What is Digg?80 Comments
- Misogyny, on 10/12/2007, -3/+52Build a man a fire, he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life...
- stevealford, on 10/12/2007, -2/+47Did you put the cat in a box after you fed it the antimatter?
- AnteChronos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+42"now we can just turn the planet into ash, no mess!"
Ash? You're not thinking big enough! With an earth-sized mass of antimatter, we can convert the entire planet into gamma radiation. - noahhoward, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38nope, we fund, they spend.
Seing as I am using the internet, something which they spent money on, I'm greatful. - Caiman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+29The future is now! Or not.
The only way anti-matter will ever go mainstream, is if the military build a bomb first. Only the military are mad enough to spend enough money to make harnessing it achievable. - noseeme, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22I made a handful of antimatter once, and fed it to the cat.
- kinghajj, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21who dugg stevealford down? obviously whoever did doesn't know about Schrödinger's cat.
- pujolsthebeast, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Well, when you don't exist you won't be scared...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+23The military doesn't spend a dime, the civilians who run the Government are the spenders.
- anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18@warriorscot
Jesus loving God, will you PLEASE make at least a passing attempt to express yourself in the form of sentences? They're really much easier to read than a seemingly unordered spew of words. - realyst, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16"Is the cat alive or dead?"
"Dead."
"But I have not yet allowed you to measure the outcome."
"You shoved antimatter in your cat. It's dead. No measurement necessary." - stevealford, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14@greyspec:
Technically, you should have used an ellipsis after "frustrating" because the sentence fragment that followed it was a poorly structured dependent clause. Then again, why am I telling you this? You're the grammar expert. ;) - elnerdo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Matter cannot be created or destroyed IN A CHEMICAL REACTION.
In a nuclear reaction, that rule does not apply. - mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Antimatter is currently manufactured at an energy cost vastly greater than the energy it contains. To make a serious anti-matter bomb, you'd have to put all the energy of several bombs into it - clearly impossible, or at least ridiculously expensive. Nuclear weapons are different, because the potential energy already exists in the fission or fusion precursors you mine from the environment.
Unless someone comes up with a better way of making antimatter, it'll never be useful as a weapon or as a fuel. - S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Matter can be transformed into energy, and possibly vise versa. That is what happens when anti matter hits normal matter, they annihilate each other and a huge burst of energy is the result.
- bIuebonics, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9what did mrs. schrodinger say to mr. schrodinger?
what'd you do to the cat? he looks half dead! - joshikus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Warp drive here we come! They've got 56 years to make it that seems like a decent amount of time haha.
- kidd3ckz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'm grateful too.
- coldphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Ha neuralzen...with that logic, man should never have spent the time inventing the wheel, afterall it is now used on cars, which often times kill people.
- sarge96, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Star Trek is completely under appreciated. The cell phones we use wouldnt exist if it wasn't for the communicatior. But one problem with your transporter comes from the fact that all of a humans information would fill up hard stacked from here to the center of the galaxy and back. Didn't anyone watch "How William Shatner changed the world" on the History channel?
- derkaas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5E = mc^2
- superyounan1, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7wow. When i was younger, I admired the technology star trek for its fantasy, but as I get older, my admiration is switching to its vision. They managed to take scientific theories in their infancy and saw the potential of how they will develop. Matter-Energy conversion star trek used 'replicators'? I've read and heard about how scientists are just an inch or two away from figuring out the relationship between matter and energy. Transporter? Dugg article on front page a month back about the successful quantum teleporter test to move a large amount of matter. Trichorder (or however its spelled), there are 2 similar technologies, also dugg, being tested. And now, antimatter as an energy source. Sometimes its unclear if science is inspiring scifi, or the other way around.
- andnever, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5everytime i read one of these articles on digg i get scared im going to walk into a black hole and not exsist
- Katana314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Sir, we've discovered a new type of substance that could power the US for at least five seconds!"
"Astounding work, Scott! Where did you find out about this?"
"In the prequel to The Da Vinci Code..." - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4it's easy to harness antimatter. go to any italian restaurant of your choice, order pasta and antipasto and mix them up.
- turpenine, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8you spelled your winky face wrong.
- Charlotte_Web, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It seems to me that, while this seems like cool, futuristic technology, right now it's hard to see it having a practical application.
The problem is that if it takes a solar flare to create a pound of the stuff, that's a helluva lot of energy to create such a small amount. Of course, if it was possible to create antimatter with less energy than you would gain back in a matter/anti-matter explosion, then you'd have the recipe for a perpetual motion machine.
I suppose the nice thing about uranium in nuclear power plants is that uranium is naturally occurring, even if it does have to be processed (maybe someone more knowledgeable can speak to how energy-efficient this whole process is). Antimatter exists in such small amounts in the universe that it appears that we would have to create all of it that we use. And then we get to the problem of spending more energy to create it than it releases. And why would you use coal to create energy to create antimatter to create energy for homes, when you could just use coal to create energy for homes.
The only real practical application for this, I suppose, would be for energy storage in a spaceship, where you are away from fuel sources for extended periods of time. And then to have power generation on the surface of planets that we are still exploring and haven't started claiming resources from. - S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Two wrongs never make things right....
- moocow1452, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, all we need to do now is built a warp drive, and ride it out to the sun to get antimatter for the warp drive to be able to work properly. Then we're golden!
- euphemizeme, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Or if you want to blow their minds:
A. matter - Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Crap, I did the budget wrong, we DO use that much in 2 days. Unbelievable.
- S1ngular1ty1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Believe it or not, I was recently at a meeting at work and one of the future technologies that my company said it was working on was anti matter containment. I laughed because that sounded really funny to me after watching Star Trek for years.
- anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Everybody knows that the correct way to say it would be "He runs fastly."
Doy. - randysouth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you don't antimind, it doesn't antimatter.
- IanCal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Actually it's ridiculously inefficient if you are creating it.
If you found it, on the other hand, that would be great. Still, it'd be a bitch to convert to useful energy. - derkaas, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@stevealford
"Wrong" is also an adverb. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wrong if you insist.
Incidentally, you're probably just the kind of person who would tell me it's wrong to say "he runs fast," but you'd be incorrect, because "fast" is also an adverb. English is not as hard as some people pretend it is.
Trying to sound smart and actually being smart are two different things. Don't confuse yourself or others by falling victim to the former. - Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I just did the math on an 80 billion kwh / year budget (~1997 levels), and I'm getting that it would take about 9g of matter converted completely to energy with no losses to run the U.S. for a day. So, for a full kilo (500 of antimatter + 500 of matter) we get about 111 days worth.
I still find it amazing how much energy we use that such a large amount of antimatter would only go that far. - bnoj13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1...but three rights always make a left
- pacman122, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you're a douche, nuff said
- Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Store it? What are you crazy?
You make it as needed. And if there's no good way to make it "cheap as free" you don't. Antimatter is silly-dangerous stuff to keep lying around. - Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Its a gigajoules vs exajoules thing. I have a hard time grappling with that many orders of magnitude. Pardon me. I'm sure you knew exactly how many exajoules the U.S. consumes in a day off the top of your head.
- Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1wrong reply to
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Transporter? Dugg article on front page a month back about the successful quantum teleporter test to move a large amount of matter."
Is that so? I'm familiar with quantum teleportation, as in transferring a quantum state, but AFAIK this has nothing to do with teleporting/moving matter. I would certainly appreciate a link to prove me wrong. - stevealford, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I love theoretical particle physics... you can never prove or disprove any theory because the evidence destroys itself instantaneously.
- Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Even if it's hard too, I think fusion power is a bit closer to reality if talking these things...
- SultanTravi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's why all this money "wasted" in the military is put to good use. Plus, anti-matter bombs are the perfect smart weapon. One could adjust how much is in it to exactly destroy the target with minimal collateral damage.
- dreamxtime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Antimatter could be an extremely valuable source of energy - there are only a few things I foresee being obstacles:
1. Where the heck are we gonna keep it? Gravity and magnetism would be needed to keep antimatter away from matter unless it was being used. If there were to be an unexpected failure and a large quantity of antimatter were to come into contact with regular matter, it would make Tsar Bomba look like a kids' chemistry set.
2. How are we going to get enough antimatter to keep things moving? We can't keep annihilating matter forever - we'll run out.
3. The cost will be astronomical, what with building bigger and bigger particle accelerators.
4. It could become a point of contention between countries on less-than-friendly terms. I don't want to think about what would happen if some country decided to make an antimatter warhead. That would be the end of us all. - ricree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's great and all, but how exactly would we go about storing it? Currently, the only known way is to store similarly charged antimatter particles in a strong electric field. Since the particles obviously repel each other, we can only store a tiny amount of antimatter at any given time. So basically, even if there were a nearby source of antimatter, we'd have an extremely tough time ever even getting it to earth, much less using it as energy. The sun already produces more than enough energy without even considering antimatter, and getting use of that energy is a heck of a lot more realistic in the foreseeable future than this idea is.
- Afreyt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Considering that Fat Man annhilated more or less a gram of matter in order to do its dirty work, is the "half a kilo" in the article saying that the U.S. consumes 250 hiroshima size atomic weapons worth of energy every 2 days?
I'm as cynical as the next enviro-geek, but that seems a little off. - anonym41414, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Einstein shot that old myth straight to hell. It turns out it's ridiculously easy to destroy matter. At even the slightest provocation, particle-antiparticle pairs convert themselves into high-energy photon pairs in the half-MeV range. And as for matter being created, all you have to do is accelerate something out of an inertial reference frame. It gains mass relative to the starting reference frame, mass that comes from absolutely nowhere.
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