You take a morning off work waiting for the gas man to come and replace an empty tank. Your looking forward to a hot shower. The gas man pulls up and hops out of the van cheerfully. You notice he’s not dragging a tank with him and you expect bad news, but when he arrives at the door he chuckles and hands you a small canister, the size of an AA Battery. “Here’s your Antimatter Mr B, we’re not using that gas anymore. I’ll be back in 20 years to replace it.”

Bemused, you screw it in to some apparatus the gas board recently installed and you find your shower is hotter than ever.

On June 30th, 1908 an Asteroid impact occurred in the Tunguska region of northern Siberia. The blast levelled trees across an 830 mile area around the event, detonating with an energy 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The only problem, no asteroid was found nor it’s tell tale crater

Eye witnesses at the time reported a light so bright it outshone the sun and a heat so intense it almost burnt farmer; Sergei Semenov’s clothing to his body whilst melting his neighbour’s silverware.

The dust scattered up into the atmosphere was thick enough to scatter sunlight halfway across the globe. In London, we would have been enjoying sunlight at midnight and beyond.

Whats creepier about this whole event, is that no evidence of the Asteroid remained. Given its ability to create such a drama, it should have been able to withstand the impact, leaving behind a crater and a shred of itself. Of the two most logical explanations, one is more sensible;

1: The asteroid exploded 6 miles or so above the surface above the surface

That theory fits and is widely supported. But the other solution is much more interesting;

A lump of Antimatter hit earth

If this were to happen, there would be no trace whatsoever of the object that hit – or exploded above – Tunguska. Antimatter and matter annihilate each other completely when they come into contact with each other, converting all of their mass into energy in a reaction that is absolute, 100% efficient.

What is it?

Antimatter, basically, is the mirror image of matter which populates our known universe. Everything that ever was and ever will be is made up of matter. You, me and the moon are matter. An atom of antimatter is a polar opposite to an atom of matter. The troubling thing is, without the use of some tricky experiments, antimatter is completely indistinguishable from matter. If you took a star and compared it to an antistar, there would be no visible difference.

Your floating in a spaceship above an earth-like planet, making first contact with a race of intelligent aliens. What is the first thing you ask?
“Are you made of Matter or Antimatter?”
Whatever the answer, how could you be sure? What is antimatter to us could easily be matter to them.

Where did it come from?

Or more interestingly, where did it all go? Theoretically, Antimatter and Matter were created in equal amounts moments after the big bang. Two quandaries rear their ugly heads here, either;

1: Areas of the universe collected larger amounts of matter and antimatter creating pockets which survived and expanded

Meaning if we travelled to our neighbouring Galaxy, Andromeda, we might find ourselves floating right into an antimatter galaxy and swift and total annihilation.

2: A subtle discrepancy between matter and antimatter allowed matter to prevail

Which could be possible, especially if you believe Stephen Hawking’s big bang theory combined with his theory of Hawking Radiation around black holes (I’ll try to explain this in a later post). The process is baffling, but if it is true, roughly 99.99% of all matter and antimatter were destroyed during the earliest moments of our universe. The colossal universe that we live in is composed of an estimated 0.01% of the leftover matter. Imagine how huge our universe – something already un-observably huge – would be, were it composed of 100% of its initial matter.

Is it useful?

On the flip-side, imagine a weapon weighing 1 gram. That’s the weight of a button – taken from, say, a shirt – that is capable of delivering 21.4 kilotons of explosive energy. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 exploded with an energy of around 15 kilotons. That should be a sobering thought for everyone.

Yes and No. Useful as fiction for Dan Brown’s (and his ilk) novels, sure. It’s a scary concept, an energy source that releases itself in an amazing burst that is 100% effective is a staggering concept. Freeing all of its atomic energy in an instant. Currently, a nuclear bomb only taps into 1% of an atom’s potential energy. Even nuclear energy – our most efficient practical energy source – wastes 99% of the energy available.

We already see positrons, the anti-electron put to good use in the medical industry in PET scanners, but what of its potential to make or break our planet.

Imagine antimatter as an energy source, where one teaspoon can fuel a manned mission to Mars. Or where a tiny battery could power a human household for generations. How much cleaner do you want?

On the flip-side, imagine a weapon weighing 1 gram. That’s the weight of a button – taken from, say, a shirt – that is capable of delivering 21.4 kilotons of explosive energy. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 exploded with an energy of around 15 kilotons. That should be a sobering thought for everyone.

(un?)Fortunately

To produce antimatter on earth with any conceivable technology costs far, FAR more energy than it yields, making it completely inefficient.

Antimatter has been observed for some 80 years now (despite what Dan Brown would have you believe), thanks to Paul Dirac’s discovery – on the back of his famous Dirac Equation – of the positron.

So far, Antihydrogen has been produced in tiny quantities CERN, Geneva, simply for the purposes of experimentation.

Thankfully, to produce the single gram needed to legitimize Brown’s novel or to cause us to fret over an Antimatter Holocaust is a process that would currently take an excess of hundreds of thousands of years. To finance this operation, you would need incredibly deep pockets. How does a $1,000 Trillion price tag sound? So far, these obstacles prevent us from blowing each other to bits or securing a stable, ecological friendly existence on our planet.

For the antimatter dream/nightmare to be realised, we’d need to find a way to harvest it naturally from space. High Energy Particle Collisions (like those due to happen again at CERN in November of this year) occur naturally in our upper atmosphere and are expected to create antiparticles on a regular basis, though the atmosphere of Jupiter, our gassy, giant meteor shield is tipped to be the top producer in our solar system. Perhaps harvesting antiparticles from Jupiter could open the door for us.

“Antiprotons trapped with positrons at CERN can make several hundred atoms of Anithydrogen every second. To make a nanogram would take a thousand centuries. To fill a toy balloon, let alone make a gram, would take more time that the universe has existed.”

– Frank Close in his recent book, Antimatter. p151

If your interested enough, I suggest picking that up as it’s a fantastic read.