Hey I was watchin TV when some documetry came on.It was on these particles called antimatter(rephered as antiphoton,etc). Well the guy said if you were in a space ship and you used a few grams of antimatter it would propell you to light speed.


Is this true if it is how is it possible?

Not true.

Nothing with a finite rest mass can be accelerated to or above light speed given our current understanding of physics.

Unless Special Relativity turns out to be completely bogus. And so far, not one of the many hundreds of experiments carried out each year, where they accelerate and collide particles at near-c speeds, hints of that.

Because let's face it: the moment somebody, anybody came up with credible experimental data that did not jive with Special Relativity, it'd be all over the news. The guys who carried out the experiment would be instantly famous, literally overnight.

Even though it won't take you to Lightspeed, it is still potentially an extremely practical method of Propulsion.

I can't remember the exact figures, but 50 grams of Matter combined with 50 grams of Anti-Matter creates 8,000,000 Joules of energy. I'll try and get the link sometime...

But the rate at which Anti-Matter is created is so slow, it won't be a while till we see anything useful

anti matter would make a great fuel. here is some info I found real quick to put it in perspective:
1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×10^17 J (180 quadrillion Joules) of energy (by the equation E=mc²). In contrast, burning a kilogram of gasoline produces 4.2×10^7 J,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

that means 180000000000000000J of energy comes from antimatter, as opposed to only 42000000 from gasoline of the same mass. so antimatter produces about 4300000000 times as much energy as gasoline (per kg)

this still leaves a problem though, as I am pretty sure reactions of matter and antimatter produce high energy electromagnetic waves, which are harmful to people. so antimatter may never be used to leave earth (because you would fry people on the ground) and to use it in space would take a great deal of shielding (which would make accelerating take more energy). unless we find a way for engineering the human body to repair radiation damage and cure cancer, but we are nowhere near that now.

antimatter would make an excellent weapon, but it's gonna be a while before its used as a propellant.

i read a book where the WMD of choice was a cloud of antimatter particles rained down on the enemy. not sure how they contained the particles, maybe in tiny magnetic traps. it reduced an entire city into one big sheet of glass.

actually, if you used an antimatter reactor indirectly, like to power a very high-powered ion drive, or to simply super-heat air or propellent, a ship could use antimatter to power it's way out of an atmosphere with relative safety. Then it could cross over into a more powerful and efficient direct-drive mode.

and there are two major problems with antimatter. first, we need to actually produce antimatter, which due to a little law of conservation of energy, will take unfathomable amounts of energy. more energy to make the fuel than we'll get out of it due to inefficiencies.

but the energy's not the worse part, because then we need to store a material that when in contact with traditional matter releases it's energy. kaboom. sizzle... we'd need an electromagnetic containment system (or something) with lots of redundancy, which would still be very risky and prone to failures. imagine a gas tank where the gasoline must be kept away from the walls of the tank AND any and all air, because a single lick of gas or metal will release the energy equivalent of a small nuclear bomb (assuming you have several grams of antimatter in store). If you're really unlucky, that explosion sends the rest of the antimatter into surrounding matter, and if this is a large, earth-based "antimatter storage facility" for future spacecraft, than a rather sizable portion of the earth's atmosphere would be blown away, along with chunks of the earth's crust sent flying with orbital velocities. ka-fucking-boom

solve those two problems, and we've got antimatter energy storage. untill then, wish us luck in the testing phases....

one of the main ideas is to run nuclear reactions with solar wind to produce antimatter in a sail-type device. I am not sure how it works, i read an article on it a few months back.

Weed eater guy,

maybe this will work to store antimatter, you get a large storage tank made of carbon or titanium,but inside it put in magnets than fill up the tank with antimatter. I think it will work. oh ya freeze the container to.

I'm not totally sure but I can't help but think that if it were that simple, then shouldn't it be that easy to magnetically induce nuclear fusion? I mean, I was thinking electromagnets of those gargantuan sizes would need to hold subatomic particles in place. then again, if THOSE magnets were replaced by natural magnets, but then there's no natural magnet nearly that strong... or is there...

you pretty much hit the nail on the head there.

ouch!!!!!!!! That hurt! :-(