Antimatter Presents

Now is the time for considering presents. For me, I like to build things, you know, anything from Airfix kits upwards. I have thought carefully about kit cars and even kit planes. But how about building your own kit Enterprise? Hmm, now there’s a challenge. A few million tons of titanium: check! Phasers? Well, we will just have to do with lasers for the moment: Check! Transporters? Well, someone has managed to transport photons, that’s a start: Check! Engines. Hmm, now that’s a tricky one. Hydrogen thrusters are fine enough. But an anti-matter power core?

Anti-matter has been around for a while now. Scientists have been making antimatter particles for years. Unfortunately, once a particle is created, it tends to very quickly bump into matter, annihilating both itself and the matter it bumped into with a flash of that energy that I would like to power my kit Enterprise with. (Yes, it is true, scientists are eating away at the matter of this planet with Antimatter for years!) What I would like to do is have that antimatter stored so that I can use it on demand. There is no point in having a one hundred mile particle accelerator loop to provide the antimatter needed to power my four hundred meter long ship. (Note that the latest Enterprise to be seen on screen carries a thousand crew members and is nearly a kilometre long, compared to the original 408 crew and just over 400 meters long.)

So back to the original Enterprise plans and what do I find, magnetic bottles storing antimatter! Now where am I going to find some of those? Why, Aarhus university in Denmark, of course! Where else? Professor Jeff Hangst is a collaborator on the Alpha antihydrogen project. Not only are they trapping antimatter, but they are trapping it long enough for positrons and antiprotons to come together, all of this in a strong magnetic bottle. Fantastic! My kit Enterprise building guide says that the engines are powered by Deuterium and Anti-Deuterium, perfect! They are already making my fuel for me!

But wait a minute, something’s wrong here. Professor Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard University claims to be the first to propose the “magnetic bottle.” I am not so sure. As early as the Original Series episode “Errand of Mercy” there was talk of antimatter pods. The Next Generation Technical Manual fleshes out these pods, describing them as Magnetic Confinement Pods. So you see, Star Trek writers first proposed the method of antimatter storage long before this so called 2002 breakthrough.

But I guess we ought to be grateful that science is finally starting to catch up. There may even be an admission of inspiration in Professor Gabrielse’s closing words on the subject "It shows that the dream from many years ago is not completely crazy." Why, thank you, professor. Glad to know you think so highly of us dreamers! Now, where did I put that epoxy resin…

Many thanks to the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11773791) for alerting me to this story and to Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Antimatter_pod) for helping me to remember the dream from many years ago. “Star Trek” is Copyright CDB Paramount Television.

The age of the Offensive Laser

Blasters, Phasers, Laser Canons. Every Sci-fi series has some sort of directed energy weapon. Imagine Star Trek without Phasers or Han Solo toting an Uzi. It just does not work. At this point I must congratulate the Sci-Fi Channel’s (when it used to be called that) Battlestar Galactica and its use of real ammunition and more realistic physics. Until then, I don’t think that anyone would even consider a futuristic show without putting in a ‘Ray Gun’ of some sort into the mix.

Real science’s best attempt at such a device includes mounting it on a Boeing 747 and using such dangerous chemicals to power it, you were as likely to kill the operator as hit the target. (Try getting that in your holster, Han.) Well, that is until now! Solid State Lasers have finally reached the same power levels as Chemical Lasers. The latest Arms Show at Farnborough (Yes, we thought it was an air show as well!) shows off this new weaponry shooting down UAVs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10682693

Of course, the laser is invisible until it comes into contact with something. You can’t sell something that is invisible, so you either dress it up with a half-naked female (like car manufacturers selling 80mpg in the city) or you get an artist in to draw the ‘ray gun’ line. Trust me, once they get this thing down to hand-held size, there will be a female in the wings ready and waiting to hold it for the camera!

Venus and the Higgs Boson

The Register (That bastion of IT and Science reporting professionalism, almost on par with such tomes as Private Eye) published a story on the 25 June entitled “Venus home to lost cities left by long-dead aliens, says ESA” with the by-line “Well, it was strongly implied.” The summary of the story was that ESA have published an article to declare one time there was an abundance of water on Venus. The register invites us to spin our own Friday afternoon notions from there. Their idea such a notion involves long uninhabited Venusian cities with nuclear bunkers containing DNA ready to be cloned in to fully fledged Aliens. I am willing to bet that David Clegg (our two headed beast at the head of Government) didn’t see that one coming when they put together their latest immigration policy.

What caught my interest was the report on a theory by Eric Chassefiere that the water on Venus existed only as a mist in the air. This reminded me of the description of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis (Chapter 2 and verse 6 if you must know) where most decent translations recognise that a mist (fog or vapour) came up from the ground to water everything. Now could it possibly be that Venus was once our Garden of Eden? That would mean that our ancestors were then banished to Earth as a living Hell and the fires of the sun are the flaming sword that prevents us from ever returning to paradise. (Not that this stops NASA’s robots and the cast and crew of Defying Gravity from going there. Maybe we should consider sending them there as punishment for making such a dismal first season as to get such a wonderful idea cancelled before the season even finished!)

Consequently, could we really all be Venusians, all illegal aliens and possibly all delusional.

Moving on swiftly! Douglas Adams postulated in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.” Well, the Higgs Boson has been discovered to have spilt personalities. This is of course a disaster. Physicists were hoping that this so called God particle would be this fat bloke in the sky that gives everything else meaning (or was it mass? It’s all getting rather spiritual.) Now that there are more parts to it than they originally reckoned, are they going to call the new boson family “Mount Olympus?”

Anyway, the Higgs Boson discovery would not be so bad if it were not for the discovery of Neutrinos’ ability to transform themselves into other types of neutrino in a harmonic kind of way. What starts out as one type of neutrino can end up oscillating between types as it travels. And if that was not bad enough, what is really getting physicists’ goat is the fact that an anti-neutrino is not in fact the opposite of a neutrino. So the Standard Model of physics is not so much back to the drawing board as in the trash can. Can anyone remember when it used to be Protons, Neutrons and Electrons?

“There is another theory which states that this has already happened!”