Talk:Antimatter

Who first proposed antimatter?
Was it Paul Dirac or Julian Schwinger that first proposed antimatter? User:209.217.83.14 10:42, 3 Jan 2005 (CET)


 * Dirac posited the idea first, in 1932. --Lewis zimmerman 08:29, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

removed
I removed the following:


 * On Earth, the existence of antimatter was first theorized in 1928 by the physicist Paul Dirac while he was trying to integrate Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity with the Quantum Theory of Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg. By 1932, Paul Anderson had discovered the first of the three elementary antiparticles, the antielectron, which he named the positron. In 1955, the antiproton was discovered, followed just a few years later by the antineutron in 1959. The first antideuterion, which is composed of a single antiproton and single antineutron, and is the nucleus of antideuterium, was created in 1965. A team working at CERN in 1995 was able to combine antideuterions with positrons to form the first antideuterium atoms.

...because its all information existing outside the realm of Star Trek citation and can be found at wikipedia (most of which is internally linked and shouldn't be). --Alan del Beccio 22:40, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I removed the following:


 * When Montgomery Scott discussed the possibility of using auto-destruct against V'Ger with another crewmember in, he mentioned that the force of an auto-destruct for the Enterprise was around 100 Mt. Utilizing E=MC2, it is estimated that the annihilation of 1 kg of antimatter would result in an explosion of about 42.96 Mt.  This would mean that NCC-1701 may contain 2 to 3 kg of antimatter.


 * This is grossly incorrect as Scotty in neither the movie, nor the novelization of The Motion Picture ever gives a yield for the antimatter self-destruct. Here is what he actually says from the canon movie:


 * ROSS: Why has the Captain ordered self-destruct, sir?
 * SCOTT: I would say, lass, because he thinks, he hopes, that when we go up ...we'll take the intruder with us.
 * ROSS: Will we?
 * SCOTT: When that much matter and anti-matter are brought together, oh yes, we will, indeed.

Forum:Why use antimatter?
Why is antimatter used to power starships? It seems to me that it would be much safer to use the transporter as a direct matter to energy converter instead of antimatter. --35.11.246.142


 * What do you think powers the transporter to let it do what it does? Anti-matter. --OuroborosCobra talk 22:08, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * the use of antimatter to power a ship is more scientific than it seems. when matter and antimatter collide, it creates an immense amount of energy that, if channeled correctly, can power a LOT of things, including the transporter, which needs a LOT of power to transfer matter and energy. even in the 24th century, that really is the only way to create the amount of power made by a warp reaction, except for transwarp reactions, which are unstable and need to be monitored and used in discretion: for example, Voyager episode . Captain Jon 00:56, 27 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The answers are: 1, the transporter/replicator are not actually matter/energy converters, and 2, they operate at a severe net power loss. If a replicator was a machine that yielded more energy than was put into it, the whole premise of Star Trek: Voyager, among many other things, would be shot. :)98.197.198.167 10:00, October 18, 2009 (UTC)

TOS: Obsession
In, Kirk tells someone that one pound of antimatter can destroy a solar system. Since this is wildly inaccurate, how should we handle this? We are assuming, of course, that he means a pound on Earth, but I doubt he meant any other planet. Ddeschw 20:34, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
 * You're right, given that the Sun happily annihilates 4 million tonnes of matter a second without ill effects. The writers had no sense of the scale of planets, solar systems, or the galaxy. Either Kirk just likes to exaggerate wildly and trusts his subordinates to work out the figures properly for him, or the Star Trek universe really is on a different scale from the real universe. A friend in the video game industry related to me once how, having produced a realistic physical model for their space opera game, they had to tweak the numbers radically to make it look right–this resulted in planets being about a couple of miles across, for example. Bizarre as this sounds, it corresponds to the universe as depicted in Star Trek quite well–planets that small really would have only one climate and one civilisation, and many anomalies to do with journey times within and between systems go away. At this scale, annihilation of a luggable quantity of matter and antimatter might well be enough to disrupt a planet enough for the system to be considered 'destroyed'. :-) --Leckford 11:34, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it is better to assume he meant "if used as part of some weapon type in some specific way with which we all have a passing familiarity," or that he was simply exaggerating, than it is to rescale the entire universe as a result of this seemingly inaccurate reference.98.197.198.167 09:58, October 18, 2009 (UTC)


 * You guys aren't checking back with your primary sources. Kirk is not the only one who thought this is what would happen. Everyone from Spock to Garrovick all agreed that at the very least one ounce would be enough to blow off half an Earth-like planet's atmosphere as is demonstrated in this series of conversations:
 * MCCOY: I assume that you now believe we should pursue the creature and destroy it.
 * SPOCK: Precisely.
 * KIRK: You don't agree with Mister Spock?
 * MCCOY: It's the time factor that bothers me. Those drugs are perishable.
 * SPOCK: Doctor, evidence indicates the creature is here to spawn. If so, it will reproduce by fission, not just into two parts, but thousands.
 * KIRK: Antimatter seems our only possibility.
 * SPOCK: An ounce should be sufficient. We can drain it from the ship's engines and transport it to the planet surface in a magnetic vacuum field.
 * KIRK: Contact medical stores. I want as much haemoplasm as they can spare in the transporter room in fifteen minutes.
 * GARROVICK: Yes, sir.
 * MCCOY: I presume you intend to use that haemoplasm to attract the creature?
 * KIRK: We must get it to the antimatter. It seems attracted to red blood cells. What better bait could we have?
 * SPOCK: There is still one problem, Captain.
 * KIRK: The blast, yes.
 * SPOCK: Exactly. A matter-antimatter blast will rip away half the planet's atmosphere. If our vessel is in orbit and encounters those shock waves
 * KIRK; A chance we'll have to take, Mister Spock.
 * SPOCK: Also, we cannot be certain the transporter will operate under those conditions. If a man is beaming up when that hits, we may lose him.
 * KIRK: That's exactly why I've decided to set the trap myself.
 * SPOCK: Captain, there is so little hemoglobin in my green blood, the creature could not harm me extensively. It therefore seems logical for me to be the one
 * KIRK: Negative, Mister Spock. In case this plan fails, I'll need you aboard the ship. In that event, we'll need another plan.
 * SPOCK: It will require two men to transport the antimatter unit.
 * GARROVICK: I'd like permission to go with you, sir.
 * KIRK: I had you in mind, Mister Garrovick.
 * [Planet surface]
 * (Kirk, Garrovick and a blue ball under a floating carrying device beam down.)
 * KIRK: Kirk to Enterprise.
 * SPOCK [OC]: Spock here, Captain.
 * KIRK: Proceed immediately to maximum orbit.
 * SPOCK [OC]: Acknowledged.
 * GARROVICK: Just think, Captain, less than one ounce of antimatter here is more powerful than ten thousand cobalt bombs.
 * KIRK; Let's hope it's as powerful as man will ever get. Detonator.
 * GARROVICK: Aye, sir.
 * (He primes and sets it on the anti-grav unit.)
 * KIRK; Kirk to Enterprise.
 * More importantly, he never says anything about one pound being enough to destroy a star system.


 * Perhaps there is something specific about the combination of the antimatter with dikironium that would cause a runaway reaction? After all, the cloud creature displays *very* unusual properties, moving in and out of our space-time continuum as it does. I can easily imagine that this, inside a planet's atmosphere, might complicate things somehow. Just a shot at a rationalization. :) 98.198.208.165 19:44, January 4, 2011 (UTC)

Anti-matter. Where does it come from?
While the universe started with equal amounts of both anti-matter and matter, there are no known (as far as I know) deposits of anti-matter anymore. Why this is, I don't think anyone knows yet. That being said, in Star Trek they use quite a bit of anti-matter. What I want to know is how do they get all of it? Ether they get it from somewhere that science has yet to discover, or they have to produce it. To make anti-matter you have to put enough energy in a single spot to make, not one, but two particles. One Matter, one Anti-matter. This is at most 50% efficient, unless you use the matter you make as well, which in ST they don't. They get their matter from their Bussard Collectors. Even if they did, it would take more energy to create the anti-matter, then you would get from the reaction, because of thermodynamics. So Anti-matter is at most, a battery. I have heard of a theory which says that at very high energy levels it may be possible to convert Anti-electrons into protons, and Anti-protons into electrons. the problem is still that you would need a very high energy level to do that. so the question stands. Where do they get the power to make the anti-matter in the first place? If they just used fusion reactors, it would be far more efficient to just equip starships with them (the only argument I see here is that the fusion reactor would be to big for a starship, in which case a planet based fusion reactor would still be a huge pain in the...). Is there some other power source that they use to produce the anti-matter, and if so why don't they use that instead of a matter-anti-matter reaction? An argument could be made here, saying that a matter-antimatter reaction is a necessary funtion of the warp system, which may be possible because in TOS, the warp drive is sometimes called "matter-antimatter propulsion". On the other hand, the Romulans use a artificial singularity to provide power for their warp system, so that can't be it. Provided that there was anti-matter just floating out there in the ether, I see two problems with that. 1. Because protons have a positive charge and anti-protons have a negative charge, they attract each other. that means that any anti-matter floating about would quickly find some matter to react with, and then you wouldn't have any anti-matter to collect anyway. 2. Assuming that you could find an anti-matter nebula out somewhere where there was no matter to interact with, as soon as your starship gets close enough to collect it, it's going to become attracted to your starship, which would end badly for you. To summarize, is there any mention in canon about this, and if not does anyone have any ideas? Yobehtmada in Texas.


 * Short answer: Antimatter for the ship's engines is created using a quantum charge-reversal device, which processes deuterium into antideuterium at a net energy loss. The ship's fusion reactors, reserves and so forth power the antimatter generator. It is not more efficient to *only* equip ships with fusion reactors because the released energy per unit time is much less than with a matter/antimatter reaction; there may have been an earlier era of fusion-powered warp ships, but a M/ARA is needed to enable high warp for our hero ships.98.197.198.167 09:56, October 18, 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your reply. Is that from a canon source, from a novel, or speculation? --Yobehtmada 17:24, February 22, 2010 (UTC)


 * The quantum charge reversal device being used to create antimatter is from the TNG Technical Manual, based on internal documents prepared for the writing staff by technical advisors and art department tech-heads. The information about energy release is scientific fact. 98.197.198.167 23:05, April 4, 2010 (UTC)

Volume, Weight, and the Enterprise D
From the Technical Manual, paraphrased: The Galaxy Class has thirty antimatter storage pods, each having a volume capacity of 1,000 cubic meters. now, going from the antihydrogen having the same mass as hydrogen, therefore weight, and using a standard of storing it at -257.87 at 1 atmospheric pressure... the weight of hydrogen in just one pod is 70,796 kilograms. times it by 30... 2,123,880 kilograms of antimatter. That's a ****load of Boom-Boom.

And the tech manual says this: the galaxy class uses it all in about three years... meaning that, taken literally, it would burn through about 1,940 kilograms of anti-matter... per day.

And there's six of these ships, apparently.

So... anyone want to take a crack at how much Boom Boom (aka energy) that is, in terms of holy crap how many times over can the Ent-D power the Earth?

-Alex Mcpherson who isn't signed in forgot p/w.