The Wonders of Antihydrogen..

[Vax]

Start off with the facts...
Scientists at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, reported that they had synthesized Antihydrogen using a particle accelerator to produce antiprotons, which they then collided with Xenon clusters at a high velocity. The main problem was the amount of heat the Antihydrogen were putting off (around a few thousand K). The heat caused the antihydrogen to hit the walls of the experimental apparatus therefore, annihilating itself. The ovious way to solve this problem would be to cool it, and put it in a vacuum, and it worked. We can make as many as we want now. Great! And many more to come!

When matter and antimatter make contact they release a high amount of energy which can be calculated assuming E=mc^2. However we would have to then multiply that time the number of atoms synthesized.

So you could say E=(0.00100794)(299,792,458)^2


you would get 91308407173.7144516559769104j which is about enough energy to instantly evaporate 89270 gallons of water. That is, each individual hydrogen atom. Which on a planetary scale is a decent amount of energy.

Hyrdrogen is very small in mass. If we tried to make something a little more hefty, such as Osmium (Os, Atomic Mass: 190.2, which for the sake of the experiment we will convert into Kg) we would get the following equation:

E=(0.1902)(299,792,458)^2

so E would equal 13005361318476105.76693824j.
(bear in mind the number would have to be multiplied by each Anti-Osmium synthesized)

If this one anti-Osmium was to contact real matter, it would create a different effect. As opposed to it's lightweight counterpart with enough energy to evaporate 89,270 gallons of water, Anti-Osmium would release enough energy to instantly evaporate 12,720,000,000 gallons of water as soon as it made contact with real matter. And lets just say we made 100 thousand of these atoms.

13005361318476105.7669382x100,000=1300536131847610576693.824j

This would be enough energy to make a 3000 pound car move at 3,093,000,000 mph or 1,382,694,720 Meters per Second (which is about 4 times the speed of light). Not saying that's possible to get a car to move that fast, it's just good way of showing.

First of all I want to know if my math is correct.
That's alot of energy to be created from just 100,000 Anti-Osmium coming in contact with real matter. I think if we could use a force like this, we could travel faster than the speed of light. All we would have to do is have a strong enough "barrel" for our faster-than-the-speed-of-light bullet, and a strong enough bullet. Just like a gun. The explosion would accelerate the bullet 4 times the speed of light. Think of the bullet as a ship. We can travel faster than the speed of light using E=MC^2 and the unstableness anti-matter in our universe.

My question!

Will this work?

EDIT: I could be totally wrong on all of this

 

[Jerromy]

I'm not a physicist but that doesn't seem right. The energy required to fabricate such atoms would be just as powerful as the energy those atoms would release upon contact with normal matter. I'm not sure how the matter-antimatter annihilation physics work but I am sure both atoms would have the same energy and would release all of their mass as energy so it would be 2 atoms worth of energy for 1 annihilation. As for moving matter at the speed of light or beyond there is not enough energy in the entire universe as it would take an infinite amount of energy to achieve this with one atom let alone a large craft capable of housing a human being.

 

[Vax]

Well when Anti-hydrogen comes into contact with real matter they rapidly annihilate each other forming gamma-rays and other high-energy particles called Pions, which in turn turn decay into Neutrinos, Muons, Positrons, and electrons which also quickly dissipate. Either way, the release of energy relative to the mass of one atom of hydrogen is one thing, but the mass of 100,000 or so of an atom with a mass 190 times that could create enough to make it possible. Anti-anything has no place in our universe. We have to learn to understand it. The particle itself wouldn't propel something faster than the speed of light, but possibly an explosion of something that is, and something that isn't suppose to be in our universe.

 

[origin]

When matter and antimatter make contact they release a high amount of energy which can be calculated assuming E=mc^2. However we would have to then multiply that time the number of atoms synthesized.

So you could say E=(0.00100794)(299,792,458)^2


you would get 91308407173.7144516559769104j which is about enough energy to instantly evaporate 89270 gallons of water. That is, each individual hydrogen atom. Which on a planetary scale is a decent amount of energy.

Hyrdrogen is very small in mass. If we tried to make something a little more hefty, such as Osmium (Os, Atomic Mass: 190.2, which for the sake of the experiment we will convert into Kg) we would get the following equation:

E=(0.1902)(299,792,458)^2

so E would equal 13005361318476105.76693824j.
(bear in mind the number would have to be multiplied by each Anti-Osmium synthesized)

If this one anti-Osmium was to contact real matter, it would create a different effect. As opposed to it's lightweight counterpart with enough energy to evaporate 89,270 gallons of water, Anti-Osmium would release enough energy to instantly evaporate 12,720,000,000 gallons of water as soon as it made contact with real matter. And lets just say we made 100 thousand of these atoms.

13005361318476105.7669382x100,000=1300536131847610576693.824j



EDIT: I could be totally wrong on all of this

Yes, you are wrong, because you made a serious mistake. You said, I believe, that hydrogen atom has a masss of 0.00100794 grams.

The mass of Hydrogen is 1.0079 grams for 6.02 X 10^23 atoms! So your calculations are off by 21 orders of magntude!!

In other words your calcuations are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times too big.

 

[Vax]

I converted the mass of hydrogen in grams to kg. I guess I forgot to convert back.

I know I'm missing some stuff.

Letting matter and anti-matter combine gives you up to 100% energy efficiency, but I guess technically some energy is being lost in moving the fuel itself. That all goes back to specific impulse (which simply states the higher the specific impulse, the less propellant is needed to gain a given amount of momentum). No matter what your specific impulse, you can't beat converting all of your fuel mass into kinetic energy for the rocket (which again, that is a wishful thought but for the sake of explaining the transfer of energy it will suffice, I'll talk more about it a couple more lines down).

Some students somewhere P) determined if you could move .1 c you would get to Alpha Centauri in 40 years, as it is just over 4 lightyears away. At that speed you can still measure the kinetic energy of the ship using mv^2 (Some good 'ole newtonian physics), where M = the mass the object v is the speed. This is where 100% energy efficiency is a really good thing..

When you equate the rocket kinetic energy and the mass energy of the antimatter, you will learn that you would only need .5% of the ships mass to propel it to .1 c. Of course to stop you would need an opposite but equal reaction.

So you would need .5% the ships mass energy to get there, another .5% to stop, turn around, then you will fly back using another .5% and another to stop. So that's 2% of the ships mass, which I'd say is pretty efficient. This is better than our modern day ship of I think like 75% mass energy (something like that), which is the main reason we can't travel such great distanced and speeds controllably.

(A 3000 pound car carries about 100 pounds of gas.. Not very efficient, but it's great because we have alot of gasoline for you to refuel along the way. A 747 jumbo jet however has a much higher ratio of fuel to weight of the craft, therefore the ratio is greater than 1 which in space is a big problem because the propellant weighs more than the rocket)

Now for the whole 100% energy conversion. That wasn't entirely true . Lets say our ship weighs about 100 tons. The mass of the propellant would be 10 tons for a round trip. So you could say the efficiency would rather be 90%, but good.

I know what you're thinking..... And you're right. 10 tons of antimatter is equivalent to 200,000 Megatons of TNT (or 10,000,000 hiroshima bombs). For a means of comparison, the largest nuclear bomb recorded was a modest 100 megatons or so (1960's). It would be a horrible mistake to store (even to make) the anti-matter on this planet. One slip up and we ALL would die.

But anyways, my first post was the idea that we could use what we know about anti-hydrogen to propel us through space. We would obviously have to use something a little more massive than anti-hydrogen, otherwise the mass would be too large for a 100 ton ship to carry. We could also tack another 2.5% to the efficiency if we leave the 2.5% we use initially behind by creating some kind of explosion to propel us.

If this doesn't make sense I can explain.

 

[origin]

I converted the mass of hydrogen in grams to kg

Correct you converted the mass of 6.02 x 10^23 atoms of hydrogen from grams to kilograms.

 

[Vax]

Correct...

never seen that word in the "Physics" forum..

 

[MeteorWayne]

Also Vax, please realize that all the antimatter we've created on earth so far wouldn't fill a teaspoon (before it annihilated of course)

 

[Vax]

Also Vax, please realize that all the antimatter we've created on earth so far wouldn't fill a teaspoon (before it annihilated of course)

Yes this is true, in fact not even a 1/10 of a billionth of a gram has been produced, however in 2004, CERN was able to create 100 antihydrogen atoms per operational second (as insignificant as it may sound, it is alot more than we had yesterday). That's just after 10 years of having a machine capable of low production, but it didn't solve the fact that when the anti-hydrogen came to be it was superheated, it was superheated and collided with real matter isntantaneously. We'll figure it out. It's really a matter of time before production picks up. My idea of creating, not the weakest anti-hydrogen, but an atom with a larger mass. 190 times the mass. It will take a very long time before we could even begin to fully understand the production of anti-hydrogen, followed by all the other elements that come before Osmium on the periodic table.

 

[Saiph]

Well, there's the math error in the first post, as already mentioned.

That, and I don't see the benefit of, say anti-Osmium over anti-hydrogen...you still get 100% mass to energy conversion for both...but Osmium would be much harder to make.

Take even anti-Helium, either we find a way to make it from whole cloth (straight from the energy conversion)...which is unlikely. Or we fuse many anti-hydrogen together to get it...meaning we expend more energy/effort to fuse it for...no real gain.

Granted, we could gain some energy from fusing it...but enough cover the energy debt to create it?


See, now that's an idea that's worth working out. How much energy to you get fusing elements up to Iron (where you start losing energy through further fusion). And how does that compare to the energy required to create all the original hydrogen atoms? I'm sure it's more energy to create than we get back from fusing, but I wonder how much the gap is closed....

 

[Vax]

Well I did convert the equation into kg so I could use e=mc^2

True it would be smarter to go ahead and make something that has higher energy than anti-hydrogen (because the mass of all the anti-hydrogen atoms as a whole would be less efficient than the equivelant amount of energy created from anti-helium). It would be easier this way because you would need less anti-helium atoms to get the same amount of mass/energy as all the anti-hydrogen (The anti-helium would have the same mass but doesn't take the same amount of time to produce).

Say it took you 100 years to make 100 tons of Anti-hydrogen (in our dreams), but it only took you 10 years to make 10 tons of anti-helium which collectively has equal atomic mass and creates the same amount of energy (asuming e=mc^2), it would just be easier to physically store/manage.

So yes, anti-hydrogen and anti-Osmium are both 100% efficient (since the mass of all the atoms would be converted into kinetic energy and not other useless forms of energy). But for every anti-osmium would be the equivelant to 190 anti-hydrogen. I'm not saying you would save space by using anti-osmium, the masses would be the same, I'm just saying it would be more time efficient to use anti-osmium (or anti-matter with an even larger mass). You would spend more time creating the anti-hydrogen than the time elapsed in the experiment itself, therefore anti-hydrogen would not be equally efficent, excluding anti-hydrogen and anti-osmium's kinetic similarities (that they are both 100% efficient). You could expirment with helium, but it would take just a hair less time to produce 5 tons of anti-helium than anti-hydrogen.

Sorry if it seems like I'm over explaining, but for some reason I feel like I'm not explaining it clearly

 

[origin]

Well I did convert the equation into kg so I could use e=mc^2

I am not sure if you are making a joke or you don't understand the error yet.

Here is your error:

You said the mass of a hydrogen atom is: 0.00100794 kg.

That is wrong.

The actual mass of a hydrogen atom is: 0.00000000000000000000000000607 kg

 

[drwayne]

Tip On Thinking About Number

One of the skills that takes time (and a certain number of embarassing mistakes as I can atest) is the
ability to look at one's numbers, realize what they mean, and whether they make sense in a general context.

If something is on the order of, say

0.001 Kg

Then it is essentially, one gram. Now that number may not mean much in rough isolation, but consider this.
It is not unusual to see doses of medication that are on the order of milligrams. (Medication popped into
my head for NO particular reason ) This means that ordinary, everyday materials have a mass that is
about a 1000 times smaller than your figure for one hydrogen atom. This should be a tip that something
went wrong in your math.

I am not picking on the OP of this thread, I guarantee I can top anyone here in dumb numerical and logical
errors committed in my career. Just trying to pass on the wisdom gained from stupidity.

Wayne

p.s. One of those strange numbers to remember in case like this - the density of water is essentially
one gram per cubic centimeter

 

[Vax]

Okay besides the math part from the first post, does any of this at all seem possible? I just need some input.

By the way I saw what you meant origin, i know it seems dumb to leave an error that essentially changes the whole thing entirely, but I'm not talking about the mass of hydrogen anymore, I'm talking about the plausibility of idea as a whole. I mess up, as I have no real education in the field (besides a couple years of reading), so I ask those who do. This is all just an idea I scribbled down in band one day

 

[origin]

Okay besides the math part from the first post, does any of this at all seem possible? I just need some input.

By the way I saw what you meant origin, i know it seems dumb to leave an error that essentially changes the whole thing entirely, but I'm not talking about the mass of hydrogen anymore, I'm talking about the plausibility of idea as a whole. I mess up, as I have no real education in the field (besides a couple years of reading), so I ask those who do. This is all just an idea I scribbled down in band one day

A matter / anti-matter reaction is the most efficient means of creating energy. 100% of the mass is [usually] converted to energy. This energy is in the form of gamma rays which are somewhat difficult to use for anything useful. By the way vax, you said somewhere that the energy created is in the form of kentic energy which is not correct.

The other problem is how do you create antimater in volumes that are large enough to be useful.

So it is not plausible at this time.

 

[Vax]

Well then it is plausible. It all sounds a little crazy but it probably WILL be one of the only ways we could travel faster than the speed of light. We would have to start small, and work our way up.

 

[origin]

Well then it is plausible. It all sounds a little crazy but it probably WILL be one of the only ways we could travel faster than the speed of light. We would have to start small, and work our way up.

Nope - you cannot travel faster than the speed of light even if you used all of the energy available in the universe!

 

[Saiph]

see, your problem is converting atomic mass to kilograms....you're introducing some weird data there.

10 tons of hydrogen will produce the exact SAME energy as 10 tons of helium in an anti-matter reaction....because the mass is identical. 100 tons of anti-hydrogen is ten times MORE energy than 10 tons of...anything else (anti-else?).

But the energy release from a helium atom is ~4x that of a single hyrdrogen.

But you keep comparing equal masses, not equal numbers. or rather you seem to be confusing the two.

Now, if you want to use helium for other reasons, such as storage issues, that's a bit different.

But I still don't see the point. I don't know if you can just make straight anti-helium, without having to fuse anti-hydrogen. And if that's the case, why bother? Storing hydrogen isn't that much more difficult than storing helium.

 

[Vax]

But the energy release from a helium atom is ~4x that of a single hyrdrogen.

that means you would only need 1/4 the mass of helium to have the equivalent energy as 100% of the hydrogen. On top of that we need to learn to fully utilize this new research on anti-matter until will can grasp the strange concepts.

 

[Saiph]

no, that is not at all what that means. again you confuse number of particles and the total mass.

a SINGLE Helium releases 4x the energy of a SINGLE hydrogen because it's 4x heavier.

However, any mass of helium gives the same energy as the same mass of hydrogen.

You would need fewer helium atoms for the same energy output, true, but the exact same MASS.

And when you create anti-matter, it's the mass that counts, not the number of particles. So there is no advantage to creating anti-helium over anti-hydrogen. And that's assuming you can just create it from the initial reactions.

If you have to actually fuse the anti-hydrogen to get the helium, it's actually more problematic.

 

[Vax]

More problematic and thus making it less efficient, but that's what science is! Obtain knowledge about everything we can. Not to mention this is science fiction coming to life. But if we are going to continue on our research why not use the technology? We have the energy capability.

 

[Vax]

My main question is, what the hell happens when matter and anti-matter annihilate each other? Everyone says the energy can be calculated with "einsteins great calculation". I understand mass and energy are directly interchangeable, but wouldn't there be instances when this does not apply? Wouldn't the release of energy be greater than the amount required for the provided mass?

:|

 

[drwayne]

"Wouldn't the release of energy be greater than the amount required for the provided mass?"

You are postulating

E > mc^2

?

 

[Vax]

You could say that. I'm just asking what happens when the matter and anti-matter make contact. I do assume E=MC^2.


Its pretty elementary, and I don't mean to insult anyones intelligence, but check this out:

http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/fi ... /emc2.html

The only way for ALL this energy to be released is for the kilogram of water to be totally annhilated. This process involves the complete destruction of matter, and occurs only when that matter meets an equal amount of antimatter ... a substance composed of mass with a negative charge. Antimatter does exist; it is observable as single subatomic particles in radioactive decay, and has been created in the laboratory. But it is rather short-lived (!), since it annihilates itself and an equal quantity of ordinary matter as soon as it encounters anything. For this reason, it has not yet been made in measurable quantities, so our kilogram of water can't be turned into energy by mixing it with 'antiwater'. At least, not yet.

THIS is what I've been talking about since the first post, for some reason I feel like everyone's been criticizing my grammar as opposed to criticizing the point.

 

[origin]

You could say that. I'm just asking what happens when the matter and anti-matter make contact. I do assume E=MC^2.


Its pretty elementary, and I don't mean to insult anyones intelligence, but check this out:

http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/fi ... /emc2.html

The only way for ALL this energy to be released is for the kilogram of water to be totally annhilated. This process involves the complete destruction of matter, and occurs only when that matter meets an equal amount of antimatter ... a substance composed of mass with a negative charge. Antimatter does exist; it is observable as single subatomic particles in radioactive decay, and has been created in the laboratory. But it is rather short-lived (!), since it annihilates itself and an equal quantity of ordinary matter as soon as it encounters anything. For this reason, it has not yet been made in measurable quantities, so our kilogram of water can't be turned into energy by mixing it with 'antiwater'. At least, not yet.

THIS is what I've been talking about since the first post, for some reason I feel like everyone's been criticizing my grammar as opposed to criticizing the point.

I don't think anyone has criticized your grammer. First of all your original post had a math error. Since then you seem to not understand that 1 pound of anti-hydrogen annihilating 1 pound of hydrogen would produce exactly the same amount of energy that 1 pound of anti-lead anihilating 1 pound of lead would produce.