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.
