A vial of antimatter...

[parallaxicality]

I just read a review of Angels and Demons and apparently it involves the theft of a vial of antimatter to use as a bomb. OK.... I may be not as knowledgeable on this subject as others on this board but what kind of super-Kryptonian starship vial could possibly contain antimatter? How is antimatter contained anyway? Is it even contained at all?

[peter eldergill]

Apparantly it can be contained in a trap of some sort...I read that here on one of threads, but I can't remember which one. I think the issue is that the colliders can't make antimatter in any quantity that would be dangerous and it would cost billions to do so.

Pete

[grant hutchison]

If it consisted of charged particles (antiprotons, for instance) it could be contained in a "magnetic bottle": a shaped magnetic field that causes the particles to spiral back and forth along the field lines without striking the walls of the container. Neutral antihydrogen would be much more of a challenge, I imagine.

Extrapolating from Dan Brown to reality is never going to be informative, though. :)

Grant Hutchison

[01101001]

This won't explain it, but the video clip provided has a humorous little bit on Tom Hanks' field trip to CERN and how they lost their antimatter: BA Blog: Tom Hanks and the Higgins Bosun (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/13/tom-hanks-and-the-higgins-bosun/)

[Gillianren]

I believe CERN actually has an FAQ page up about the book/movie and how very, very wrong Dan Brown is.

[Fazor]

My understanding coincides with that others here have said. Any sort of container to hold anti-mater would have to be able to somehow keep said anti mater from contacting any mater that makes up said container. (Electric/magnetic fields maybe?). And thus, would be much bigger and more complicated than a "vial", and very conspicuous, bulky, and rather hard to steal.

And that's if you some how managed to create a substancial amount of anti mater, let alone enough to make a bomb.

* * *

I don't mind some fibbing in literature (you have to have fiction in order for it to be, well, fiction). But I don't understand how Dan Brown's works always seem to get percieved as "Based on real stuff!" as much as many people seem to think they are.

And a vial of anti-mater? That might be a little past my fiction-forgiveness threshold. *shrug*

[Chuck]

With some science fiction antimatter, you can safely walk around in a universe full of the stuff as long as you don't meet your antimatter twin.

[Ilya]

My understanding coincides with that others here have said. Any sort of container to hold anti-mater would have to be able to somehow keep said anti mater from contacting any mater that makes up said container. (Electric/magnetic fields maybe?). And thus, would be much bigger and more complicated than a "vial", and very conspicuous, bulky, and rather hard to steal.

And that's if you some how managed to create a substancial amount of anti mater, let alone enough to make a bomb.
Depends on your definition of "bomb". Annihilating 1 milligram of antimatter is equivalent to about 40 tons of TNT. Quite substantial.

Edited: I messed up exponents. It is 40 tons, not 400 kg.

[Ilya]

As an aside, SF writers, even fairly "hard" ones, tend to overestimate the destructive capacity of antimatter. In the prologue of The Asteroid Queen by Pournelle, a Slaver launches "God's Fist" missile:

The warhead was almost a kilogram of antimatter. When it hit, there would be very little left of the continent.
Must be a small continent then. Kilogram of antimatter is about 40 megatons.

Likewise -- and on the other end of size scale, -- Reynold's Revelation Space has "hot dust", the ultimate infiltration weapon. Hot dust is one twentieth of a milligram of antilithium, the size of a pinhead and suspended in a magnetic bottle as big as a thimble. In the book, detonating hot dust produces a one kiloton explosion. That's too high by a factor of 500.

[Fazor]

Well, it's my understanding that a kilogram of antimatter is a huge amount of AM to be produced. But my understanding is based on vague information I've come across over the years.

[parallaxicality]

http://spill.com/ has a clip of the beaker. I would however advise those of a more sensitive disposition to block their ears to some of the more pungent conversation.

[RobDegraves]

Anti atoms can be created by particle accelerators but only at a huge cost in energy and only in tiny amounts. The LHC, once fully operational could likely produce about 10^7 antiparticles per second. If that sounds like a lot, keep in mind that at that rate it would take them two billion years to produce 1 gram of antimatter.

Antimatter is typically stored in something called a penning trap. This uses a mix of electrical and magnetic fields to confine charged anti particles. Unfortunately, at this time penning traps do not keep the particles confined for very long and they soon bleed out of the confinement.

Currently antimatter is theoretically valued at around 62 trillion dollars per gram.... assuming that much could be gathered in one place.

As a historian I find Dan Brown's books quite entertaining. However, he has the habit of starting off with an excellent and well established premise then of jumping off all over the place with little regard to any kind of factual standards. His book "The Da Vinci Code" starts off with an excellent premise, that Marie Magdelene had likely been far more influential in the life of Jesus than the bible and later sources allowed. That there was some form of very early cover up in this case is a reasonable premise. However, Dan Browne then skips over centuries as if they were nothing, following a secret order and a blood line that could not have possibly survived that long nor even have known about the secrets that they are supposed to guard. It's nice fiction but hardly based on any kind of facts.

Same thing with the antimatter in "Angels and Demons". If the Illuminati had stolen all the antimatter in the world, they could have probably have run a light bulb for a while... a great achievement technically but hardly impressive as an act of violence.

[publiusr]

How I wish WISH we could make even that vial of antimatter. What a propellant.

Still the idea of an actual technocrat-based illuminati appeals to me. First I need an agent to hire hookers and private eyes to blackmail anti-NASA types. Now I need wiretaps on all enemies of stem cell research for extortion. Then someone to make poor-mans raygun versions of "active denial" systems to break up anti-research protests. Then I need a few Billion for my DC-X Volcano base in Japan.

Theodore Kaczynski in reverse. SPECTRE come to like. Or is it KAOS? Starker!!!?

[robross]

As a historian I find Dan Brown's books quite entertaining. However, he has the habit of starting off with an excellent and well established premise then of jumping off all over the place with little regard to any kind of factual standards. His book "The Da Vinci Code" starts off with an excellent premise, that Marie Magdelene had likely been far more influential in the life of Jesus than the bible and later sources allowed. That there was some form of very early cover up in this case is a reasonable premise. However, Dan Browne then skips over centuries as if they were nothing, following a secret order and a blood line that could not have possibly survived that long nor even have known about the secrets that they are supposed to guard. It's nice fiction but hardly based on any kind of facts.

Same thing with the antimatter in "Angels and Demons". If the Illuminati had stolen all the antimatter in the world, they could have probably have run a light bulb for a while... a great achievement technically but hardly impressive as an act of violence.

Well, don't lose sight of the fact he is writing FICTION. He just mixes in enough reality to keep it very interesting. Sci-Fi would not be very interesting if you had to work within the confines of real-world physics - no warp drive, no time travel, etc. I think Dan Brown does a great job of mixing truth and fiction to keep the stories plausible enough that it's easy to suspend disbelief for the non-plausible bits.

Rob

[Gillianren]

Well, don't lose sight of the fact he is writing FICTION. He just mixes in enough reality to keep it very interesting. Sci-Fi would not be very interesting if you had to work within the confines of real-world physics - no warp drive, no time travel, etc. I think Dan Brown does a great job of mixing truth and fiction to keep the stories plausible enough that it's easy to suspend disbelief for the non-plausible bits.

Well, first off, it would be easier to do that if he didn't go around declaring that, fiction it may be, but huge amounts of it is really true.

Second . . . I disagree. For one, I don't think his writing is skilled enough to make me want to read it in the first place, and the basic concepts are, to me, so ludicrous on the face that there's no point in overcoming my distaste.

[mike alexander]

Assuming the material is antiprotons, space charging limits how much you can compress the ionized material. A gram of antiprotons is a mole, 6X1023 antiprotons. Heck, just a mole of garden variety hydrogen occupies over twenty liters at room temperature. Now try squeezing it together with a positive charge.

[kzb]

The worst bad science bit in Angels and Demons is the antimatter explosion itself. A blast of pure white light according to Dan Brown. Actually I'm sure they would all get radiation sickness from the hard gamma radiation.

[DonM435]

A thermos.

Keeps the matter matter and the anti anti. And it knows the difference.

[ineluki]

I believe CERN actually has an FAQ page up about the book/movie and how very, very wrong Dan Brown is.

http://angelsanddemons.cern.ch/faq

P.S.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html

[Barabino]

Forgive me this wild science fiction...

We suppose that neutron stars are made of neutron matter...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_matter

Let's assume we have a significant quantity of it...

could it be used to contain antimatter?

Or does it react with antimatter anyway?

or neutronium does not have the mechanical qualities to contain anything?
(e.g. it is a gas in earth conditions of pressure and temperature)

[grant hutchison]

"Neutronium" (it's a science fiction term) is made of neutrons, which are matter. Neutrons have an antiparticle, the antineutron. So neutrons would annihilate with antimatter.
IIRC, a large mass of neutrons is anyway unstable at standard temperature and pressure, and is a fluid within neutron stars (so not an ideal structural material).

Grant Hutchison

[robross]

Forgive me this wild science fiction...

We suppose that neutron stars are made of neutron matter...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_matter

Let's assume we have a significant quantity of it...

could it be used to contain antimatter?

Or does it react with antimatter anyway?

or neutronium does not have the mechanical qualities to contain anything?
(e.g. it is a gas in earth conditions of pressure and temperature)

The neutron start is only as dense as it is because of the immense gravity. You could not just scoop out a 1cm cube of neutron-star and plop it on your lab table. Not because the table would collapse under the weight, but because it would rapidly un-neutron-star-ilize.

Rob

[Barabino]

"Neutronium" (it's a science fiction term) is made of neutrons, which are matter. Neutrons have an antiparticle, the antineutron. So neutrons would annihilate with antimatter.


I didn't think about that... thanks to both of you!

[publiusr]

I've wondered how other substances might be more easily handled and or weaponized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopositronium