Large Science Thingy

[dreamcaster 0]

Could this thing be responsible for the increase in earthquake and volcanic activity recently?

[solderz 0]

Could this thing be responsible for the increase in earthquake and volcanic activity recently?

roflThanks for the laugh this morning.

[qyayqi 11]

roflThanks for the laugh this morning.

i just watched this thing yesterday that said they're making anti-matter with this thing. anti. matter. anti-matter. that stuff REALLY blows the hell up when containment is lost. luckily this happened very high up in an un-manned helicopter. these scientists are more out of control than this forum!scoff if you want, buddy boy, but can you prove that they DIDN'T cause the volcanic activity and earthquakes?

[LongLiveYorke 38]

i just watched this thing yesterday that said they're making anti-matter with this thing. anti. matter. anti-matter. that stuff REALLY blows the hell up when containment is lost. luckily this happened very high up in an un-manned helicopter. these scientists are more out of control than this forum!scoff if you want, buddy boy, but can you prove that they DIDN'T cause the volcanic activity and earthquakes?

Earthquakes: noAntimatter: yes (really)

[Balloon guy 158]

Earthquakes: noAntimatter: yes (really)

I just pictured the scene in True Lies where Arnold told the pilots emphatically that the nuclear would not be detonated when they shot up their vans carrying the bombs, then turned to Tom Arnold and shrugged his shoulders cause deep down he really didn't know for sure.Personally I find it very odd that all these earthquakes are happening right around the time that NASA is having their funding cut and their last missions with the shuttles are wrapping up...

[runthemover 39]

God is never direct about his anger so yes it's possible except that apparently this amount of earthquake activity is not different than usual supposedly. The difference is them hitting populated areas. This according to some yahoo or cnn or some article I read. ON THE INTERNET

[solderz 0]

i just watched this thing yesterday that said they're making anti-matter with this thing. anti. matter. anti-matter. that stuff REALLY blows the hell up when containment is lost. luckily this happened very high up in an un-manned helicopter. these scientists are more out of control than this forum!scoff if you want, buddy boy, but can you prove that they DIDN'T cause the volcanic activity and earthquakes?

I really hope, in the bottom of my heart, that this is sarcastic. The amount of antimatter being created at CERN is harmless and we have been using anti-protons in hospitals for years. Why haven't you heard about it in the main press? Because it is harmless.Science really is the hope for mankind and I wish the general masses would bother to learn something about the stories they read before going off half-cocked. But, again, I am assuming the qyaqi was being sarcastic.Here is some info that was posted because so many people believed what was printed in Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons about anti-matter that the author wanted to set the record straight.Link to Website

Does antimatter exist?Yes, it does, and we produce it routinely at CERN. Antimatter was predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in 1928 and the first antiparticles were discovered soon after by Carl Anderson. CERN is not the only research institute to produce and study antimatter.How is antimatter contained?It is very difficult to contain antimatter, because any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation.For electrically charged antimatter particles we know how to contain them by using ‘electromagnetic traps’. These traps make it possible to contain up to about 1012 (anti-) particles of the same charge. However, like charges repel each other. So it is not possible to store a much larger quantity of e.g. antiprotons because the repulsive forces between them would become too strong for the electromagnetic fields to hold them away from the walls. For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no grip on the particles at all. Scientists work on ideas to use ‘magnetic bottles’ (with inhomogeneous magnetic fields acting on the magnetic moment), or ‘optical traps’ (using lasers) but this is still under development.What is the future use of antimatter?Anti-electrons (positrons) are already used in PET scanners in medicine (Positron-Emission Tomography = PET). One day it might be even possible to use antiprotons for tumour irradiation.But antimatter at CERN is mainly used to study the laws of nature. We focus on the question of the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The LHCb experiment will compare precisely the decay of b-quarks and anti-b-quarks. Eventually we also hope to be able to use anti-hydrogen atoms as high-precision tools.Do antimatter atoms exist?The team of the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN made the first anti-hydrogen atoms in 1995. Then, in 2002 two experiments (ATHENA and ATRAP) managed to produce tens of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, later even millions. However, although "tens of thousands" may sound a lot, it's really a very, very small amount. You would need 10,000,000,000,000,000 times that amount to have enough anti-hydrogen gas to fill a toy balloon! If we could somehow store our daily production, it would take us several billion years to fill the balloon. But the universe has been around for only 13.7 billion years...So the Angels and Demons scenario is pure fiction.Can we hope to use antimatter as a source of energy? Do you feel antimatter could power vehicles in the future, or would it just be used for major power sources?There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy ‘source’. Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature; we first have to make every single antiparticle, and we have to invest (much) more energy than we get back during annihilation.You can imagine antimatter as a storage medium for energy, much like you store electricity in rechargeable batteries. The process of charging the battery is reversible with relatively small loss. Still, it takes more energy to charge the battery than you get back.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.I was hoping antimatter would be the future answer to our energy needs. It seems more research is needed for this to happen.No, even more research will not change this situation fundamentally; antimatter is certainly not able to solve our energy problems. First of all, you need energy to make antimatter (E=mc2) and unfortunately you do not get the same amount of energy back out of it. (See above, the loss factors are enormous.)Furthermore, the conversion from energy to matter and antimatter particles follows certain laws of nature, which also allow the production of many other, but very short-lived particles and antiparticles (e.g. muons, pions, neutrinos). These particles decay rapidly during the production process, and their energy is lost.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.By the way, this shows that the symmetry between matter and antimatter as stated above does not seem to hold at very high energies, such as shortly after the Big Bang, as otherwise there should be as much matter as antimatter in the Universe. Future research might tell us is how this asymmetry came about.Can we make antimatter bombs?No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.

[JoeyJoJo 18]

Volcanoes: Earth's Pimples

[solderz 0]

Although we are perfectly capable of creating earthquakes. It just takes a different tech:Geothermal Tech causes quakes

[runthemover 39]

actually Volcano eruption occurs when two Immortals fight on holy ground

[JoeyJoJo 18]

Although we are perfectly capable of creating earthquakes.

The Haitians found that out the hard way.

[LongLiveYorke 38]

The amount of antimatter being created at CERN is harmless and we have been using anti-protons in hospitals for years.

Do you mean anti-electrons? A PET scan uses positrons, which are the anti-matter partners to electrons. But maybe you're referring to something else...

[solderz 0]

Do you mean anti-electrons? A PET scan uses positrons, which are the anti-matter partners to electrons. But maybe you're referring to something else...

You're right. Positrons are currently used. I was thinking about what that story said about anti-protons for use in irradiating tumors, which is currently being researched, and typed the wrong thing. Nice catch.

[mrdannyg 274]

Do you mean anti-electrons? A PET scan uses positrons, which are the anti-matter partners to electrons. But maybe you're referring to something else...

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