Talk:Antimatter
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[edit] 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)
[edit] 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 shouldnt be). --Alan del Beccio 22:40, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)
[edit] 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 Threshold. Captain Jon 00:56, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] TOS: Obsession
In "Obsession", 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)