Antimatter Molecule Should Boost Laser Power 211
Laser Lover writes "Molecules made by combining an electron with their anti-particle positron have been created by researchers at the University of California Riverside. The team's long term goal is to use the exotic material to create 'an annihilation gamma ray laser', potentially one million times more powerful than existing lasers. 'An electron can hook up with its antiparticle, the positron, to form a hydrogen-like atom called positronium (Ps). It survives for less than 150 nanoseconds before it is annihilated in a puff of gamma radiation. It was known that two positronium atoms should be able to bind together to form a molecule ... '"
Oh yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:iran (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Could we use it on sharks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:iran (Score:1, Insightful)
Atom is a bad word for it (Score:3, Insightful)
As I said in the title, maybe "atom" is a bad word to describe this system. However, the word "atom" comes from a Greek word meaning "indivisible", and since we've since discovered that what we call atoms are divisible after all, the word isn't even appropriate in its accepted usage.
Re:iran (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not true. Many civilizations no longer exist because they were destroyed by another. We, as a society, are unwilling to accept the measures needed to really win a military war. For this I am thankful. But saying that military might can't end a war is completely false.
Re:iran (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iran (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You CAN end a war with weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not the US has any right to be where it currently is, the reason why it isn't unchaining its military to lay waste to the region, ala Dresden, Nagasaki, etc., is because the aftermath would be on CNN in 15 minutes.
>You can't blow up an idea, especially if each attempt just makes more followers.
You can't blow up an idea, but if you blow up enough people you can break the will of people to act on those ideas. It just takes sufficient force. We are unwilling to apply that kind of force in Iraq, and, consequently, we are having no effect on the will of our enemies there. In fact, in all likelyhood we are actually enhancing their will by being there.
Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
You didn't win a war, there, you won a fight. The two are not the same thing.
You fight him, make it clear that you're going to win, and then talk with him such that he gets a way out and hostilities turn into a mutually acceptable relationship -- that's winning a war. You need the fists, but you also need some intelligent action.
This is not to say that there are not occasions where the fists are the ONLY intelligent thing, but that means your opponent is one stupid piece of crap. Such people exist, and they're more likely to be part of a bar fight, but I don't think the metaphor extends to nations often, if at all, as nations are large groups of people, not just one Saddam.
Re:iran (Score:1, Insightful)
Thankfully?
Only thankfully for the enemy. Since WW2, every war we've fought has been a bloody stalemate at best, and a loss at worst. Korea was a draw, Vietnam was a loss, Gulf War I was a draw, Afghanistan was a loss, Gulf War II was a loss, and if we fight it, Iran will also be a loss.
Strategic bombing works, but it requires overkill. The London Blitz wasn't enough. Dresden and Tokyo weren't enough. You have to flatten every city within hundreds of miles, and keep the cities flattened and smoldering for the better part of a year, but a civilian population's will, no matter how fanatical at the onset of a conflict, can be broken.
Come up with a way of breaking a civilian population's will short of that, and the world's generals will be only too delighted to try it. Diplomacy and propaganda are superb tools before the guns start firing, but the past 60 years have shown that nothing short of wholesale extermination is effective in winning wars. It's brutal, it's ugly, and that's why they call it war, not sitting down for tea.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Things like this.. (Score:3, Insightful)
In the several years prior, jet engines first became practical, digital computers were first invented, digital computers switched from relays to vacuum tubes (which are frequently derided these days as glass field-effect transistors), some of the first plastics became available, the German Type XXI completely changed how submarines would work going forward, both cruise and ballistic missiles were invented, radars became small enough to put in bullets, and oh yeah, The Bomb. I think penicillin was invented in there, too.
Technology was moving fast then, in very visible ways.