how antimatter spacecraft will work
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ย. 2023
- In this video I do not describe how antimatter spacecraft will work. (I am still not over the use of the word ‘will’ in that title. I know that it is intended to match the series of other titles on the website but the audacity!)What I will do is complain on the internet. For about 40 minutes. As God intended.
How Antimatter Spacecraft Will Work by Kevin Bonsor:science.howstuffworks.com/ant...
Scientific Literacy: Why it Matters by some stupid kid:edreformbyundergrads.wordpres...
Science Knowledge Quiz:
www.pewresearch.org/science/q...
Not to brag but I got a perfect score so…(You answered 11 questions correctly
You scored better than 83% of the public, below 0% of the public and the same as 16%.)
If you would like to see more videos from me consider joining my patreon: / acollierastro - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
the antimatter video is here: th-cam.com/video/1r6GC0ekyIY/w-d-xo.html
Came here before that
Fist(/2nd) comment 7th like 10h ago
That article is disgusting. Should be deleted. Its not appropriate for children or anyone else.
But it's not even 2025 yet...
The fundamental flaw in the article is that it directly states that annihilations are explosions. To be precise, they are not the same thing. Annihilations expel photons(no mass) and are simply a flash of light. Explosions are a sudden expansion using waves of kinetic force to push everything away from an epicenter(creating motion, thrust).
If we could harness gamma photons, annihilations would be an awesome source of power but, they would still not be a source of motion.
Also, Jenna has retracted her position on vaccines but that part of the story gets no press so very few people know.
"Your right hand is not an anti-left hand"
The audience stands to applaud and immediately explodes
😂😂😂😂😂
The blast creates a fireball 10km wide.
RIP :)
@@Mrpersonman0 Bigger one once of anti-protium touching matter yields 12 megatons. My hand is at least 4 ounces. Two hands 8 ounces (251 grams roughly) so 96 megatons/ Shatter windows 1,000 km away crater is 7 km. That is one person if its a whole audience, nuclear war is a firecracker. LOL
I love that the pinto/Indy car analogy is literally just to explain what the word "faster" means. Like I'd get it if the analogy was "An antimatter spacecraft would be like a racecar compared to a regular car," but instead it actually explains "The slower car will eventually get there but it will take longer" like we're encountering the concept of speed for the first time lol
It reads like an 8th grader trying to meet a word count 😹
The duality of Angela's channel: 1hr+ video with calculus and differential equations diving into quantum quantum and a 45 minute rant about a shitty website vaguely related to physics. Such a wonderful ride.
I’m so glad the algorithm recommended me her one random day. I love her content!
With a full 2 minute sorry-not-sorry to whateverhernameis McCarthy. It's pretty great.
Some people show up for the 1hr+ video with calculus and differential equations, the rest of us are here for the alkaline water + lemon juice takedowns.
_It's got electrolytes; it's what plants crave._
quantum quantum 😄
I find the phrase "not good enough to go on the Internet" so optimistic and endearing. If only the real thing had such standards.
I can't wait to find out how antimatter spacecraft will work from this video
edit: oh
By Talos, this can't be happening!
DISAPPOINTED
The Answer: It won't work. You'll just blow yourself up the first time your ship has a power failure.
@TheMusicalFruit so you just incorporate an independent backup power system. deadly explosions are always gonna be a significant risk of spaceflight
But you watched to the end. Because it’s awesome.
Its actually really insidious that an AI company is now trying to pass off an entire website with 20 years of real human written work as being AI generated
It honestly only serves to denigrate both parties, because GPT-4 can write articles much better than that 😅
It’s really just a disclaimer. Think back to university when you were doing Composition as one of your reqs and they forced you to write everything in a program that had a little owl as the icon (I forget what it was now). It gave you a score - you needed to get it to 90 “quality” and fix all your Chicago or AP style guide errors. Or like.. if you’ve ever written something for “inclusive language” for HR while doing recruiting they sometimes make you write it in a web app and get the same kind of score. Thats all AI now.
Yara opened the article, the AI scored it for SEO and readability, Yara hit Publish and it automatically tagged them as an author is the most likely explanation.
The “may have been generated by an AI” is boilerplate like “sent from an iPhone” being on your emails, and UNTRUSTED SENDER gets put at the top of every email you receive from outside your org.
That brings up an interesting point though that you actually trusted the disclaimer at the bottom of the article as factual..
@@gingerestkitten Who's Yori?? Was this reply AI generated too?
do you think they sold the co-authored "&"s to people that want to get author credits up?
@@moominfinfixed. If only HowStuffWorks had an editor like you on staff :3
It's so disappointing that everytime I tell someone "oh I study electromagnetics" the immediate response is "oh I could never do that" and I'm like....I don't believe you. And you should believe in yourself more. I've done it for a very long time and that's why I'm able to do it. But the feeling of reading an article and not understanding immediately therefore dumb has just rotted out collective consciousness.
Right? It's just one more step. It's just looking up a couple of the terms or seeking a chart of something... It's just a little studying! Studying is fun af if you do it right.
I get your point but isnt EM a famously hard class in most colleges? I would consider it the hardest course I have taken to date.
@@lbgstzockt8493 imo like many things in university, I feel it's often taught poorly and not connected to anything "real" which makes it harder for folks to grasp.
I will say that I can give "oh I could never do that" judgements when it requires doing something that would personally fill me with dread and not give me joy
@@minerman60101 But like, isn't that feeling of dread just because you haven't been acclimated to that type of stuff? Actually just asking, because my personal theory for why so many people are "bad at math" and don't like it is just because they never had a teacher that actually liked math(for example), and don't have the knowledge required to approach it confidently.
I'm a big fan of that metaphor which explains the concept of "faster" to people who already have a concept of racing and development of commercial vehicles.
I just wanna know why the pinto bean-powered car is slower than the antimatter powered car. But the article doesn't say! It just says that beans make smaller explosions.
Edit: I read it wrong, it says "smellier" not "smaller"
@@theprinceofinadequatelighting Huh. Now I want to know what a matter-antimatter explosion smells like 😂
@@emilyrlndoes an antimatter potato annihilating with an ordinary potato smell of potatoes?
Like in theory there’d be nothing left right because it’s annihilated but in practice would it have enough left for there to be a smell? What about an antimatter potato and a regularly Turkey, would it smell of both?
And in fact, does antimatter smell the same? I guess it probably wouldn’t because it would annihilate on your smelling sensors before you smell them… but then to antimatter people do they smell the same as the regular do to a normal person?
@@bulldozer8950asking the deep questions, there!
Do antimatter people spell dog C-A-T?
I appreciated the foreshadowing of
"all of these references in this recent article are from 20 years ago"
...and then it turns out it was from 20 years ago all along!
It was pretty neat
As a librarian I don't know why we aren't talking about this stuff all the time in every public forum that we can. I don't have proof of this but I swear stuff like this is killing curiosity and analytical thinking. Also, never apologize for an Eastern Kentucky accent. People still make fun of me for how I say "potatoes".
Eastern Kentucky? I thought she was from Kansas or Nebraska? 🤷
Popular science has just gotten worse and more clickbaity over time; it's awful. But they will always be more incentivised by clicks than facts so the cycle is inescapable.
@@Hailfire08 The mindboggling thing to me is that people are willingly consuming bad information that they know they don't entirely trust because it takes on the semblance of what they would expect in that situation. The perfect example are those google dropdowns and answer boxes at the top of your search--those are all entirely scraped and answered by websites whose provenance and reliability are taken as given because they're at the top of the SEO or most closely match the phrase one inputs. People would rather go through multiple of those dropdowns to get an answer that they think satisfies their needs rather than do the due diligence and eventually save themselves some time.
@@manwalrus The good news about those drop downs is that with the commercialization, they have become increasingly less useful and relevant. I am trained to skip them at this point, because they fail me every time I try to use them. Can't be a unique experience. I don't need advanced knowledge to know the dropdown didn't remotely understand what I was searching for. People learned to rely on them because at one point they were at least good enough for conversation. Nowadays, they're good for nothing and that alone will probably deter reliance somewhat. You can't even convince yourself the answers mean anything when it becomes obvious it's still struggling to understand the question. It answers every question but the one you're actually seeking an answer for, until it is about something you're buying.
Puh-TÆ-EE-tuh-ohs
MYSTERY SOLVED!: My niece used to write articles as piece-meal work. Authors specify the subject, number of words and suggested source(s) and people submit their work and if the author uses your text you get paid. For her it was a hobby and she was good at it. Authors who are just trying to get published as much as possible probably just go with the one that reads the best.
When I was in middle school I wrote travel articles for places I had never visited in order to save up spending money for a vacation I was going to take one summer. Don't know what websites they went up on as everything was anonymous and disconnected. I also wrote comments for song from some online music streaming site. Those weren't technically fraudulent I guess because they let us listen to 10 seconds before we wrote our review.
I want to clarify, the website that I was writing travel articles for knew that I had not visited the places, there were instructions and procedures to follow for how to look stuff up. This type of low effort content has existed for the better part of 20+ years online, but AI is increasing the rate at which it can be pumped out. I literally would not be surprised if an actual kid wrote the article in the video.
As a citizen of 2025, I look back on this early content by Dr. Collierastro and recognize the sparks of brilliance that led to her breakthroughs in superluminal warp drive technology, powered by antimatter. Now that we live in a future where we travel faster than Indy Cars compared to Pintos, it's amazing to rewatch this video for the thousandth time and see where all of this phenomenal science came from.
It really is a comforting feeling to live in the future and have such a clear understanding of how antimatter spacecraft work.
Yep, I used the Faster-than-pinto-and-light Collier Engine to travel back in time, too. I'm on my way back to 2003 to teach Kevin some science!
@@theprinceofinadequatelighting noooo don’t mess with the timeline, you don’t know the effects teaching Kevin science could have on our ability to create a Time Machine in the future, some say the whole reason she made thre antimatter engine was so she could get this article taken down
I want whatver Mossy is libating
This video is like those articles that promise to tell you how to make a pineapple pie, but instead, describe the author's relationship with their Hawaiian heritage.
Unlike those articles, this video is delightful.
looking the thumbnail is important ! xD
Reminds me of that one HowStuffWorks article
Those articles are actually the worst thing to ever exist.
Except she says in multiple places that she will not be explaining how an antimatter engine works. Big difference lol.
Is pineapple pie a real thing? Please tell me.
As a great scientist once said, "fkn magnets! How do they work?" He never did tell us
According to Ahrefs, over a 100 domains have referenced this "guide". Including articles on Medium, NBC News, Reason. The article itself was written in 2003 (according to WaybackMachine). Here are the large majority of the few changes they made (read it, it's a banger, great use of AI:
2003: Warp drive is another one of those science fiction technologies
2023: Warp drive is one of those science-fiction technologies
2003: It just hasn't been achieved
2023: We just haven't achieved it
2003: However, scientists are working on developing an interstellar spacecraft engine that is similar to the matter-antimatter
2023: However, scientists are working on developing an interstellar spacecraft engine that is similar to the antimatter
2003: Antimatter spacecraft like this one could some day
2023: Antimatter spacecraft like this one could someday
2003: like the one used in the space shuttle.
2023: like the one used in space shutles.
2003: In this edition of How Stuff Will Work, we will
2023: Let's
2003: and find out what antimatter actually is and how it will be used
2023 and find out what antimatter actually is and how we might use it
2003: ---
2023: What is Antimatter? In this composite image of the Crab Nebula, matter and antimatter are propelled nearly to the speed of light by the Crab pulsar. The images came from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo by NASA/Getty Images
2003: Until just recently,
2023: At one point, scientists considered
You left an unclosed paren! Also how did the AI make it strictly worse?
@@Isaac-zy5do oh it wasn't an AI or if it was, it was instructed to only change minimum amount of stuff. Updates like that are only made so that Google sees that it's "kept up to date" as the algo likes fresh content. But this article isn't there for traffic, it's there just to bring authority to the domain as it has over 100 other websites pointing to it. Which then increases their important articles like "the longest running TV show", etc.
@@markototevdo we think (or for that matter is it known) whether Google is doing some sort of diff or edit distance measure, or if they’re cheating out and hashing it?
I think it's a little bit of both, but mostly hashing. Whether that works depends on the SERP in mind so it's not a one rule for all. This is why "authoritative" sites like this can rank well for queries with garbage content. For this article in particular, they definitely only did it (as with all articles as the same co-author is added) just to "freshen up" the content.
Not *exactly* topical, but this reminded me of my high school chemistry class. We had to do a huge end of year project with each student getting a unique prompt for an experiment. My prompt was stupid hard, requiring me to bust out the dictionary and thesaurus just to understand the single sentence I was given. Eventually got the grasp of it and after research saw it was pretty cool; required me to build my own barometer. Was doing my final write-up after having done the experiment, felt unsure about one thing I was about to write so did one more google search. Found a university article that COMPLETELY countered everything I understood about the assignment. Like, negated each element verbatim. Lost my mind for a couple days before finally realizing that there was a clause in the opening paragraph of that article that could be interpreted as saying "written below is a counter example," but like the specific diction was such that I originally took it as "here's an example." Sudden peace followed by UNYIELDING RAGE were my prevailing emotions. Got an A.
Moral of the story: fuck that author. Nobody I showed the article to properly understood it on the first go.
Honestly, even the Star Trek writers seem a little confused about the distinction between the warp drive and its antimatter power source, but that's neither here nor there.
From day one star treks warp drive has been a loose magic fast travel system with the word SCIENCE slapped on it.
Someone asked a nerd what's a plausible way to go FTL and the nerd said "well theoretically there's what's called spacetime warping but..." producer: PERFECT! WARP DRIVE IT IS!! But what kind of gas would it run on? Nerd: well, the most energy dense power source might be what's called antimatter, but....
Producer: right! Antimatter, it powers every no matter what.
No concept of what warp drive would actually be, how it would work or what it's effects might be. No thought given to how much antimatter would be required at any plausible level.
I did some napkin math years ago and found that the energy required to get the four and a half million ton Enterprise up to full impulse speed and back is equal to roughly 7,000 tons of antimatter, plus it's equivalent in regular matter. That's assuming 100% efficiency, and canonically this is done with a few fusion reactors rather than antimatter reactions. I gave up trying to calculate how much fusion fuel that would require as it started to look like something close to the whole mass of the ship itself.
And the order to full impulse is given so casually you just know Picard doesn't have to pay the bill!
So what I’m hearing is that Trek is… _not_ hard sci-fi? 😉
Don’t they run on dilithium crystals? They’re a made up material you can’t really say that the amount of them needed for power is unrealistic
@@Noobslayar They've never been 100% clear on precisely what those do, either. They seem to have... something... to do with the matter-antimatter reaction. They can, sort of, go bad and then you need a new one. That's what we know...
@@nw42 It kind of astonishes me how many people think the science in Star Trek is all meticulously researched. I think promotional materials for The Next Generation back in the 1990s fostered this idea.
nearly did a spit take during my lunch when you said "ok this article is for children, that's fine"
Regarding achieving the top position on Google: In the early days of Google, it was relatively easy to manipulate the algorithm, especially when there wasn't much content available on a particular topic. Once you secured the top spot, you could acquire numerous links from other websites. However, today, manipulating the algorithm is not as straightforward. Nevertheless, if your content held the top position, let's say, 20 years ago, it implies that you have accumulated thousands of links to that article from other websites. Links continue to be one of the most significant factors in the Google algorithm, if not the most significant one. If the article was recently written, it might not be at the top spot. But, thanks to its historical links, the Google algorithm still regards it as an 'authoritative' article. This is how such content maintains its first-place ranking.
Thanks for providing this explanation.
In addition; Google will grab the date currently on the website. So even if an article was written 20 years ago and unchanged, if they updated the date it will change on Google. So many (clickbait/scummy) websites will have a script that automatically updates the dates on their articles in order to attempt to provide more "credibility" to them. So not only are some of these websites still legacy top rankers, but they may look recent to the average observer.
Just another reason why multiple sources and critical thinking is important when doing any research on the internet.
When Angela asked that quiz question about how dark matter works, I was like "oh, i watched that video. i can answer that!"
But then my brain immediately responded:
"Dark matter -- what is it? do we need it? where is it? how much? do we need it? do we need it? do we need it? do we need it?"
It's possible the dark matter section of my brain has been taken over by that banger of a track
it sometimes hurts me that I will never be able to fully share with my spouse how pissed I am by how deeply that song has affected my brain. virtually no one will share my pain. but reading your comment gave me a tiny bit of relief, knowing you have likely been affected in the same way.
Hopefully at the conclusion of this article I will be able to work on my antimatter toaster I intend to invent, so far I have just selected the colour of the case.
Congratulations ! You qualify for the position of marketing manager ! Here's your big fat bonus ! It will be in shares of the new toaster company. Now, its all up to engineering ! Don't bother me with the details.
Will it go fast?
@@ZombieBradow It's like toasting your bread on the engine block of a Ford Pinto vs. an Indy car.
I have a feeling you're gonna burn a lot of toast.
Where's your GoFundMe?
I'm so glad I found this channel. It brings back a bit of faith in the humankind.
Dr. Angela Collier does not represent "humankind" she is literally a Post-Doc PhD. within the best people who can have a scientific themed channel on TH-cam. Humanity and men specificall are SPIRALING down to the 1700s levels of understanding but now powered by Wi-fi 6E or whatever.
"Why would you name your car after a bean?" Because the last car Ford had named for a horse was a roaring success, so they were trying to channel the horse theme into their slow little splodey box.
Heh, yeah I wasn't sure if she was joking or not.
This channel is my comfort blanket, it’s nice to know I’m not crazy when I see basic mistakes in fields I’m passionate about and get frustrated, doesn’t matter that I don’t fully understand all the science, the literacy talks are always nice. Keep making cool videos(:
"And that's what I've been doing for that last two weeks"...building an anti-matter engine?!
Building the engine: ✔️
Fuel for the engine:
How does an anti matter engine work? Quantum quantum, quantum quantum, quantum quantum quantum quantum. I think you'll find that's the answer. Come on Angela, you really should have known that!
Did you know that Schrodinger was arrested for animal abuse, click here to learn the sexy quantum truth.
Quantum quantum? Quantum quantum, quantum!
Quantum? pfft. Nanomachines son.
It's fine.
@@piedpiper1172Lol that Google offered to translate your message, and the translation is "How much, how much, how much..."
I really hate that feeling of confusion reading an article like that. I always go into a spiral of thinking "Am I stupid? Am I going insane? Is this evidence of cognitive decline? Have I always been this dumb?" before eventually realising that no, the article was basically written by google's autofill
14:30 “We’ve been failing Billy!” 😂 This whole part had me in stitches. Such a great video!
If you find more of these and make more videos like this, you can title the playlist “The Perils of AI”
Wild Luke spotted! Thanks for the Latin and Greek lessons!
"I did the normal thing ..."
*highlights all words into categories*
I relate so deeply to your sense of normality.
Around the time when this article was originally published a friend of mine, aspiring writer with a degree in English, did some writing for various similar websites. The amount that was paid for each word did not make it worthwhile to put any effort into it. He didn't do it for very long as it was both depressing and not adequately remunerative.
I am really glad Angela has never had the sweet displeasure of riding in a Ford Pinto. Ralph Nader described it as "unsafe at any speed." You can't pay money for that kind of hate.
It was the Corsair that was unsafe at any speed. The Pinto was unsafe while stopped. Its fuel tank exploded when the car was hit in the rear.
@donaldwhite8420 Yes! It's hilarious that there are fans and collectors of Corvairs.
The human editor ADDED unnecessary, unrelated sentences to AI-generated story? Interesting… They were an ANTI editor! Or, according to them, they’re the mirror image of an editor.
The mirror image of an editor? Beware the left-handed editor!
That's how your antimatter spacecraft will work, then. It'll be crewed by 50% editors and 50% anti-editors.
Nope, it wasn't even AI-generated
That's why when an Editor and an Anti-Editor collide you get a huge amount of energy in the form of textual fluff
Few days ago i was looking for some articles and examples regarding RF component i do not often use. It was a simple dual gate mosfet used in high frequency circuits like RF preamplifiers. First 2-3 pages of google results are just AI garbage. Same sentence in 5 different ways. On page 4-5 i found a blog from 2002 that had wonderful explanation.
I wanted to buy some PTFE boards used for prototyping rf circuits, and the same story. 2-3 pages of text without any information. What is strange the website looks like legitimate PCB manufacturer business website.
I am basically just giving up on google results and internet in general. If it is not on youtube I will just look for a book.
I love the enshittification of the web!
Honestly, same. It's almost impossible to find anything you want. I'm about ready to make a site of "good info" that me and my friends find, like a telephone book of websites listed by tag.
algo generation is going to exponentially increase the amount of useless horse shit on the internet. all will kneel to adsense. click click click
@@jupitersky I hope that what's happening is just the transition from web crawler search engines back to human curated ones and that we aren't just stuck with this stuff forever
@@ganondalf8090 Honestly, the most valuable information about websites travels via youtube videos and word of mouth in places like discord these days. We've regressed to a time before proper organization of information after relying on entirely automated search engines for so long, so it sort of needs to be re-built.
Forum posts or random reddit posts from years ago are still the best source of information on the internet. Given that you know to be skeptical of everything on the internet, you can at least sift through them to find unique explanations and ideas.
This is just Buster saying why would people go on to the internet and lie for 43 minutes and I love it.
This video is literally the mirror image of a video about how antimatter spacecraft will work.
I am so here for a 40 minute video of Angela discovering clickbait for the first time 😆
You reminded me of my friend who is a university math tutor. He's told me many stories of his clients, who again are people that graduated high school and got accepted into a fairly tough to get into school, who are completely unable to do basic arithmetic. They take out their calculators because they can't multiply a number by 10.
It's not because they're unintelligent, they just aren't science/math literate.
The Ford Pinto, was named after the horse, not the bean. Silly youngster.
Seriously, keep the interesting stories coming.
What if the horse was named after the bean though 🤔
Ah, this is why.
And it had the exciting habit of exploding when crashing
I was going to say the same. But you can't really expect her to know details about some crappy old car.
It's named that because, as a gasoline powered car, it cannot stop farting.
"We've been failing Billy"
Oh my God. Love your rants, love the time you put into this.
Keep it up,
Despite the horrendously disturbing subject matter, you make me belly laugh at the inconceivable absurdity of it all with the way you tell a story.
Don't ever stop and congrats on 100K subscribers!
@@andrewfarrar741 yeah nah
The best thing about your video style is that you use the same fonts and style of presentation for the captions as a 20 year old website. Love it.
Something that a lot of non-teachers don't realise is that a huge number of American high schools are just diploma mills. Before the pandemic even, but especially since the pandemic, administrations have adjusted the role to be more like daycare than education. Students are enabled to not learn anything with no consequences, natural or otherwise. I've worked in high schools where more than half of students in all classes just sit on their phones, where daily attendance is 50% of kids on any given day. I also currently work in a school where there are consequences, and despite serving a very low economic area, even the low performing students are learning at about an expected level in my class. But a lot of kids go to college because it's "the next step" in life when they really only have a C level elementary or middle school education. That's the about 1/3 that you are seeing in your classes who cannot read a simple graph.
6:26 as a left-handed person, I can say my right hand is an anti left hand. If I pick up any of my left handed devices with my right hand both of them explode.
With your expertise in left-handed devices, we need you to develop a left-handed engine out of regular matter so we can study it and finally get to the bottom of this "how an antimatter engine will work" question.
I can't do fMRI studies on left handed patients, because their brains are organized differently.
Thank you, Angela. That was a very eye-opening presentation. I grew up with How Stuff Works in book form, and found the illustrations AND information very informative. But it has, over the years, and by virtue of the greed of people who sold the IP for a quick buck as well as the people who bought the IP to make a quick buck, devolved into primordial slime. It’s sad - but the bright side is we now get people like you to help us sift through the detritus of Internet “science”. ❤
Dr. Collier! Have you ever watched folding ideas? Something in their narrative style that I think would translate well is after they finish the video they have an aside where it's something they realized while writing the video and it's a tangent, but also interesting and so they add it in. And I think it would be very interesting if you did something similar (also it boosts engagement bc it's like a post credits scene to get people to watch til the end, everyone wave hi to the omnipotent youtube algorithm, hiiiii, pleasedontsmiteme)
She confirmed watching folding ideas in an interview a little while ago.
Can you do a bookshelf tour?
I'm not mad that you didn't get to antimatter engines, because you always explain why cool things are impossible. I can keep my hopes up for a week more.
This will get lost in the sea that is the comments section, but I just wanted to say:
Your videos have re-ignited my love for physics. I recently graduated with a mechanical engineering degree (bluntly put, because I thought it had more job prospects), but I've always wanted to understand modern non-classical physics.
I've started to read university texts on QM and GR in my free time, it's gonna be a long journey!
I read your comment. :) I applaud your willingness to learn more.
Good on you, my friend! Enjoy your pursuits!
This made me want to learn about antimatter engines, and I ended up reading the wikipedia entry on antimatter rockets. That site has managed to hold on to a level of rigor that's become almost non-existent for the most part anywhere else. But it seems like a herculean effort, and it seems like that web site could fly apart at any time, just as soon as all the volatile components present in the rest of the internet combine in just the right way. Whenever Jimmy Wales dies (or the legion of volunteer editors lose interest), that is when we all choke to death on the stupid and the information superhighway crawls to a stop.
My beloved ChatGPT4, even in default mode, says "This chamber would be surrounded by a dense, tungsten coating to absorb gamma rays and use the absorbed heat to warm the propellant. For magnetic confinement, superconducting magnets would line the chamber, preventing antimatter from contacting the physical structure and annihilating prematurely.". Uh-huh, that's how stuff works around here, how stuff works.
But do we need it do we need it
So chatGPT thinks that anti-matter spaceships will be steam powered? What is this propellant?
@@jsrodmanobviously it’s magnetic so that the superconducting magnets in the chamber prevents premature annihilation. Duhhh lol jk
@@jsrodmanANTI-STEAM
@@jsrodmanThe propellant could be hydrogen. This sounds like basically a nuclear thermal rocket (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket) but with antimatter annihilation instead of nuclear fission.
It's simple, I see a new acollierastro video just dropped and I leave everything I was doing and instantly know how I'll spend my next 45 minutes
Exactly!
Same here!
Huh, your mannerisms and expressions really perfectly convey the emotions you experience while doing this work.
The disappointment, the aversion, the dismay, I can feel it. I reckon you're a good actor too.
Crikey that Power Balance mention gave me a violent flashback to the days of early 2010s science and skepticism podcasts and conferences. Simpler times.
Fantastic video so far, really great story telling. Your writing has apparently come a long way!
ETA: It was an excellent video
The Pinto was famous for exploding when hit from behind, Very relevant to an antimatter rocket,
*On a related note, the 'How Stuff Works' podcasts are pretty good.*
But if you say we're never visiting the site again, I can leave it. You make a good point about the responsibility of scientific journalism and how it's impacted by pop science.
I love how you always record in a different place in the house. I like to imagine you were a long from room to room and just had the sudden urge to flip on a camera and vent
When I was in college -- and I was studying engineering, for what it's worth -- I had the distinct impression that there were professors there who were more interested in making the students feel stupid than in helping them get smarter. Not all professors, to be sure, but disturbingly many, particularly in the first two years. I suspect that they rationalized that behavior as "weeding out the ones who aren't cut out for it" or something, but I feel very strongly that this kind of approach to teaching causes a lot of good students to drop out, and a lot of bad students (who just happen to be good at memorizing the textbook) to stay and then perpetuate this bad culture. Or write bad popular science articles.
I can't say you are wrong because I don't know your situation or professors, but during my PhD in engineering, and getting my hands dirty teaching, what I noticed is that a lot of professors are genuinely super excited to be able to share their field and really want to take students with them to discover and learn. The problem is, instead, that doing it for 20 years has made them lose touch with what a young bachelor or masters student actually knows and understands, and how this stuff that is easy for them (as they have been doing it for 20 years!) is really not as easy as they think. As a result, they go 'but look at the mathematical beauty' because they have honed the ability to think in pure mathematics for 20 years, and don't understand students can not grasp the topic without the link to real world examples as they do not (yet) poses the tools to do so. Which kinda makes it even more tragic, because they really want to share and teach, but without a good support system to give them feedback on the shortcomings and help them relate to the position of the student, they fail to do so.
@@JorenVaes it looks like more absence of teaching skills. Your explanation would work for prof. who just started to teach after long period of working, only in this case they can be detached from knowledge of students. But people who teach for few years clearly see what concepts are difficult for students. And after few years of experimentation with explanations they can find the way that majority will understand it. Problem usually that you immediately find that you need to explain things beyond your topic. You maybe teaching some engineering topic, but you have to jump into explanation of some mathematical concepts(quite deeply), when you find that students didn't understand it from other math courses.
The fun thing about current text gen AI is that it allows for the highly efficient creation of metric tons of a slightly worse version of the last decade worth of human made content slop the lords of the internet decided to prioritize.
Where do I want to go today exalted Gateslords? Thy clickbait shall protect me from curiousity, which killed the cat.
I'm sure you know Angela, but for younger viewers who might not, the Ford Pinto was supposed to be the "everyman's" Mustang. It was a pity seeing the issues associated with it in real time. At the time I thought hey glad I ride in a Chevy Vega, but then they had similar issues. Love your vids!!!
This reminds me of an issue that pissed me off at work a couple days ago:
I had a niche question about some Microsoft product, and as I usually do in that situations, I went to a search engine to see what forums and help pages had on the topic. One page I clicked on had the exact question I had in the title. The body then included in information on how to resolve that issue.
Scrolled back to the top to see if I missed something, and I saw a banner proclaiming the article had been written with AI.
These niche forums and help pages are incredibly important to me, and I hate seeing them get cluttered out and replaced by useless garbage, that likely is plagarising from the actually useful work other people did. I really hope enough people push back against this, still unclear to me the most effective way to do that though.
Wow thank you so much for all the effort you’ve been putting in lately ❤️ it is very much appreciated
practically speaking, the antimatter spacecraft works just like a normal spacecraft, because the CP-symmetry violation would not be observable in its normal operating regime 😃
I think an element of what you call scientific literacy is philosophy. I never studied philosophy as a kid, but when I studied for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), I had to learn about the structure of valid and sound arguments. Your example person who was ignorant of antimatter physics, but otherwise scientifically literate, recognized the key missing step as the article giving no link between why antimatter explosions would be so large, and why that would make you go fast. I think learning about necessary and sufficient conditions, various common logical fallacies, and what is needed to make an argument sound and valid could go a long way to helping people develop the skills for detecting nonsense.
Your channel is already my favorite channel on youtube, and it keeps getting better with every video!
I think the pinto was named after the horse, not the bean.
So I just looked it up. Apparently pinto is just the Spanish word for modeled color or something like that. So the bean and the horse are named with just a description. The car was named because horses are fast and cars are fast. This is the third edit.
Yeah pinto is basically mottled or painted. So a pinto horse is a horse that looks painted. A pinto bean, similar. The car was named after the horse, even though the car didn't have a funky paint job, they just exploded.
As someone who grew up in a family with one, I can assure it was named after the bean.
I finally understand why I will continue to watch one of your videos when you start to cover some topic that doesn't interest me in the least. And I don't just watch, I smile and nod and sometimes laugh. It's because you'll take the time to go through 1500 words of gibberish with a rainbow pack of highlighters, color coding every error. It's because you are "fun, and stuff." ❤
I like how you translate your impatience with stupidity into humor and lighthearted chaff. You're a human antidepressant who lightens my day. If I'm having a dark day, I'll watch you for a couple hours and find myself able to laugh again.
You really have a fabulous channel going here. Your videos are interesting, enlightening and funny. Thank you for making them!
You are on fire and so on point here! You were even able to own up to your own bad article. Keep going. I love your TH-cam channel and learn something from every video. Thanks! 👍
Exasperation is very high in this video. Loving it
I like the Pinto vs. racing car thing. They're explaining the concept of a thing being slower than another thing. Important background info. Pretty sure there's a whole episode of Sesame Street devoted to it.
Truly a classic episode
You continue to be my favorite science-topic TH-cam channel. Thank you.
I read lots of "science talk" in the humanities classes that I've graded papers and exams for. I think it's a universal phenomenon :P
Watching home movies from 2000 is so funny to me, because even in Central Ohio we all sounded like Appalachian residents. It feels like theres been an overall flattening of people's regional accents.
My guess at antimatter engines?
Two types:
- antimatter decay engine: notable in using a large, thin film of radioactive material that produces positrons or anti-protons. Doesn’t NEED to emit antimatter, but perhaps there are advantages to be had. Notable for the velocity of the emitted mass being used for thrust.
- antimatter heat engine: uses antimatter annhilation to produce heat, which in turn is used to produce thrust
The Dr. cannot miss! Love your content! Some of my favorite science communication channels have been subsumed by strangely similar 2 hour long videos on The Most Important And Dramatic Science. I’ve patiently waited a year for one channel’s upload on the Cambrian era that I don’t think will ever release. But every video I see here is an absolute banger, with a fun and unique topic. I really appreciate that this channel is for whatever you feel passionate about at the time, and that you can do some goofier videos that still have a lot of real value.
"What I will do is complain on the internet. For about 40 minutes. As God intended."
Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic 😂
edit: oh shit, I still have the HowStuffWorks coffee table book that my dad gave me when I was a kid. Pretty fun book, all things considered!
Gosh, I hate it when an article does that.
Here in Brazil we call it "encher linguiça" ("stuffing sausage"): when you're supposed to do a thing and you do a bunch of things related to that thing, and it looks like you're doing the thing, but you're not really doing the thing, you're just circling the thing, without actually DOING The Thing.
(about being Brazilian... Here, "pinto" means a very specific part of the human male anatomy 🤣)
Exactly! So much garbage written on websites behaves this way. It's infuriating.
Brazil mentioned. Thought the same thing about the car
Another anecdote for you, a long time ago I tried to start my own business, during that time period I went to this business plan competition in New York City where the winner would get investment in their business, there was this one presentation that reminded me of a perfume commercial, it didn't say anything and I didn't know what it was for. That was the business plan that won the competition judged by adults with money.
I’ve been trying to get better at understanding scientific research papers, I don’t consider myself the most scientifically literate person. I will say, if I encountered that website, my thought wouldn’t have been “This is a bad website” it would probably be “I don’t follow what they’re saying, let me see if someone else explains it in a way I can understand or sites a source I can go to”
To be a nerd, here is my conception of Antimatter drives;
Similar to project Orion, there is not really any theoretical reason why Antimatter as a propellent shouldnt work. Its a "reaction" that releases a lot of energy, no need to a genius to figure out how to use it for thrust.
The most straight forward approach, used by the ISV´s in Avatar, is to just have two jets, one matter the other Antimatter, collide in a combustion chamber, Annihilate and produce a shitload of radiation. Basically how modern pintle injector rockets work. There are several problems with this, just from a "is this safe ?" standpoint. To which the answer is "probably not". Its also not very efficient. Leaving aside that some portion of the antimatter will not annihilate, even the rest which does will do so by radiating high energy photons in all direction. Annihilation is a Omnidirectional process. Since we cant reflect gamma rays, half of the reaction energy is just sort of instantly lost. Which means you need some chunky radiators.
A way to fix this is to use the Antimatter annihilation as a heat source to ionize a propellant like Hydrogen. In terms of energy efficiency this might be close to the theoretical maximum. But now you have to carry a propellant with you. And you still cant reflect gamma rays so again, chunky radiators. There is also a question of how exactly you go about heating the propellant using the Annihilation process. You cant have say a stream of liquid hydrogen and just bust Antimatter in there, that will just be the first option above. So you need a way to have the annihilation occur in the middle of the reaction chamber. Which isnt impossible but an interesting engineering challenge.
The last method i am aware of is to use Antimatter in combination with my favored spacecraft concept, Project Orion. Usually Project Orion, or Nuclear Pulsed Propulsion, has the downside that the individual bomblets you eject and absorb the explosion energy from can only get this small. You need a critical mass Plutonium or Uranium core to have a nuclear explosion. This size limit on the Bomblets intern means your ships can only get this fast before things become to big. Only a few micrograms of Antimatter could be enough to catalyze thermonuclear fusion, basically skipping the first stage of a conventional hydrogen bomb. This might allow you to build truly energy dense Bombs. One concept i saw proposed a 1 Mt bomb at just 100 kg. Such a "Antimatter Catalyzed Project Orion" spacecraft might be able to reach 10, 20 or 50% the speed of light and slow down, depending on how beefy you can make the pusher plate. And it comes with all the other advantages of Orion, such as no need for particularly large radiators, high cargo capacity and just in general being pretty badass.
Maybe this is just option 2, but can't you just have a normal spherical combustion chamber with normal hydrogen gas pumped in? Then inject a SMALL amount of antimatter in the center. It will annihilate with some of the hydrogen, but the rest of the hydrogen will absorb the gamma radiation, be heated, and expand out the nozzle. Not sure about how much radiation is absorbed vs the size of the chamber and density of gas. And of course how to guarantee that no unannihilated antimatter reaches the chamber walls. This is the lowest tech concept I can think of that assumes we could invent a way to inject antimatter with a tiny nozzle but maybe not control it at a macro level.
@@shaunswett6684 That is the idea of a combustion chamber, well i guess Annihilation Chamber in this case. Its really more of a engineering issue how exactly you get the Antimatter in there to react continuously and produce thrust. The big issue is that unlike a normal propellant, Antimatter can blow up at any point if the magnetic containment fails. I guess it might be similar to how we deal with hypergolic propellant. So with a lot of caution xD
In Avatar they describe what you have as a Hydrogen Afterburner, which makes like no sense. Ideally you want the Hydrogen to surround the antimatter to absorb as much energy as possible. Injecting Hydrogen into the antimatter produced exhaust will probably just reduce engine performance.
@@erikhall1146 Yeah, I decided to read Wikipedia after posting that comment and found this little gem: "Direct heating of the hydrogen by gamma rays was considered impractical, due to the difficulty of compressing enough of it within an engine of reasonable size to absorb the gamma rays" But what do they know? :) Looking forward to AC's video where she might actually, you know, talk about antimatter!
I love that you're delving into molecular biology now! That was one of my majors back in the day. I work with a lot of newly minted engineers now and I'm so happy that colleges are integrating biomaterials and cellular systems into their coursework. It's all different facets of physics in the end, but I appreciate when people show an interest in my little niche! 🥰 Also, poor Kevin. He will forever be besmirched by the AI bots zombie-resurrecting past works.
I have watched many of your videos recently and have come to appreciate your channel. You do good work! Keep it up!
Wow, what a twist! I loved how the foreshadowing of the page being the same for twenty years was visually in there. You really had me in stitches with the part on 'Billy'. Though I get that was a joke, you can't really come back from something like calling something so bad someone would have to be held back in eighth grade. That man is burnt to a crisp, no 'he is not a scientific journalist who needed proper guidance' can save him.
An antimatter spacecraft is just a spacecraft made out of antimatter, which presumably can do very similar chemistry to normal matter. It can have a variety of engines, for example mixing anti-hydrogen and anti-oxygen to make anti-water and energy, thereby pushing it forward.
It's a common practice, unfortunately, to pump out shallow content and continuously "update" it to trick people and search engines into thinking it's timely. The most egregious examples are the "Everything we know about [upcoming game/movie]" articles that are constantly "updated" to say that we still don't know anything new. Usually they will generate their own slop (now with an AI, of course), but I suppose buying a website with lots of existing content works just as well.
Your videos keep me so engaged throughout the entire video's runtime. I love your style of videos so much!
17:50 the first one of those podcasts, Stuff You Should Know, is genuinely amazing.
I was basing my entire prototype antimatter engine off this article. Now what am I going to do?
Just add more "quantum" and call 'er good.
The number of normal things you did is astounding and appreciated lol
Out of curiosity, I logged into GPT-4 and asked it exactly that question ("Please write me a 1500 word article on the topic "How an Antimatter Engine Will Work"). The response has an engaging one-paragraph preamble, and then launches into this:
The Principle of Antimatter Propulsion:
At the core of an antimatter engine is the concept of annihilation. When a particle of antimatter meets its matter counterpart, they obliterate each other, releasing energy according to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc^2. This equation implies that a tiny amount of matter and antimatter can release an enormous amount of energy, far surpassing what is achievable through nuclear fission or fusion.
An antimatter engine would work by directing the explosive force resulting from matter-antimatter annihilation to propel a spacecraft. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of the process:
1. Antimatter Storage: Antimatter is created and stored in a penning trap, a device using magnetic and electric fields to contain charged particles. For an engine, the most likely candidate for antimatter is positrons, the antimatter counterpart to electrons.
2. Antimatter Injection: Antimatter is then released in a controlled manner and mixed with a matter fuel, such as hydrogen.
3. Annihilation Chamber: The mixture enters the annihilation chamber, where matter and antimatter collide. This leads to complete annihilation, converting the mass of the particles into pure energy.
4. Energy Conversion: The energy released is predominantly in the form of high-energy gamma photons. These photons are not easily harnessed for propulsion, so additional mechanisms must convert the energy into a usable form. One proposed method is to use the photons to heat a working fluid, which then expands and is ejected to produce thrust.
5. Thrust Direction: The expelled particles create thrust in one direction, propelling the spacecraft in the opposite direction according to Newton's third law of motion.
... so, right out of the gate, better than the article you found 🤣🤣🤣 It did slip up a bit, missing the concept that the nucleus of the hydrogen atom could be used as the "working fluid" ... but overall, better than what I saw you reading.
I don't say this enough, but I really love your videos. You communicate well and your facts are well sourced and your knowledge base is evident in your commentary. Thank you, keep it up.
This is why you always go to project rho for your spacecraft questions
This video goes from how a bad article is bad into touching on why capitalism ruins everything and I'm here for it.
Capitalism doesn't ruin everything. The lack of free markets ruin everything. Capitalism is merely a system. You don't need a free market to have capitalism, but you need capitalism to have a free market. Without a free market you end up in, say, the Dark Ages for a few millennia.
"you need capitalism to have a free market"
> Businesses can be worker-owned
> Market socialism is a thing
> Under capitalism, a free market will cease to be free as time passes, due to how capitalism works
@@TasTheWatcher There's nothing in capitalism that precludes joint ownership of profits, and losses.
As long as socialism is voluntary, that's fine, that's part of the free market, people can chose to be a part of it, or leave it.
We are NOT in capitalism. Government bails out favored businesses using public funds and lets successful businesses fail, because government undermines those businesses. What system does that sound like... ?
I got click baited into watching a 43 minute video on how antimatter spacecraft will work, only to watch another 1 hour video on antimatter.
I’m not even mad.
Could just listen to you talk about any subject. So much passion and clear explanations and humour.
Yeah but an antimatter engine isn't really a breakthrough in physics, is it? More like a feat of engineering if you ask me.
...
...I'll see myself out 😅
Exactly, physicist make a dark energy engine instead plz... In a pinch a dark matter engine might do too.
emm, not really. There are a lot of problems which we barely know how to solve theoretically. For example, you have to make a mirror which can reflect with huge efficiency very energetic gamma-rays, but all materials are transparent for them. Even theoretically no such materials can be made. You only can use dense electron plasma to reflect such hard radiation. Such kind of problems are way beyond engineering.
@@inevespace whoosh
@@wtfpwnz0redlol what was the joke supposed to be? I legitimately don’t understand where the whoosh is here
@@suppositorylaxative3179 watch her video on recent physics breakthroughs (i forget the title)
I always listen with interest, I'm often blown away and grateful, but this time you get extra gratitude points for your amending your old sentence about sex workers and the support you expressed to us 💮
The AI might not have written it, but it sure as heck read it and added it to its training data...
Isaac Arthur has a good video on Antimatter Factories and touches on how the drives could work in theory in his Spaceship Drive Compendium.