STOCKPILING ANTI-MATTER
Scientists are building bigger and better magnetic bottles to store more and more quantities of anti-matter:
The article mentions the storage of positrons, which are anti-matter electrons. At this juncture, it's worth nothing was these particles are: they are particles of the same mass as their "normal matter" counterparts, but with their spin or rotation in the opposite direction, giving them an opposite electrical polarity. So...positrons are basically "electrons with a positive, rather than negative, charge."
It is intriguing to me that the article doesn't mention two possibilities. The first of these is that the whole matter/anti-matter symmetry doctrine is part of the standard model of physics... yet, we see so little anti-matter. Thank goodness! because if there was more of it floating around, the total annihilation reactions that it produces when it comes into contact with matter would be commonplaces. Thus far, scientists had had to produce most of the anti-matter in the world artificially, in large particle accelerators. But the point here is, the theory, and basic observation, are once again in conflict, and this has led some scientists - Dr. Paul LaViolette comes to mind - to question the whole matter/anti-matter symmetry dogma.
But as I was reading this article, another, terrible thought occurred to me: build a large enough magnetic bottle, with a large enough storage capacity, and "put a trigger on it" so to speak, and one has the stuff of the old Buck Rogers' science fiction stories: real-life disintegrator guns. We're still a long way from that, of course (thankfully!), but when we start getting close, look for stories of anti-matter storage bottles to quietly disappear from open discussion.
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S’cuse the humor. Magnetic bottles remind me of the sealed #10 can filled with freeze-dried water. You open the can and just add water and walla!!
Of course if the storage system fails, the holder will just blow
himself up.
Mybe the start of new weapons that will be used in space?