Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/mar/14/please-drive-carefully-scientists-plan-to-transport-volatile-antimatter-for-first-time
176 points · 60 comments · view on lemmy.world
60 Comments
aeronmelon@lemmy.world · 73 pts · 158d
Perfect time in history to just start transporting antimatter.
Encephalotrocity@feddit.online · 76 pts · 158d
The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.
obinice@lemmy.world · 31 pts · 158d
They just need to transfer power from the car's inertial dampers to the containment field
AbidanYre@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 158d
You mean the shocks?
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 157d
those constrictors keep freezing on our starships, causing an overload.
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 157d
Still though, we need a new HAZMAT category now.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 157d
its not like star trek, where they produces kgs at a time, which is nuclear level events if they "collide"
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 157d
For reference, a single kilogram of antimatter reacting with regular matter would create an explosion only slightly smaller than the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, and well over a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Widdershins@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 158d
It's a little late to have Blast Corps ready to help out but it's never too late for a remake.
MrSusan@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 157d
An article concerning cerns concern
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 157d
correct.
Randelung@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 158d
I've seen Angels and Demons, I know where this is going.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 157d
OR the V series, when aliens built a "anti-particle particle annhilator as a power generator for humans, which was extremely volatile(because they were planning to blow it up using the same method with "grenade".
riskable@programming.dev · 6 pts · 158d
Time Travelers from the future might recruit an entire school bus's worth of geriatric retirees to prevent such a thing from exploding 🙂↕️
LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 157d
Great series. Glad it ended when it did.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 157d
and here i was contemplating yesterday whether interstellar rockets will ever use antimatter drives and when the technology to store and transport antimatter will ever mature ...
melfie@lemy.lol · 0 pts · 158d
froh42@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 158d
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world · -9 pts · 158d
A few thousand antimatter charged particles could be used as an implosive trigger for a fusion bomb.
EDIT Source. See section 3 in general and 3.5 specifically:
https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510071
rain_enjoyer@sopuli.xyz · 12 pts · 158d
you're off by something like 15-18 orders of magnitude
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 158d
This is old, but you get the idea. See section 3.5.
https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510071
EDIT: I'm getting bullshit downvotes from people who clearly won't read the paper and don't understand the proposed detonation model. One need not have grams of antimatter to trigger a H-H fusion detonation. A relatively small amount of antimatter is needed to trigger initial fusion of a hydrogen target, which by cascade can be used to detonate additional hydrogen. This removes the fission trigger and allows for very small fusion weapons with relatively low yields. For example, a device the size of a hand grenade with tons of TNT equivalent output - like a truck bomb in your hand. Or a rifle sized X-Ray laser is another proposed weapon.
Read the study. This technology is feasible.
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 158d
The paper you linked says "1 microgram is sufficient to trigger one thermonuclear weapon" which corresponds to 6×10^17.
This makes your "few thousand" of by 14 orders of magnitude instead of 15, I bet you feel vindicated now.
A man portable nuke has existed since the 60's so it wouldn't be a game changer.
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 158d
You're getting the microgram statement from here. You miss the point. A millionth of a gram is feasible to make and contain right now. It was predicted by 2010 in the paper using CERN, and there are much better facilities producing since then.
You're missing the point to be pedantic over a 20 year old paper. Newer approaches reduce the antimatter requirements for such weapons even more.
This might make you wonder why antimatter is being transported around. The fact is, proposals to weaponize antimatter as a fusion trigger have been around for over 40 years, and the means to achieving that from a production and engineering standpoint seem a good bet to be available today.
HalfAFrisbee@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 158d
LMAO, the little baby down voted you.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 158d
I think even the TSA could tell that's a bomb.
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 157d
Yes, but if you take the train or a private car you won't be searched. To get it across international borders try smuggling among other cargo or by submarine, maybe even diplomatic courier.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 157d
Sure. I just thought it was funny that it looks like the suitcase a cartoon character would put a warhead in.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 157d
interesting! i had wondered whether that exists. the wikipedia page on radionuclides seems to hint so since it gives 10 kg as a possible total mass of fissile material in a critical scenarion but i still had doubts till now.
rain_enjoyer@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 156d
it's not a twenty year old paper, it's a twenty two year old preprint which has all the reliability of a blog post. in 22 years, you can get born, complete all education bachelors degree, start masters degree and write a real paper that would be accepted in a real physics journal. the reason it's not accepted for all these years is it is packed full of crackpot nonsense. it cites Dan Brown's Angels and Demons ffs
echodot@feddit.uk · 6 pts · 157d
In conjunction with you know a fusion bomb so in and of itself not something I'd be concerned about.
It's like saying that a spark could be used to blow up a mountain, yeah it could, in conjunction with several hundred kilogrammes of C4.
hector@lemmy.today · -38 pts · 158d
I thought anitmatter was still mostly theoretical. Apparently they claim bananas give some off in the decay of potassium. I am skeptical they have a good handle on "antimatter" however, despite scientists claiming they have all of the answers now, just as every generation of experts claimed to have all of the answers, never being true before, but it is now, got it.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world · 56 pts · 158d
You thought wrong and that's ok.
Which is more likely: you haven't kept up to date on physics news, or the people who spend their lives doing physics don't know what they're doing? Be skeptical. But fix that by reading more. If someone is skeptical, but the answers exist and they stay skeptical, that's just willful ignorance.
No they haven't. And no one is claiming that now.
This isn't skepticism. This is "I don't understand, I don't want to understand, but I want to feel smart so I'm going to say they're not smart".
hector@lemmy.today · -39 pts · 158d
On the contrary, the universe, the state of matter, the mechanisms of astro physics, are the subjects most deserving of being skeptical of experts claiming to know things they have no way of knowing. Now you may be referring to some humble scientists, but the "exerts" absolutely do claim to know everything.
Man_kind@sh.itjust.works · 31 pts · 158d
You dont have a good understanding of what science is. No scientist claims to know what charge is, what causes it, nor what dark matter is or dark energy.
Scientists say what they can say with reasonable certainty. If they state something, you can research why they state it, and find sound reasoning and experiment that supports it.
If you dont, you can disprove it, and then now you're a scientist.
Just because you dont know a thing, doesn't mean others cant know.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 157d
I'd also like to interject that physics deals with models of how the world works, i.e. physicists make predictions about what would happen in specific scenarios. That has nothing to do with knowing what goes on underneath, because we can't know that.
Consider quantum physics. It might be that the universe is indeed a wave and that's just how things are. But it could also be possible that we're living our entire lives in a simulation, whoever hosts the simulation is having a tea party and giggling at us silly being on how we're confused by our observations. You can't really tell these two apart, experimentally, since they would have the same outcome. So physics can't really tell about what things are, just how they behave in certain situations. That's why i think of physics as models, not theory (because "theory" carries a starker claim to absolute truth to me).
bunchberry@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 152d
Quantum physics in no way implies everything is a wave. Physics academia is just filled with crackpot mystics who have an obsession over constantly inventing "paradigm shifts" and chasing the most bizarre interpretations of the mathematics possible and never have presented a shred of empirical evidence that their whacko crackpot claims have any basis in factual reality.
You can just split out the wavefunction into its real and imaginary parts, as two separate real-valued vectors, and convert it from Cartesian to polar form, and then it is clearly just a stochastic theory with non-classical stochastic dynamics, in fact the formula for evolving the probabilities is just the classical one + an additional non-linear term. I created a whole visualizer for this.
That is the simplified case for quantum information science / quantum computing. But you can do it in quantum physics as well, in fact doing it for particle positions is what led to Bohm developing is pilot wave theory, where the additional non-linear term is the quantum potential. We have always known that quantum mechanics is just a non-classical stochastic theory for decades, which there may or may not be an underlying deterministic reality, but there is no magic to it as if the entire world is a giant vibrating single multiverse wave. They are just particles. The only thing that is wave-like is their stochastic dynamics.
But no one will tell you that because people are obsessed with chasing the most whimsical interpretations possible and lie to people about the mathematics that it somehow inherently necessitates their quantum woo.
Man_kind@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 157d
Why does "theory" carry starker claim absolute truth to you?
Theory, theoretical, these are not claims to absolute truth. Rules maybe, but then id say you're more correct that they'd be rules of a model.
Relativity is a theory. Its in the name. You might not like it, but it is definitely a theory, and referred to as such by all of science. Maybe you call it model of special relativity, but you'd be the exception. However it would not be incorrect to refer to it as a model, either.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 0 pts · 157d
I think the word "theory" derives from the words "theo" (meaning god) and "ergy" (meaning work). So it's "god's work" literally translated.
What is meant by that is that people recognize the truth, such as truths about how the world works. The truth is called "god", or rather, "god" in the christian context is understood to be the set of all truths. So mathematical insights and physics rules are a subset of god, because they represent truths of some sort. And applying these truths in practice, i.e. building machinery according to them is the work that people put into it. So people work according to "god", i.e. according to rules. Like when you build a car, you have to know about thermodynamics. The knowledge makes you do the work. So it's insight->work, or in latin/greek: "theo-ergy" or "theory" for short.
You have to remember that all these words were invented in the 1800 so it's not unreasonable to claim that there's a heavily christian background in them since that's how people thought at the time.
Man_kind@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 157d
This is the biggest load of horseshit I've ever read. You've broken down a word to its roots, and then used its etymology to create a new definition of the word, and then claim that's what the definition must be because of the etymology.
Whats the etymology of vaccine? I mean, there are so many words that have gone on to have a changed meaning from the roots of it. How a word developed and what it used to mean, does not determine the definition today.
There's nothing theocratic about the theory of relativity. If someone says "oh I have a theory as to what happened" they are more closely saying they have a hypothesis, than they are saying they have God's truth on the subject.
So, i question your authenticity in this discussion, because i find it hard to believe that you genuinely believe what you're saying to me. Im skeptical you're even a real person.
I'll just leave this here
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/54072318
Marthirial@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 158d
Come on Hector, just go back explaining everything with baby Jesus back in your room and stop making an ass of yourself in public.
hector@lemmy.today · -29 pts · 158d
Dumb people always accuse others of being dumb. That's you.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 158d
And yet that's how you started this thread. Any chance you'll be self aware enough to take your own feedback?
PoastRotato@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 158d
The folks at CERN have been generating antimatter (albeit in infinitesimal amounts) since at least the 90s; it's far more than just theoretical.
hector@lemmy.today · -23 pts · 158d
I don't doubt that, just doubt they have a good understanding of it's role and all that.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 158d
If they fully understood it, they probably wouldn’t keep running experiments on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete unknown though.
Are you thinking of dark matter?
Edit: I can’t believe I fell for it. A) the username is hector, a synonym for “annoy” or ”pester.” B) going through their recent comments, they keep misspelling words in quotation marks and dropping one different, very obvious spelling or grammar mistake in each comment. C) they go a little further off the deep end and a little more obstinate every time.
hector@lemmy.today · -20 pts · 158d
Not sure on dark matter and anti matter. In public schools they taught us matter came into existence by shooting matter in one direction and antimatter in another. Like they know.
village604@adultswim.fan · 19 pts · 158d
So you legitimately think the knowledge you gained from a public school science class is enough to determine that experts in the field don't know what they're doing?
That's a real question, because that line of reasoning is used by climate change deniers, antivaxers, and flat earthers.
Dasus@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 158d
Not exactly, no.
#The matter- antimatter asymmetry problem
###The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?
https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem
Tldr just because you didn't properly listen or the teacher was shit doesn't mean physicists are as ignorant about the subject as you think. No offense.
hector@lemmy.today · -10 pts · 158d
I reject the big bang. I don't doubt there having been a bang that relatively seemed big.
Likewise I reject this leading theory.
Dasus@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 158d
Hmm, who do believe, the nigh-consensus of pretty much all physicists, or.... hector on the Fediverse?
I mean, one has literally millions of scientists and decades, if not centuries of established, peer-reviewed literature... and the other is a random stranger online who believes Charlie Kirk wasn't shot for being a massive right-wing cunt, but "as the first victim of the war on Iran."
Geez, that's a tough one. Couldn't possibly decide which way I'm leaning.
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 158d
Damn, we should let those experts who have been studying this for their entire lives that you reject the theory! They're going to be so bummed they have to go back to the drawing board and throw out all the evidence and experiments they have done!
Man_kind@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 158d
Sometimes science has prevailing theories. They call them theories, because they aren't known woth certainty. But they still teach them in school, as its our best guess.
echodot@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 157d
Are you getting confused between antimatter and dark matter because antimatter has very much been proven to exist for longer than I've been alive.
hector@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 155d
Could be mistaken, but antimatter is the one taught in school as being created in the genesis of matter, which is what I reject, along with the big bang, relatively big bang perhaps, in the universe? Not so big.
untorquer@quokk.au · 2 pts · 158d
So when it comes to the concept of the science on matter progressing, you're anti that.
hanrahan@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 158d
You an English literature major ? /s
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
hector@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 155d
You have all the answers because you are wrong.