None of it matters if the controls aren’t responding. You’ll know, too, because they make that sad static beepy noise like some sort of Tactile Control Panel ACKnowledgement failure.

I’m betting they sprung for the cheaper Cardassian ones without the redundancies. O’Brien is not going to be happy.

Well, in a crunch I wouldn't like to be caught without a secondary backup.

Try reversing the polarity

Only on the unoccupied decks!

Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!

Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

They are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing is relatively simplistic, but that often isn't a problem when the story is good.

I just read Angels and Demons. My take is that it is quite gripping and entertaining, and has no other virtues. The prose is just ok, and everything built above that is increasingly nonsensical. However, I'll endorse burkaman's reply as an equally accurate and more charitable review. :)

His books are perhaps in the same category as Nickelback albums: people love to rag on them, but if you look at the sheer number of units shifted, clearly lots of folks enjoy them.

Read them for what they are (fictional novels with allusions to truth and fact) and you will truly enjoy a good story!

There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.

According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...

That's just an engineering problem as well.

Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?

If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.

Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.

Antimatter is a completely different story.

The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.

At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.

A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.

So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.

But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.

Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.

Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.

Surely you understand there's a difference?

Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.

Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.

And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.

Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.

Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.

Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most common cause of launch delays.

With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.

I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship

I thought the entire point of being given a plate of Italian food was to annihilate it, followed by some tiramisu.

Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.

There's a great episode about this on History of the Universe yt channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJGaqe5t14g

It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)