30 Year Old Physicist Causing Stir

[arsenal]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

If you mean create mini-blackholes accidentally on the face of the earth? Sure, that's a weapon of mass annhiliation. Maybe we'll open gates to hell or alien worlds like in Doom and Half-Life.

Well, at least we have the Rock to protect us!

[Nehkara]

Wikipedia:

The collider is currently undergoing commissioning while being cooled down to its final operating temperature of approximately 1.9 K (−271.25 °C). The first particle beams are due for injection in August 2008, with the first collisions planned to take place two to three months later.

[photon]

Originally Posted by Bagor

I was thinking along the lines of using antimatter in weapons.

I think the quote I heard was that if they accumulated all the antimatter that had ever been produced at CERN (EVER!) in one place and used it for energy, they could light a normal light bulb for a few minutes...

I don't think the LHC is setup to capture any antimatter generated, but even if it was it would take billions of years to capture even one gram of antimatter. And that wouldn't be that impressive explosion wise, I think you need in the range of a kilogram to make a bomb with megaton yeilds.

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by photon

I think the quote I heard was that if they accumulated all the antimatter that had ever been produced at CERN (EVER!) in one place and used it for energy, they could light a normal light bulb for a few minutes...

I don't think the LHC is setup to capture any antimatter generated, but even if it was it would take billions of years to capture even one gram of antimatter. And that wouldn't be that impressive explosion wise, I think you need in the range of a kilogram to make a bomb with megaton yeilds.

Thanks, Looks like Mr Brown was twisting facts a bit for a dramatic effect.

At pro-prologue bit at the start of his book which is titled "Fact". (copied from Angels and Demons).

"Until recently antimatter has been created only in small amounts (a few atoms at a time). But CERN has now broken ground on its new antiproton Decelerator - an advanced antimatter production facility that promises to create antimatter in much larger quantities.

One question looms: will this highly volatile substance save the world or will it be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made"

Found this bit from a Q&A session with CERN regarding Angels and Demons.

Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?

Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules (1012 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.
You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.
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.
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.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/...tAandD-en.html