🚀 go-pugleaf

There is yet another interesting book out there, called "Mirror Matter"
by Dr. Robert L. Forward, another far-thinker in this area. He has
worked with DOD and other interested parties on antimatter as a
*practical* energy source right now. He points out that while AM is
useless for bombs due to the fact that instead of "low" energy 
gamma rays like fission and fusion, with AM you get "high" energy
gr which drop back into particles **very** fast and so are hard to
use to transmit energy, thermal shock, etc. This means designing
a practical AM reactor has some interesting problems besides
keeping the AM cool and moving it around.

More interestingly to me, he mentioned that DOD is in the process
of building an accelerator solely for the purpose of generating
AM for use in space projects, both as fuel and for research purposes.
Presumably the "cold" AP mentioned in the recent Sci Am article would
be part of such a system.

So perhaps the antimatter rocket is not as far away as some have
thought....

Reality Check:
We have never actually made antimatter. We have made anti-particles,
but as yet they have never been cold enough to try to get them to
link up into matter. Supposedly this experiment is intended in the
relatively near future; perhaps Bill Higgins could comment on this.

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|  Nathan F. Wallace                           |      ______/ /_/___    |
|  email: wallacen@beethoven.cs.colostate.edu  |     / ____  ______ \   |
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