Antimatter
destroys any matter that it touches in a pyrotechnic flash, an
explosion that releases all the energy that had been locked inside for
billions of years. Antimatter thus could become a wonderful source of
power, the technology of the 21st century. Or instead, its potential to
consign matter to oblivion could make it the ultimate weapon,
Frank Close, University of Oxford, author of Antimatter
Scientists have had to spend a lot of time reassuring to the public
that they’re not Cobra Commander, out to annihilate the Earth with
anti-matter black-hole projectors. Which is totally wasted time,
because even if they were that’s exactly what they’d tell us anyway.
The LHC spent ages assuaging space-time fears (triggered by reporters
who have to copy and paste the word “neutrino”, and a botanist who’s
spent more time answering criminal charges than accelerating
particles). Now, because of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, the scientists at CERN had to explain that they’re not about to blow anyone up.
The
fact that antimatter can create huge explosions is accurate, a rarity
in Dan Brown novels. Antimatter meeting matter isn’t even called an
explosion, it’s called “annihilation”, and this is in scientific
circles who refer to thermonuclear detonations as “events.” The energy
released is the mass times the speed of light squared, and which means
one kilogram gets you ninety quadrillion joules - two thousand times
the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The problem is, if your
terrorist organization has a kilogram of antimatter you’re invincible
anyway - because you can fly past security checkpoints on your quantum
unicorns and hypnotize targets using The Force. We can only make a few
trillion anti-particles at a time, which does sound like the sort of
thing Dr Evil would threaten the UN with until you realize that even
half a gram is three hundred sextillion atoms. And that’s not even
counting how each of those atoms is many, many particles. Oh, by the
way, a sextillion is a trillion times bigger than a billion.
See?
Even trying to describe how impossible the antimatter bomb is, the
comparison numbers start to sound stupid. Short form: if would takes
us two billion years to make enough antimatter to blow up the Holy See,
and you can safely assume that something else would have happened to
him in that time anyway - up to and including the re-evolution of
dinosaurs.
If you’ve got a half gram of antimatter you don’t need
to blow up the Vatican anyway: it costs sixty two trillion dollars a
milligram to make so you’re sitting on thirty-one quadrillion dollars.
There isn’t even three quadrillion on the planet. You can just buy the
place and evict them, and by “the place” we mean “Earth.”
Oh, and
did we mention how you’d have to be driving something the size of a
tank to contain the Penning trap, vacuum systems and power supplies
involved? You can’t fit a fuse on antimatter - if even the air touches
it, you and everything else you can see will be kissing gamma rays
before you know anything’s happened.
So it’s a total Cobra
Commander plan - sure, it could work, if you had impossible resources
that would enable you to enact a million easier options anyway. Why
has the story caught public attention? Why, because Scientists Are
Bad, of course! Nuclear is boring and hippies destroying food crops
doesn’t make genetic modification look scary enough, so antimatter is
the next big one. It’s the biggest and baddest science-boom until
someone works out how to garrote people with a superstring, and nobody
cares if it’s impossible.
Posted by Luke McKinney
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