Aestu wrote:
Dotzilla wrote:
Usdk wrote:
oh yeah? like what kind of weapons?
gluon-response initiated positron bombs?
Positrons are a form of antimatter. Producing useful quantities of positrons is in the same realm as inventing warp drive or building the Death Star.
equations often have "double solutions" if you will. for instance, we could ask "what number times itself equals 16? is it 4 or -4? obviously it's both. for the most part, equations dont guarantee that their solution, (or in this case the product) applies to actual real world events. having said that, if a mathematical model of a physical anomaly is right, then playing around with it's equations can be quite useful.
where am i going with this? i'll humor you, you're right, a positron is a type of antimatter (even though a gluon response initiated positive particle of ANY kind is renamed a "positron" because it's existence doesn't meet matter requirements). going back to what i was saying earlier, in the case of antimatter, such "playing around" with equations often leads to completely verifiable trending/predictions. obviously if the predictions cannot be verified, the theory is discarded and we start from step one, but whether the physical outcome is viable or not, a mathematical model guarantees that your conclusions are logical and internally consistent.
antimatter, or more specifically, antiparticles are used in real world applications such as weapon making, energy derivation, and bioresearch. cancer cells may not react to hydrogen bombardment but their protein walls react to antihydrogen. subatomic particles of this nature have tons of measurable features. obviously a positron is a mirror image of an electron, just (you guessed it) positively charged. even the "chargeless" neutron has an antiparticle keenly christened as an antineutron. antineutrons have an opposite zero charge to the regular neutron. the math behind this comes from the triplet of partly charged particles called quarks that "compose" neutrons. let's say the quarks have the following charges:
(neutron) -1/3, -1/3, +2/3
(antineutron) 1/3, 1/3, -2/3
using that example we see that each set of three add to zero net charge, yet the similar components have opposite charges. so, ultimately, if we know this, and we know that energy = (mass) x a really fucking big number (the speed of light squared), we could take two gamma rays (gamma rays because they have sufficiently high enough energy) and force them to interact to transform themselves into an electron-positron pair, thus converting a tiny amount of mass into a LOT of energy.
make sense?
