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From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Do Positrons Have Negative Mass?
Message-ID: <228@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Aug-85 16:33:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.228
Posted: Wed Aug 21 16:33:47 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Aug-85 03:56:51 EDT
References: <437@ttidcb.UUCP>
Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 38
Summary: 

In article <437@ttidcb.UUCP> jackson@ttidcb.UUCP (Dick Jackson) writes:
>
>In about 1966 I attended a seminar by Prof. Fairbanks who researched
>at Stanford U (I think). He was trying to slow down positrons for long
>enough to tell if they fell upwards or downwards.
>
>Does anyone know how this turned out? If this experiment did not get
>completed, has there been any other work?

I read in the newspaper about a week ago that someone (Stanford??) was
doing research on the mass of antimatter (not specifically
positrons).  The article stated that NASA was interested in this
peripherally--they wanted to know whether antimatter could be contained,
in the hopes that *it could be used as a fuel in spaceships*.  Shades of
Star Trek!!

Can this really be?  Or are the newspapers up to their often bad
standard of journalism? :-)

On a more morbid note, suppose antimatter could be contained,
presumably in an electric field inside a vacuum bottle.  Off hand, it
seems that such an apparatus could be very small--perhaps briefcase
sized.  It wouldn't take very much antimatter to make a very powerful
bomb.  (Did I read that something like a gram of matter gets converted
into energy in a nuclear bomb blast?)  Let's hope that antimatter
remains extremely difficult to produce.  (Has more than a microgram
ever been produced in all the world?  I have no idea, but from what I
hear even the largest accelerators produce only a few 100,000
antimatter particles??  At that rate, we're safe for a long time...)
Of course, another problem with the idea of an antimatter terrorist
bomb is that no vacuum bottle is perfect, and the antimatter would be a
constant source of radiation as matter leaking in encountered the
antimatter.  Perhaps too much radiation to safely carry around?  I hope
so...

Does anyone have a handle on the math of this?
-- 
Mike Maxwell