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Originally Posted by GreenLantern
So is there anyway to destroy atoms.. besides radioactive atoms?
Is that theory for black holes?
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Sure, though I guess it depends on what you mean by destroy.
If you compress and heat them enough they'll fuse into different atoms, so it'll stop being hydrogen/helium/whatever and become carbon or some other heavier element.
You could shoot protons at it and if one sticks in the nucleus it could be a different element (since the element is defined by the # of protons in the nucleus). Or shoot neutrons at it and the nucleus might split into 2 or more different atoms.
Fission/fusion will actually completely destroy some of the atoms involved, converting them to pure energy.
You could bring an atom (or a subatomic particle) and its anti-particle together and the two will annihilate completely into energy (and new particles will precipitate out of the energy).
You could feed it to a black hole and that'll hide it for a long long time, but eventually the black hole will evaporate and whatever you added will be given off (not in the same form though).
If you smash two atoms together with enough energy they'll blast apart into a spray of new particles and energy.
I can't think of any more at the moment.
For the most part though all of these things obey the laws of conservation of energy, so if atoms are unmade or disappear, the energy and mass and momentem etc of the result will balance out. Matter and anti-matter annihilate, the resulting energy is equal to the energy bound up in the matter in the first place. Smash two gold atoms together and the resulting spray of particles retains all the energy and mass of the originals, etc. So in a sense nothing ever truly becomes unmade or undone, it just changes form.. and because of entropy because less usable.