OT - Physics Question on Anti-Matter

[Ed Kolis]

OK, let's see... You have 2 ounces of matter and antimatter, that's about 57 grams or 0.057kg, and the speed of light is 300 million meters per second... thus using E=m*c^2, the energy produced in the detonation is 5.7*10^-2kg * (3.00*10^8m/s)^2 = 5.1*10^15 kg*m^2/s^2, or 5.1 quadrillion (the American kind, a thousand million million) joules. What that is in kT I don't know, but I'll try looking it up...

edit: OK, a "ton of TNT", according to Wikipedia, is defined as 1 gigacalorie, which equals 4.184 billion (thousand million) joules (it also happens to equal a million dietary calories - think of THAT next time you sit down to dinner, since there are a million grams in a metric ton, you are eating the energy equivalent of hundreds of grams of TNT! Don't let your food a splode! )... anyway, since the antimatter explosion produces 5.1 quadrillion joules and a ton of TNT is 4.184 billion, that means that the antimatter explosion is equivalent to... 1.2 *billion* tons of TNT (1,200,000 kT) - which is about 10 times more powerful than any bomb mankind has ever devised! (The most powerful bomb was developed by the Russians during the Cold War and it had an estimated output of 100,000 to 150,000 kT...)
(SJ or some other mathematically inclined person, could you stop by and make sure I didn't horribly screw up the math? )

[Tnargversion2]

Ed Kolis said:
OK, let's see... You have 2 ounces of matter and antimatter, that's about 57 grams or 0.057kg, and the speed of light is 300 million meters per second... thus using E=m*c^2, the energy produced in the detonation is 5.7*10^-2kg * (3.00*10^8m/s)^2 = 5.1*10^15 kg*m^2/s^2, or 5.1 quadrillion (the American kind, a thousand million million) joules. What that is in kT I don't know, but I'll try looking it up...

edit: OK, a "ton of TNT", according to Wikipedia, is defined as 1 gigacalorie, which equals 4.184 billion (thousand million) joules (it also happens to equal a million dietary calories - think of THAT next time you sit down to dinner, since there are a million grams in a metric ton, you are eating the energy equivalent of hundreds of grams of TNT! Don't let your food a splode! )... anyway, since the antimatter explosion produces 5.1 quadrillion joules and a ton of TNT is 4.184 billion, that means that the antimatter explosion is equivalent to... 1.2 *billion* tons of TNT (1,200,000 kT) - which is about 10 times more powerful than any bomb mankind has ever devised! (The most powerful bomb was developed by the Russians during the Cold War and it had an estimated output of 100,000 to 150,000 kT...)
(SJ or some other mathematically inclined person, could you stop by and make sure I didn't horribly screw up the math? )

Well regardless of how close you are, that still paints a pretty picture. I guess if an Anti-Matter research center proposal comes up in your next city counsel meeting, it would be a safe bet to say no!

Whoops, the magnetic containment field surrounding the pebble sized bit of Anti-Matter failed and wham there goes the county.

[Tnargversion2]

Ok, so in the game perspective, some of the components that utilize Anti-Matter Warheads, we're probably talking about very finite amounts of AM, say less than a gram of the stuff? Other wise we would see one hit one kill damage types correct?

If an ounce of AM and an ounce of matter can produce and energy release something like 10 times that of the most powerful nuke or hydrogen bomb ever produced and we were to successefully hit say an aircraft carrier sized vessel, it would be a safe bet that the aircraft carrier would be nothing but ashes, maybe some mangled trushes and support beams here and there, on one hit.

Next question, how large of a device and energy requirement would it take to contain a gram or less of AM. Hypothetical guesses again are welcome, just trying to visualize this in my head.

[Suicide Junkie]

Energy requirement is basically zero.
The device dosen't need to do any work on the antimatter, but simply provide a potential gradient (electromagnetic) to keep it away from the sides of the container.

The size depends on how good your materials science is... how strong/small/light of a magnet can you manufacture?

[shinigami]

Jumping back to the Death Star beam, something of the sort might be possible, just maybe not on that scale.
Physicists have been able to get atoms to flow along a laser. If the laser is powerful enough to vaporise all the stray atoms in its path and allow anti-atoms to flow along the beam to its end you could have an anti-matter tunneling weapon.

[Slick]

While containment is difficult, making antimatter is much more of a challenge. Making a stable antimatter atom has been done. I'm not extremely current on it, but the last thing I read was that scientists were only able to make a few atoms of anti-hydrogen (antiproton combined with an "orbiting" positron). Capturing this antimatter atom in an electric field is hard enough; and making an ounce is completely beyond our current capabilities. Not to mention that it is a really bad idea because, as the math above shows, a problem with the containment vessel will release lots of energy.

[Randallw]

I just ended up thinking about entropy.

I wondered how you could make a profit because to get the energy out you have to spend energy to make the AM. But then the Positive matter has already been made so you only need to make half of it. From there I started thinking about Fusion power where you get the energy out of sea water because the energy was placed into it at the beginning of time or whatever. From there I ended up considering mining sunlight from a star, but that's not infinite either. Eventually even the star will die. So clearly there is no such thing as an infinite energy source. It makes a clear argument for entropy. One day the universe will die. In about a billion years we might flee to another universe, but clearly even that will die. Which is more disturbing, that everything will die eventually or that I am getting depressed about soemthing that won't happen for maybe 14 billion years