![]() ![]() The plot of Assassination Classroom all traces back to the Big Bad Shiro trying to utilize antimatter as a new form of energy by producing it from living humans.It just gives the writers a lot of room to work with, and frustrates creators working on the harder sci-fis. ![]() Who knows? We might find a solution to that, too. But on the flip side, scientists are befuddled as to why there's so much matter in the universe compared to antimatter when all known processes for creating such massive particles, like the Big Bang, should create matter and antimatter in equal measure. Modern science considers this unlikely, because it would be difficult for that much antimatter to exist in the universe without coming into contact with matter and violently proving its existence. For instance, it was once theorised that antimatter did exist in large quantities somewhere out in the far reaches of space - it was just undetectable. Science Marches On with antimatter as it does with pretty much everything, so you might see some outdated "science" in your stories. But there are several key differences which make them useful to sci-fi writers: first, they're far more powerful second, they're remarkably fragile, meaning The End of the World as We Know It can happen from a single "oops" and third, they don't always make radioactive fallout (it depends on the work), making for a somewhat more palatable After the End scenario. Even if you use one of those electromagnetic traps, we haven't yet been able to build one that can hold more than a billion antiprotons or so - about a millionth of a billionth of a gram.Īntimatter is often used in fiction similarly to nuclear weapons. Not that a gram of antimatter has ever been produced. Antimatter is currently the most expensive stuff on Earth, worth about $62.5 trillion per gram - just short of the annual economic output of the entire world. You'd need a massive particle accelerator to make enough antimatter for your Faster-Than-Light Travel or Matter Replicator to work, which will require its own power source - solar, nuclear, or perhaps an entire Dyson Sphere. As a power source, it's just not practical because antimatter does not exist naturally in useful quantities.The most scientists have been able to pull off is storing 309 antihydrogen atoms together for more than 1000 seconds - short about a billion trillion of what one would need, give or take. Scientists are working with antihydrogen atoms, which are electrically netural, but they also don't respond well to the electromagnetic traps they've been working on. Another issue with storage is that antiprotons have negative charge and hate being close together, so it's difficult to get them into a tight space together.Your best bet might be a powerful electromagnetic trap of some kind, like what they've been working on in the real world. Most storage devices are also made of matter and wouldn't be able to contain it. You can't just have an antimatter bomb ready to go on the planet's surface without it activating. Writers often forget that air counts as matter.This, naturally, makes for an attractive sci-fi weapon or power source. When protons and neutrons encounter antiprotons and antineutrons, they also annihilate, resulting in a star of pions shooting out, which ultimately also decay into high-energy gamma radiation. When electrons encounter positrons, both particles mutually annihilate and emit gamma radiation (and if they do it at high energy, they can produce other stuff as well). And in some cases, like photons and neutral pions, the particle is its own antiparticle. Antiparticles have many of the exact same properties as your everyday particles (mass, intrinsic angular momentum, etc.), but some of their properties are inverted: antiprotons have a negative electric charge, antielectrons (also known as positrons) have a positive charge, and antineutrons and anti protons have negative baryon numbers. However, it can only be formed as a product of radioactive decay or particles colliding at very high speeds, and it lasts only brief moments until it comes into contact with normal matter. ![]()
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