Theoretical physics, anyone else like it?

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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

Reaper, I don't know that you can say pluto's size is specific to its involvment alone in the Kupier belt.
Pluto orbits along an irregular path falling inside Neptune's orbit from time to time. It's size, composition, and orbit suggests it is a Kuiper Belt object whose orbit was perturbed a few billion years back by Neptune's formation. That's the running theory at least. Wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Belt_Object

I hear if we get enough Anti-Matter together we can destroy the planet. Go CERN...;)
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

Someone will destroy the planet long before we are able to harness, harvest, and put to use anti-matter (which isn't actually "anti-matter", it's just inversely charged particles.. protons are negative, electrons are positive [positron] etc. but I digress :P) unless we suddenly do a Star Trek and everyone on Earth suddenly turns into new age hippies :P

Personally, I believe someone will split Earth in half or something equally as proposterous by means of an experiment gone bad..
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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

I place my bets on the CERN facility in Switzerland. One day they'll create a mini-blackhole after banging a few quarks together at the next-generation energies they now have and Earth will go pop inside a year sucked inside out. Only the theoretical physics will die happy. ;)
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akimm
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Post by akimm »

Concerning Anti matter, do we actually have a containment source? I thought that stuff was still impossible to garner very much at all, let alone sustain it, doesn't it decay and go BOOM, whenever exposed to any matter?
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

An insanely powerful magnetic field is needed to contain it, and more importantly, stop everything else getting into it. A few years ago someone managed to accomplish a sustained field just long enough to measure it before they ran out of energy. That's about 0.01x(10^20) seconds (iirc), btw.
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akimm
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Post by akimm »

What do you guys think about mesons, possible impilications for them, if you're not sure what that is, its basically (from what I understand) a quark and anti-quark.
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