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[andrea]

While it doesn't solve the heat death, it may turn out to be a good way to generate antimatter. It wouldn't create energy, but I am sure that it would be useful too.

[Akura]

Weaponizing it? If you can make anti-matter, then you can easily solve the problem of annihilating matter you don't want to exist(and cause quite a bit of damage with the resulting energy).

[andrea]

I prefer "use it as super dense fuel for spaceships" rather than "blow up the world". But why not, it works too.

[AntiAntiMatter]

We are talking about stuff that has a huge potential for destruction here. The moment the military gets on it (and they will) they are immediately going to start making antimatter weapons. Naturally, other militaries will eventually figure this out, and sooner or later someone is going to invent the antimatter bomb, which will make the average nuke look like a hand grenade.

[Soadreqm]

There's not much to "invent", really. Just allow antimatter to come into contact with regular matter and it'll annihilate back into energy.The only thing required to make an "antimatter bomb" is to open the antimatter jar, at which point the stuff will more or less instantly explode.

[AntiAntiMatter]

There's not much to "invent", really. Just allow antimatter to come into contact with regular matter and it'll annihilate back into energy.The only thing required to make an "antimatter bomb" is to open the antimatter jar, at which point the stuff will more or less instantly explode.

Good point. All they'd have to do is retrofit some already existing ICBMs. Which is even scarier.

[MonkeyHead]

of course the issue there is in having a storage mechanism, which might use such an obscene amout of energy you might as well just use that energy directly in the form of a weapon...

[Fossaman]

I'd like to point out that this method of manufacturing antimatter would consume more energy to produce the antimatter than would be released upon its annihilation (because let's face it, they're not going to get 100% efficiency). Whereas uranium comes right out of the ground in a conveniently energy-dense package already. Yes, antimatter blows up pretty good. But we've already got a perfectly good way to blast ourselves into oblivion, nobody's going to bother weaponizing it until it gets cheaper than mining and processing fissionables.

[Virex]

If you're producing enough antimatter this way to even get to the scale of a firecracker in a decent amount of time, you're using a doomsday raygun fit for frying the moon to make a firecracker. Somehow that doesn't seem to most effective way of using such an energy beam emitter.

[Graebeard]

This shit is 80 years old, man.  Dirac, the physicist who theorized the existence of antimatter before it was ever observed, had exactly this conception of the vacuum.  Read about the Dirac sea, it's mind-blowingly interesting stuff.

Also, the earlier posts about the first law of thermodynamics still hold is definitely true.  But the explanation of "creating" an electron /positron pair is misleading under the Dirac conception of the vacuum.  Rather, what you're doing is knocking an electron out of a (much) lower eigenstate, one in which it did not need to interact with normal matter.  What you end up with is an electron in a higher energy state (which you can now observe) and a "hole" where the electron used to be.  It's kind of the same general idea you find in semiconductors.

[Eagleon]

As I understand it now, the energy of the electron/positron together will contain whatever energy is leeched from the laser. Correct me if I'm wrong here. That means that what inefficiency there is will be caused by the focusing and recycling mechanism and any other outside apparatus, in addition to heat loss from whatever electricity is needed, inefficiency in producing the energy for the laser, and whatever material requirements there are.

I don't doubt that's simplifying things. But if you consider the massive amounts of energy we put into mining coal, oil, uranium, etc (including shipping, fuel and manpower for extraction equipment, sorting, refinement, and facilities operation) it could be up there with flywheels in vacuum in terms of efficient energy storage if we can make the laser and confinement devices cheap enough and efficient enough to operate. And it would be a fantastic financial resource for space-based facilities - just construct a huge solar collector, use the energy to create antimatter, use a lot less energy than what would be required in full gravity to make magnetic containment for it, and sell what you don't need.

There's just not enough information to satisfy me on this. Reading the original paper, it sounds like it was originally related to one of Bohr's conjectures on a maximum limitation to how strong a laser/QED field can be, which is fascinating by itself, but I admit I couldn't begin to pick apart how efficient this would be.

[Orb]

Honestly, if you are going to make anti-matter in this method, its 50% efficiency, since half of it is matter, after all, If you are using twice as much energy into making a bomb than it will release, you are better off with a deathray or something.

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[Graebeard]

I'm not sure how that follows, since the antimatter will liberate twice as much energy as is stored in its mass upon contact with any matter anyway, given that the matter it contacts will also be annihilating.

Correct.  The only inefficiencies would be whatever heat/induction/etc... the lasers and equipment used in the antimatter creation process causes.  Someone posted above that uranium is perfectly good for weapons.  That's certainly true, but I'm fairly confident in saying that there's nothing known to physics with greater energy density than antimatter.

[Earthquake Damage]

Honestly, if you are going to make anti-matter in this method, its 50% efficiency, since half of it is matter, after all, If you are using twice as much energy into making a bomb than it will release, you are better off with a deathray or something.

A death ray is a point weapon.  An antimatter bomb is an area weapon.  Energy comparisons are meaningless as they have different uses.