PET scans are an example of practical antimatter usage.

@LowBeta

Some hospitals have cyclotrons to make fluoride-18, which produces a positron when it decays.

They're making microscopic quantities.  Don't shit your pants.

Reliable time travel exists, which is the explanation of various UAP and biologics therein.

The interesting thing I learned about CERN here is that it was the Euro Manhattan Project for a brief period of time.

In HS physics long ago we calculated how much energy would be released converting 5 grams of matter (a US  five cent piece, IIRC).  It was equivalent to a good sized nuclear explosion.

Looks like everything is under control.

@MrHiggs

How can that low of a temperature be achieved?

A dumb jarhead found this interesting.

The dose is the poison, but that just means we should be making it in orbit.  The orbit of Mercury...  You want rocket fuel? You got rocket fuel.

They have to contend with my ex-wife, pissed off I didn't put the seat back down??

No, and I hope not.  I wouldn't wish what happened to Higgs on anyone.

Damn it, now I'm crying again.  Poor guy.

How about we start with an Orion Drive? Probably going to need that to get to Mercury with a decent payload anyway.

I'd think SpaceX might be cheap enough that you wouldn't need that.  You will need a von Neumann-able process for making solar cells, which will power everything else.  Build your antimatter factories, build your starwisps on up to generation ships---"Yeah, you're catching a ride on Hale-Bopp, all right."---and go go go.

In high school, my physics class took a field trip to Fermilab.  Coolest day I ever had in high school.  If you were there in 1988, 16 year old me says hello.

I missed something. What happened?

His wife died in childbirth.

If we had the energy to make a ton of the stuff in the first place, we've already solved the problem of cheap, abundant energy.

This is why we colonize Mercury and build a network of power sattelites. Once human civilization has cheap abundant solar energy we can do practically anything we want within the realm of physics as we currently understand it.

That's going to take awhile though. Who knows what we will know in 500 years?

Meh, as long as they don't do anti-nitrogen.

Called out once?


eta



Holy shit I had no idea. Fuck me.

Did you know that CERN has the same layout and dimensions as the original Temple of Moloch and CERN spelled backwards is an acronym for Nephilim   Require Earth Control?

@Radiolucent

forgot about positrons, was thinking antiprotons.

The Lab is a unique national treasure.

I love that Charles Stross wrote a practical Orion Drive into one of his books.

Shit

Can we use it as fuel to power Epstein drives?

If so, I'm all for it!

Only one tool necessary...

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Epstein Drive is supposed to be a fusion drive. But the way it works is magic according to current science so...

Later on in The Expanse there are ships powered by antimatter. They are quite punchy.

Epstein drive? That’s suicide.

Cool

I vote for an Improbability Drive instead

Nothing. Literally nothing.

And I'm going to take your word on it. Literally.

I learned something from wiki.

In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge, parity, and time, known as CPT reversal. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles can be generated at particle accelerators; however, total artificial production has been only a few nanograms.[1] No macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling.

In theory, a particle and its antiparticle (for example, a proton and an antiproton) have the same mass, but opposite electric charge, and other differences in quantum numbers.

A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle–antiparticle pairs. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with the notable mass–energy equivalence equation, E=mc2.[2]

Antiparticles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an antihydrogen atom. The nuclei of antihelium have been artificially produced, albeit with difficulty, and are the most complex anti-nuclei so far observed.[3] Physical principles indicate that complex antimatter atomic nuclei are possible, as well as anti-atoms corresponding to the known chemical elements.

There is strong evidence that the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, as opposed to an equal mixture of matter and antimatter.[4] This asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the great unsolved problems in physics.[5] The process by which this inequality between matter and antimatter particles developed is called baryogenesis.

Much more here

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