Order an antikindle and your bank balance goes UP? I like the sound of that.

Or on contrary expecting some sort of royalties

No, 100k and 10,000k each have one decimal place. Two decimal places is the difference between 100k and 104k.

Too late to edit: I think the note [1] needs to be fixed. I think it's a cycle of quarks, down -> strange -> bottom -> down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Weak_interaction Anyway, before constructing a giant particle accelerator to measure that, better ask a particle physics expert :) .

I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks:

- Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive.

- The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate.

- The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).

If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge.

The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).

More info: https://visit.cern/

You are getting downvoted but it made me wonder (I visited CERN a few years ago). I guess there are two aspects in play. One, the pile is massive, which naturally inspires awe, especially in person. Two, I know that what I'm looking at is actually a unique super advanced piece of technology, which took countless hours to produce, and that influences how one sees it.

Perhaps it depends on what you work on day-to-day because "a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics" sounds _extremely_ cool to me!

It would be the same as someone visiting a modern art museum, and see weird spashes of paint and a banana nailed to a wall.

It's all in the eyes of the beholder.

Because we are massive science nerds. I have been interested in this kind of stuff since I was a little kid. Which leads to the second point...

I ended up working at another accelerator facility, so even though I am an IT guy, I actually understand what I am looking at, which helps to increase the enjoyment.

When I look at that pile, I see hundreds or thousands of devices that need to be working in concert to produce a meaningful result. Devices that need to be triggered exactly when the particle bunch travels by at near speed of light. These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere and in a way that is later useful to the scientists.

The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.

Man, I've been in their underground part, every 5 years they open for public and open the detectors themselves. It was by huge margin by far the best executed engineering of any type I ever saw, and I don't consider myself a nerd in this area. Every tiny detail was simply perfect, not a speck of dust, all cables aligned perfectly etc. Seeing inner parts of these massive detector tubes (maybe 10x20m ?) was the pinnacle of the show.

Pictures simply don't do it justice. One can't replace physical travelling and experiencing things (and people) for whatever purpose and this shows it well.

That being said, since I live not far from there, I certainly hope that containment is flawless, don't want to experience matter-antimatter annihilation of non-trivial amounts anywhere near my kids, or myself for that matter (NIMBYism at its best, get your damn antimatter off my lawn!)

> just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics

You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.

Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".

Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.

But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.

One great way to enjoy the visit and get an idea of what you are looking at is to pick something very specific, like some connector or box, and ask what it does. Then ask what happens when it fails. The answer to the later question is almost invariably interesting - even in relatively mundane places like a power plant or fire truck.

>So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?

Yes: it is massive. There are few bigger experimental setups in the world.

A telescope is "just a mirror", yet any modern large telescope is awe-inspiring by virtue of its size.

A lot of tourism is just feeling a place. You can often get better views of a place in photographs than in real life. And yet the presence feels as if it adds something.

I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.

Irrational, but real.

what i saw of cern was a beautiful campus with ongoing cricket matches on the lawn, lots of offices and computers, and a great cafeteria.

my brother worked down the hall from tbl, and we stopped by, but he was out. brother’s boss (mdm wu, of quark fame), was out of town too.

brother was the vms admin, and would bitterly complain that mdm wu never cleaned out her mail spool, and it was now a ruinous 40mb.

st genis is quaint and nice to visit, with views of mt blanc.

The emergency copper quench conductors the thickness of my arm were pretty cool to see.

You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.

The speed of light is a significant limitation at these kinds of scales.

It's not just a massive pile of wiring and magnets etc, it's a massive pile of wiring and magnets which kicks particles around a race track the size of a small town, with absolutely insane timing precision before dumping them into targets the size of buildings, all generating unimaginably huge volumes of data which have to recorded in nanoseconds.

> every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it.

(Maybe I'm saying the obvious; sorry if that's the case ...) In perception, knowledge greatly affects what we 'see', on a physiological level - our brain's perceptual function is not at all purely sensory, but wired into the rest of our minds. People who have never drunk wine may say it's just unpleasant and a strong taste, and why drink it? People who know it well can perceive all sorts of things, from flavors to colors and more.

With knowledge, the wires, magnets, and electronics, like the sensations of wine, will reveal themselves. A good, passionate source can help ...

Imagine inventing something like a better coffee carafe and being able to say this about a sizable portion of notable structures.

Not bad for a cat, nice work. Clearly you don't work in the cybernetics division.

That is super cool, you should be proud. I took plenty of pictures of all the machines xD

> picograms

I needed to know how much antimatter weighed and this article seemed helpful (though I am poorly placed to know if it’s correct).

https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-antimatter-weigh-492195828

Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.

Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.

Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.

Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.

Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma

(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")

There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.

Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.

That’s because it’s not really a hazardous material. 70 antiprotons annihilating with 70 protons releases a grand total of 2×10⁻⁸ Joules.

This thing? I think it looks super cool. An 80-20 rectangle stuffed with science stuff.

https://home.cern/sites/default/files/2024-10/1st-moving-cra...

Apparently there is no UN number for antimatter, disappointing.

We could use UN 2910 or maybe UN 0357

Antimater has positively charged electrons (positrons) and negatively charged protons (antiprotons). Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.

So just the charges are swapped around.

Charges interact with electric fields.

Gravity is related to mass. It doesn't matter whether the bulk of the mass comes from negatively or positively charged particles.

Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction. If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).

What about warp drives?

Now, is it safe to eat?

That would be enough to neutralize one Amoeba cell

What's that in dB(modern nukes)?

They’re going to be shipping around much less than a gram. We haven’t generated close to a gram in total across all particle accelerators on earth so far.

Producing a gram would cost ~$2.7 quadrillion - https://ket.org/program/physics-girl/why-this-stuff-costs-27...

lol at having 1 gram of antimatter. They are moving around dozens of atoms here. 1 gram of antimatter is off on humanity's capabilities by roughly a dozen orders of magnitude.

For those who missed it, “antimony” is element 51 so it’s not just a pun on “anti-“ but a reference to another element.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony

Just like matter and antimatter, money and anti-money (debt) are created and destroyed together, and cancel each other out. When they come in contact, both are deleted.

All money creation, pretty much, is accompanied with creating a corresponding debt.

Bankruptcy sometimes deletes anti-money but the 'money' stays. I'm not sure what role interest payments have (I think that's a case of transferring money around). The bankruptcy thing seems a bit like baryon asymmetry.

It is really a complex problem.

Well there is no nobel price in economics[1] so probably a nobel peace price for ending trade wars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveriges_riksbanks_pris_i_ekon...

Extraction is the challenge...

The US has subsidized Helium via this mindset for a long time.

Where I get confused is, after all these years, surely others could make a bigger effort? (unless the nature of US reserves put us in a unique position)

The bullet should consist of several parts. Maybe it's more rocket than a bullet.

1. Part that makes it move from the gun to the target. May be ordinary powder or reactive engine.

2. Part that creates an energy when bullet hits the target. That's where antimatter would be useful.

3. Part that converts energy to damage. For example compressed gas which gets very hot, expands and pushes shrapnel to hit things around with very big speed. There are many possibilities, but you need as much energy as possible to create as much damage, as possible in the end.

You wouldn't need anything near a gram. It isn't used for its explosive power but to create particles to increase the efficiency of the surrounding nuclear reaction, not actually contribute any explosive force on its own.