Re: Robots and Tech stuff

"Bruce Pihlamae" [email removed] writes:
> There seems to be this conception in SF that if you take a tennis ball of
> Anti-Matter and merge it with a tennis ball of normal matter then both
> immediately destroy each other in a slugfest of radiation and energy.  I
> don't think that would be the case.  The moment the first anti-atom and
> normal-atom came in contact there would be a hugh amount of energy released
> and the two objects would be flung apart.  The trick is to maintain the
> contact.  In a total vacum in 1G gravity if you dropped an Anti-Matter
> tennis ball on a normal-matter floor it would bounce (an awful lot) and
> release hugh amounts of energy with each bounce.

Where is the tennis ball going to go that it won't come in contact
with matter?  And why is all the antimatter going to stay together in
one lump with all this energy floating around?  At 300 K the avewrage
speed of these molecules will be somewhere around 10000 m/s this means
that the average number of collisions on one cm^2 will be on the order
of 10^25 collisions per second.  Each colission releases about 10^-10
J for a 10^15 Watt power output.  (back of envelope calculations,
subject to gross inaccuracies, but I can't be *that* far off).

What you would probably get is an expanding plasma cloud of antimatter
with a hot boundary where the antimatter is overtaking the matter.
Basically a big explosion....

> Secondly, all those pebbles just burnt up in my planetary atmosphere like
> small meteors do so Your Scout ship isn't as deadly as you thought 8-}.

Small normal meteors travel at considerably slower speeds and
therefore don't burn quite so hot (like A-Bomb+ temps) when they burn
up in your atmosphere...

-Love, Kisses, and a Neutron Bomb
-Eric the Finn