AKA: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Atomic Antimatter Bomb
Antimatter bombs are a common trope in sci-fi, first popularised by Star Trek’s photon torpedo (fun fact: the “photon” in “photon torpedo” refers to the high-energy gamma ray photons released by the antimatter reaction that occurs within!) and used many times since. Surely, they are of fantastical power, but how fantastical? Wonder no more, my dear friends – Dee’s Big Booms Number-Cruncher is here!
So, you might be asking yourself, “why did you make this? Can’t we just go to Wolfram Alpha and do all this ourselves?” And the answer to that would be “yes”. However, sometimes Wolfram Alpha can be a little too incredible for its own good. It can be a chore, for instance, to convert the units given into something you can better understand. This is why I’ve gone to the liberty of including several units – kilojoules, megatons, and a couple of real-world Big Bombs – so you can more easily visualise just how big an antimatter boom can be.
Except, there’s a problem with this. Well, okay, there are several problems with this, but there’s a big one that’s kind of a mood killer. First of all, it’s really goddamn hard to make antimatter actually explode. If you drop a cube of antimatter, then it will let off a big flash… and then nothing – except for acute radiation poisoning, but that’s between you and your doctor. This is because the vast majority of energy released in a matter-antimatter annihilation is in the form of high-energy gamma rays, and neutrinos. High-energy gamma rays are pretty good at frying a squishy person, all their molecules nice and tightly packed together, but struggles immensely with delivering any form of heat – in other words, the “thermo” that makes thermonuclear weaponry not just a big old pop of radiation. To correct this, you’d need some way to convert those gamma rays into heat, which is much easier said than done.
Still, being that Star Trek is science fiction, they’ve obviously come up with some magical way of converting these gamma rays into something resembling a traditional explosive, for all the good that’d do in a vacuum. Huh, given how explosions work in a vacuum, maybe they’d be better off with it just being a big ol’ gamma flash for ship-to-ship weaponry…
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Well hey! Thanks for the kind words! I have to agree, one of the biggest problems with science today is that science communication – dejargoning it and making it easier to understand for those without a degree – is so lax. A physicist can say all sorts of gobbledegook, and the masses are forced to just shrug and say “… yeah, cool”. As you can no doubt guess, I’m aiming to demystify this stuff, putting it in terms much more easily understood and conceptualised – or, at least, illustrate just how damn out there some of this stuff is. And comments like this really help me keep at it. I hope you’re having a great day, jamming!