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Showing posts with label Antimatter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antimatter. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Imaginary Conversation: Antimatter

The following conversation is fictitious. Any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.





Dr. Wu: Did you hear? CERN scientists just published an article that they have trapped antimatter for over 16 minutes.
Dr. Bernard: Yes. They confined antihydrogen for 1000 seconds. Incredible. This will bring us closer to studying and understanding the laws of nature and physics.
Dr. Wu: Whatever happened to America's Super Collider that they were building in Texas?
Dr. Bernard: The project was scrapped in 1993 due to budget cuts.
Dr. Wu: But they already built over $1 billion worth of infrastructure.
Dr. Bernard: Yes. It would have been the world's largest particle accelerator, 3 times as big as the Hadron Collider in Europe.
Dr. Wu: It would have been such a great contribution to science.
Dr. Bernard: About $8 billion dollars to complete it was too much, especially since antimatter cannot be used as an energy source or to make an antimatter bomb.
Dr. Wu: That was an entertaining book.
Dr. Bernard: Speculative fiction.
Dr. Wu: So, what have they been up to instead?
Dr. Bernard: Other than making movies? Advancing technology based on fireworks.
Dr. Wu: HA! That was a good invention, wasn't it?