THE ANTI-MATTER BOMB

 Atomic Bombs were exploded over Hiroshima (right) and Nagasaki to end World War 2.

Nagasaki's Fat Man was 40% more powerful than Hiroshima's Little Boy.  The Tsar Bomba of the Soviet Union, a hydrogen bomb, was 3500 times more powerful than Fat Man.

Watch this fascinating video of how much destruction these weapons would cause.

Comparison with other bombs, height of Mount Everest and altitude of commercial airliner.

It is reported, that Soviet scientists were worried about this H-Bomb being, perhaps, too powerful, so they decided to limit the size to 50 Megatons, but instead got 57 MT of TNT.  They could have brought it up to more than 100 MT.

Can a more powerful bomb be built?  Yes, an anti-matter bomb. 

• Watch this video.
• Theoretically, should be 100 times more powerful than a Tsar Bomba.
• Just half a gram of anti-matter reacting with half a gram of ordinary matter would produce the equivalent of the Nagasaki A-Bomb.
• A ton of anti-matter in a bomb would equal 3 million Hiroshima bombs.
• 
  Should you be worried?  No.  Why?
• The cost of producing just one millionth of a gram of antimatter would be $62 billion.  The entire Manhattan Project to produce the first A-Bomb cost $35 billion in 2025 dollars.

• 
  This fairy tale was probably sparked in 2004 when Kenneth Edwards, a keynote speaker at a NASA conference in Virginia discussed the potential use of antimatter.
• In short, there is no practical way to produce enough and adequately store anti-matter.  Of course, theoretically, there are ways if you have an infinite amount of money, and read what CERN is doing.
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  If you add all the antimatter made in the 30 years of antimatter physics at CERN in Geneva, they might have produced 10 billionths of a gram.  If that amount could be exploded, it would be like lighting a match.

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  Half a gram could be enough to produce a Hiroshima A-Bomb, and about 1.1 kilograms of anti-matter would be needed to produce the equivalent of a Tsar Bomba.
• Well, what about harvesting antimatter in space?  Yes, possible, and this article says this could be five orders of magnitude more effective.  Also suggests that there must be as much anti-matter in the universe as natural matter, with a closing quote:

For the most part, propelling spacecraft to near the speed of light with antimatter lives in the realm of Star Trek. The technical obstacles are non-trivial and probably won’t be solved in the near future, if ever. From this perspective, the potential for antimatter probably has been overhyped. However, the small scale experiments are just the first baby steps that could help us down the long path. More importantly, research and development in this area is part of a broader framework that could help fundamental science and our understanding of the universe. Antimatter plays a central role in some of the Holy Grail problems of physics, such as the nature of dark matter and why matter dominates over antimatter.

• Anti-matter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion has been proposed to thrust future spacecraft.

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  In the Star Trek episode on Obsession, Spock said that 28.3 grams (or one ounce) of antimatter reacting with matter would be enough to blow up half the atmosphere of an Earth-sized planet.
• Dan Brown in Angels & Demons involves an antimatter weapon.

Well, to close, on the matter of matter vs antimatter, they are the same with an opposite electrical charge and quantum numbers.

I could explain what is a quantum number, but will let this lady from Old School Chemistry do that.

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