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Thoughts On Anti-Matter

If the Big Bang theory is correct, then it is unlikely that any but tiny traces of anti-matter survived annihilation with matter during the early instants of the Big Bang.
 
bewareofdogmas said:
I was thinking you could shoot a couple meter in size ball of matter at it and watch what happens.
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Um, you wouldn't even have time to notice it. Maybe a grain of sand if you were really far away. The change in mass of the Hiroshima bomb was about 1 gram.
 
bewareofdogmas said:
Um, you wouldn't even have time to notice it.-epepke

why?
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Well, because if you dumped a sphere of matter a couple of meters big into a bunch of nearby antimatter, you'd be completely fried by gamma rays before the signals from your sensory aparatus got to your brain.
 
Ever heard of the grandcamp explosion? By the reckoning of my chemistry book (the math is just tantalizingly out of my grasp) there was a mass change of 3.5 micrograms, or milligrams, I can't remember which (probably the former). That in mind, can you imagine what a matter-anti matter reaction of several kilos would do?

I'd love to watch... from a few solar systems over.
 
BoD- your hypothetical antimatter atmosphere would be interacting with every loose hydrogen atom in space. The corona would be visible from a long way away...in fact, this rings a bell...I'm sure Larry Niven wrote one of his "Known Space" shorts about this back in the eighties. Can't recall the title.
 
neutrino_cannon said:
Ever heard of the grandcamp explosion? By the reckoning of my chemistry book (the math is just tantalizingly out of my grasp) there was a mass change of 3.5 micrograms, or milligrams, I can't remember which (probably the former). That in mind, can you imagine what a matter-anti matter reaction of several kilos would do?

I'd love to watch... from a few solar systems over.
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Try a few galaxies over, that much gamma would probably fry the Earth from within a few hundred parsecs!:(
 
neutrino_cannon said:
Ever heard of the grandcamp explosion? By the reckoning of my chemistry book (the math is just tantalizingly out of my grasp) there was a mass change of 3.5 micrograms, or milligrams, I can't remember which (probably the former). That in mind, can you imagine what a matter-anti matter reaction of several kilos would do?

I'd love to watch... from a few solar systems over.
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but was the Grandcamp/Texas City disaster triggered by a fertilizer/ammonia explosion, something like the Oklahoma City bombing but much larger? I would think that the mass-energy conversion there would be much higher than at the atomic level.
:confused:
 
neutrino_cannon said:
Ever heard of the grandcamp explosion?
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Incredible story...
'Texas City just blew up'
Hopefully we have learned a lot since then about dealing with fires where amonium nitrate is involved...
When the small fire inside the Grandcamp could not be doused with jugs of drinking water or a portable extinguisher, an order was given to batten down the ship's hatches and cover them with tarpaulins.
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The Grandcamp's 1.5 ton anchor was flung two miles and was embedded 10 feet into the ground at the Pan American refinery..
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