick google you will find out that anti-matter production - though expensive - is possible in much greater magnitudes than CERN have achieved.

The speed of light is 186,000 fps, NOT 300 Million meters per second.

[edit on 21-9-2008 by wantawanta]

Originally posted by wantawanta
The speed of light is 186,000 fps, NOT 300 Million meters per second.

[edit on 21-9-2008 by wantawanta]

The speed of light is a fiction. Light does not have speed. It is everywhere along it's path, and it's detection has speed.

Einstein's constant "c" dictates this. If light is moving away from a stationary object and perceived traveling away at c, and is viewed by a rocket moving in the same direction away from the the stationary object at nearly c, the light is perceived to move past the stationary object at the speed c.

No matter the speed or direction of the point of observation all light is seen as moving at c relative to the point of observation.

How does this prove the light is everywhere along it's path without motion?

The light will by necessity of its relative speed to the moving object be at a point further than it could have reached traveling at c relative to the stationary object. It simply could not reach there yet in reference to the stationary object. Yet this same observation could be made from infinite points along it's path. It must be everywhere in order to be anywhere.

Theoretically you would tear a hole in space/time wouldn't you?

If you have matter and anti-matter in the same place I would think that equals the same thing as creating dark matter or matter with no substance just void of anything either way.

My understanding as a foot note is that there is a device coming on line in Europe somewhere that is fixin to come online that is going to explore dark matter and to try to find a way to harness that.

[edit on 22-9-2008 by Beelzabub]

Originally posted by wantawanta
The speed of light is 186,000 fps, NOT 300 Million meters per second.

[edit on 21-9-2008 by wantawanta]

If you said 186,000 MILES per second someone might agree with you.
Which is incidentally 300 million metres per second.

Originally posted by Beelzabub
Theoretically you would tear a hole in space/time wouldn't you?

Nah - they've done lots with antimatter already without anything like that. Otherwise PET would be a bit dangerous!

Originally posted by Wembley

Originally posted by wantawanta
The speed of light is 186,000 fps, NOT 300 Million meters per second.

[edit on 21-9-2008 by wantawanta]

If you said 186,000 MILES per second someone might agree with you.
Which is incidentally 300 million metres per second.

Yea I ment miles per second not feet.

[edit on 24-9-2008 by wantawanta]