Saturday, November 20, 2010

Antimatter and Science Fiction

Antimatter has been in the news lately since the ALPHA team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced 38 antihydrogen atoms were trapped for about a sixth of a second, long enough to be studied.

It's a small step to reaching the levels of antimatter use in science fiction, but the world has a very long way to go. The amount of antimatter created is nowhere near the level needed to power space ships like those of science fiction. There's a good article by Mark Whittington on Yahoo! News called "Antimatter Rockets in Science Fiction" that discusses this. Click here for the article.

I also came across this video of Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson of the ALPHA experiments and a physicist at the University of Aarhus. He talks about how the antimatter-creation process works. He's fairly technical but gives a lot of information. Below is the video.

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