The first antimatter road trip: Moving the rarest substance in the universe! (info in comment)

If anyone has ever had PET scan you’ve had a type of antimatter in you brain. This type of scan uses Positrons. Producing antiprotons is decidedly more awesome.

In the Netflix series Travelers, they have an episode where the truck moving 10.3 grams of antimatter was going to explode.

How large of an explosion would that have caused?

look at all that proper ppe in one picture!


The level of precision here makes rocket science look casual.

It doesn’t matter.

I read it could one day be used as a ultra dense engergy storage and propulsion technology for space travel.

Antimatter is actually the most expensive substance on Earth, with production costs estimated between $62.5 trillion and 2.7 quadrillion per gram.

However nowhere near a gram is here. We are talking 1 .54 x 1 -²² g roughly.

*”If antimatter and matter come into contact, they annihilate each other…”*

So, my ex-wife is anti-matter, eh?

Imagine you’re a sci-fi set designer, and you see this.

“No Mr. Director, there’s no cabinets with loads of flashing lights. No sparking rods in the background. No CGI energy fields, a real anti-matter containment unit is really just kind of a big box….

…sigh, ok. We’ll do it your way.”

Doesn’t antimatter exist randomly/naturally in the universe? Wouldn’t just about any non-naturally-occurring human made substance be more rare?

Like I bet Mt. Dew Baja Blast is more rare than anti-matter in the universe

I wanted to know how big the explosion would be for 92 antiprotons. Here is the answer.

92 antiprotons would cause no detectable explosion whatsoever—the total energy release is microscopic and far below anything that could produce a noticeable blast, sound, heat, or damage.
Here’s the precise physics behind it:

Each antiproton has the same rest mass as a proton: approximately 938.272 MeV/c².
When an antiproton annihilates with a proton (or effectively with ordinary matter), both masses are completely converted to energy via (E = mc^2), yielding 1,876.544 MeV (or about (3.006 times 10^{-10}) joules) per annihilation pair.

For 92 antiprotons (assuming each fully annihilates), the total energy released is (2.77 times 10^{-8}) J (27.7 nanojoules).

To put this in perspective with explosive yield:

This equals the energy from roughly 6.61 picograms (6.61 × 10⁻¹² grams) of TNT.
For scale: 1 gram of TNT releases 4,184 J, so this is an absurdly tiny fraction—about 1.5 trillion times smaller than a single firecracker.

Other everyday comparisons:

It’s roughly the kinetic energy of a 1-gram object moving at 0.007 m/s (slower than a snail’s pace).
It would raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by only about 0.0000000024 °C (completely imperceptible).

It’s on the order of the bioluminescent flash from a few dozen fireflies combined, but released all at once as high-energy gamma rays, pions, and other particles rather than light or heat you could feel.
In practice, antiprotons annihilate almost instantly on contact with any ordinary matter (air, container walls, etc.), producing a spray of subatomic particles and radiation. But with only 92 of them, the event would be detectable only with sensitive particle-physics detectors (like those at CERN)—not as an “explosion” in any macroscopic sense. Even if all 92 annihilated simultaneously in one spot, there would be no audible pop, no flash visible to the naked eye, and no physical effect beyond a tiny, localized burst of radiation too weak to harm anything.

For context on how small antimatter quantities get “big”: you’d need about 23 milligrams of antimatter (plus an equal mass of matter) to match the energy of 1 kiloton of TNT. 92 antiprotons have a total mass of ~1.54 × 10⁻²² grams—27 orders of magnitude smaller.
So, in short: zero explosion. It’s a neat thought experiment in particle physics, but energetically it’s nothing.

https://preview.redd.it/4xujziyru7rg1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=415392a7f2eea0999fa7024307e9d9a21d457926

Better be careful about princess Leia breaking in and stealing some of that antimatter for her son’s school project.

So they are on their way to the Vatican with this and are telling people?
Tom hanks will be able to track a box that size much easier than the last time he saved us all.
Oh just incase /s

TIL that antimatter is no longer theoretical!

Wow. I’m old.

If containment failed on something like that with the resulting energy release be visible? I mean, I don’t believe this is going to go full fusion bomb blow a hole in the mountain side with that little but I’m curious as to how large of reaction they’re actually would be.

Edit: I scrolled further down after leaving this comment and found that somebody had done the math and found that the resultant reaction would be unnoticeably small.

Watch it get crashed into by a fent zombie behind the wheel of a ragged out Kia.