Antigravity gets first test at Cern's Alpha experiment

Of course, Phage need not even mention the challenges of building said ship.

If it has the potential mentioned, even if you could keep it from blowing up mid-construction with all the matter around it, it would try to run away.

Thrusters would be ill used as, if you have enough to counteract the effect repelling you to steer, you might as well use that to propel the ship in the first place.

Again, matter matter everywhere. The ship would blow itself to bits.

Barring that and any other basic hurdles the main issue that pops to mind - Who would pilot it? We're made of matter. Take an average person and have them board it and boom, you just took one human's worth of material out of your ship and expended them both as energy.

But the true crux of it, if you can make that much antimatter to begin with, matter+antimatter is the most efficient power generation known so I think we'd rather figure out a way to use that to power the ship than the any passive anti-gravity effect.

reply to post by Phage


My question.

Has it ever been shown conclusively that leptons gravitate? Have there been tests of equivalence principle (intertial vs gravitational mass, passive & active) which distinguish electrons from nuclei?

After all virtually all of the mass in regular matter is in nuclear hadrons after all, and any results could be dominated by hadrons.

I have no way to back it up (too lazy to do the math), but my suspicions is that gravity is an artifact of the energy density of matter. (Inverse square relationship, etc.) That is, there is a relation between gravitation and the amount of potential energy being stored which matter represents. So in order for antimatter to exhibit antigravity behavior, it would make sense that it would also have reactions that produce negative energy.

Proving whether that is the case is something the CERN guys should definitely be able to do.

On the side topic of spaceship stuff...
However if you had means to produce sufficient antimatter to produce enough anti-gravity to propel a spaceship, it would also seem to be more efficient to focus pure energy from matter-antimatter reactions in front of your ship such that it would gravitationally pull you towards that focus. (Keep in mind there shouldn't be a Newtonian reaction because pure energy has no mass, but you're warping space by creating point with the same energy density that a large gravitational mass would represent. A working warp drive might be like having a "virtual heavy object" that you can turn on and off that your spaceship falls towards.

What's funny though, Star Trek's description of warp drive and some aspects needed for it to work (safely) seem to make more sense now.

I have a hypothetical question:

Say way in the future we came across a planet made of dark matter, would we be attracted to its gravitational force or repelled?

Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by roughycannon

 

Star to star, galaxy to galaxy. Same principle. Same problems. Same problems as with gravity...but backwards.

Also what would the terminal velocity be in the vacuum of space? would there even be one? would it not keep accelerating until it escaped our sun's gravity?

There is no terminal velocity in space (except for the speed of light). Your antimatter spaceship is being repelled by the Sun's gravity remember? There is no need to escape it. The closer you are to the Sun the greater the acceleration away from it.

But how are you going to build your antimatter ship? A lot of matter in the Solar System. That becomes problematic when you're trying to make something out of antimatter. The solar wind is matter. It would eat up your ship as you build it, atom by atom. Messy and produces a lot of radiation at the same time.

But I think antimatter can be put to better use. If you can gather and contain enough antimatter to make the antigravity effect useful you can do a lot more with it than just using it to "fall" away from a gravity well. Make an engine. Mix a bit of matter with a bit of antimatter and you create enough energy to maintain acceleration for about as long as you want. That acceleration won't decrease according to the inverse square law as you leave the gravity well. You accelerate to the turnpoint, flip, and start slowing down.

edit on 4/30/2013 by Phage because: (no reason given)

When I say escape it... I mean escape its repulsion, the sun pulls in large objects as far as the asteroid belt so theoretically it should repel them from that far too, also I don't mean a craft made of antimatter I mean a craft with anti matter onboard...

Like the ion engine example I talked about... putting the craft in front of the sun (relative), leaving it and then let it be repelled slowly and accelerating until it left the solar system.

Another thing sorry there would have to be more antimatter than matter...

If the craft is orbiting our sun, then it would be attracting matter... so for the effect to work there would have to be more antimatter than matter as the sun will be pulling in the craft as well as pushing away the antimatter.