Travelers : Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

So I just discovered the show. I like it. I like the characters and I want to keep watching. But HOLY CATS BATMAN their take on antimatter requires the suspension of virtually all knowledge in that field COMPLETELY!

I get that time travel is "timey wimey" and the good "Doctor" has me complacently sitting on my sofa for whatever he wants to throw at me so I'm down with all of that.

But according to CERN's website (you know, the supercollider they do research into atomic and subatomic particles in), they are only capable of creating 1 BILLIONTH of a nanogram of antimatter in an entire year. So for the show to claim they're transporting 10 grams of antimatter (turns out transport is not such a problem) they would have to have been CREATING ANTIMATTER FOR 100 BILLION YEARS (or more, I don't have a calculator handy, sorry)! So given that it's pretty clear the Travelers are operating in the present day it isn't just improbable, it's IMPOSSIBLE for anyone, anyone at all to have their hands on that much antimatter.

So if someone could please tell me that the "big bad" they are trying to prevent does not relate directly to an amount of antimatter that SIMPLY COULD NOT EVEN EXIST I'd be really grateful. Really, pathetically grateful. Cause I really do like the show and I really do want to keep watching it. But unless they set it on another planet the science just ain't there. Unfortunately, it's also just too much science for me to suspend myself from. I'd be perfectly content to have this done with an element that doesn't even exist seriously! I could suspend for that. But given all the work that CERN has done and all the questions regarding matter, antimatter and any number of theories in physics to be this egregiously wrong that an average, science fiction reading, relatively aware member of the 50+ yr. old public could immediately latch onto it and know enough to know it's wrong Well, that just smacks of bad consulting and/or big-time lazy. Both of which frustrate the heck out of me. So, "say it ain't so"! Tell me antimatter is not the mission. Cause I'm just not willing to throw CERN out the window. Kinda like I'd be unwilling to buy into the notion that when I wake up tomorrow, gravity will have ceased to exist. There are some things that simply cannot be suspended and good programming should know that.





"You told me I had nothing. But you were wrong. I have love, I have hope and I have faith."

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

CERN's accelerator is a precision scientific instrument designed to produce tightly focused beams of particles at finely tuned (and extremely high) energy levels. A production accelerator for the creation of macro amounts of antimatter would be bigger and, in a sense, sloppier. You'd direct a big thick beam of protons at much lower and less finely calibrated energies into a target of heavy metal, like tungsten or lead, and from the spray of newly created particles on the other side you'd use electromagnetic "lenses" to divert the positrons and antiprotons away to be combined into antihydrogen.

Like regular hydrogen, this would be a gas at room temperature so you'd want to cool it to cryogenic temperatures where it condenses into tiny ice crystals. You would also deliberately leave a few positrons out so the crystals would have a net electrical charge. Being negatively charged will allow them to be suspended in an electromagnetic trap. It's crucial that none of them actually touch the container walls. For obvious reasons. That's the one big drawback to using antimatter as a power source. Containment failure would be every bit as catastrophic as it's usually portrayed.

We never see the Van Huisen accelerator in Travelers but it would have to be of this type, a production accelerator - useless for research purposes - tailored specifically to make and store antimatter. I've seen cost estimates for a project like that in the $15-$20 billion range. That's just the accelerator itself. The way these things tend to go in the real world, it would take twice as long as originally estimated to get it online and cost two to three times that much when all was said and done. Facilities for safe storage of the final product wouldn't be quite so pricey but they wouldn't be cheap either. Ideally, you'd like to store the antimatter in small capacity containers separated by walls thick enough to isolate individual canisters from each other (i.e if one were to explode it wouldn't touch off a chain reaction). Needless to say you wouldn't be putting 10 grams into a single unit.

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

OK first: you just kicked the @#$& out of what I know/knew about physics (which makes me love you just a little, you scientific rock star, you!) Next, by expanding on a small observation you have now made this subject more interesting than the show (not quite what I was looking for but I still love your brain!). Finally, so you have me at "production accelerator" and now I'm wondering about transferring the antimatter from the accelerator to a container. So I gotta read more, research more and will have to give up on the show completely while I go chase a Master's in Physics!. and I think I've proven I can't do the math!

LOVE YOU chris! Soooooo glad you were the one who responded!




"You told me I had nothing. But you were wrong. I have love, I have hope and I have faith."

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

AND CRAP!!!!

Now I'm going to be all worried about whether or not I'll be on the ceiling when I wake up tomorrow.
you know, from the lack of gravity and all that!


"You told me I had nothing. But you were wrong. I have love, I have hope and I have faith."

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

Oh I wouldn't worry about that. The waking up part I mean. If someone actually canceled the Earth's gravitational field there'd be nothing to keep air pinned against the ground either. Bye bye, atmosphere!

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

You cannot possibly imagine my joy and delight at meeting another IMDb member who actually READS "stuff" and doesn't take any pleasure in cramming it down someone else's throat!

I'm pretty sure that makes you the "Mr Rogers" of this neighborhood and I'd love to be your neighbor.
Dear god I hope you're old enough to get that reference Otherwise, more the fool I AGAIN!


As an aside, John Ringo wrote a series that started with the book "Into the Looking Glass" which opens with an explosion of approximately 60 kilotons as the direct result of a Physics Professor short-cutting the creation of a Higgs boson particle which, OOPS, levels most of central Florida and creates multiple openings into other universes.

Yes, some of his books leave a little to be desired and he doesn't really develop his side characters very well. BUT, he did some pretty impressive research on this little beauty. It runs the gamut from high-level physics (apparently some of them even need to go to the "pure math guys" for help with theorems and proofs) to "gun toting rednecks" who leap into the back of their pickup trucks to go fight aliens on our soil because SWAT just doesn't have the arms they need to take back a foothold situation! It's a great ride while it lasts and although it covered more physics than I'm comfortable with (quantum mechanics and such), I gotta say that I was able to follow it and was pretty impressed by the end. His military background is clear; as is his knowledge of weaponry in general and military tactics in a number of different branches but I liked it. Especially his portrayal of multiple universes and what aliens might actually look and sound like.

Oh yeah, one of the "space marine" recruiting requirements is a thorough understanding of Science Fiction novels with an emphasis on space travel. It's SHINEY!

P.S. Thanks for resolving my fear of "lost gravity"! I'm highly comforted by the knowledge that I wouldn't wake up at all.



"You told me I had nothing. But you were wrong. I have love, I have hope and I have faith."

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

The thing with science is that small leaps over time drastically alter what is possible. Half the people on this planet are walking around with more computing power in their rear pocket than the US had to get Apollo to the moon. In the early days on DNA research it took almost a day just to add a few base pairs to the chain. Now a PCR machine on a desktop can automatically increase the number of chains to the 20th power, nanograms to grams, overnight. So for the storyline, Mac et al for the distant future having an antimatter containment device in a suitcase sized package seems not only feasible, but expected.

My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

I hear you Sluggr!

But my problem was with the fact that the Travelers are in THIS time and although I understand better than most what the iPhone 6 or 7 is capable of (I refer to it as my husband's "brain") and don't have much trouble buying into containment, it was the amount they produced that I had a problem with.

But chris set me up pretty well with what the potential for not only creation but containment as well (and all in 2016, in which the story and actions of the Travelers are primarily set) would look like and require so I'm far more understanding of the physics and and "real material" construction required to make all of the above possible.

And just between us I should BE SO LUCKY as to have a chimp to keep my passwords straight! There are times when I'm more than a little certain that chimps, elephants, dolphins and whales are far more intelligent than humans are. In the late 70's/early 80's Douglas Adams had me convinced that little white mice were running the planet as a giant experiment to explain the question of "Life the Universe and Everything" since nobody understood the answer which was, as I recall, either 42 or 47!

So I think it's pretty clear we're dealing with a crazy woman here don't you?




"You told me I had nothing. But you were wrong. I have love, I have hope and I have faith."

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

My quote is from Cleaver Green, a lawyer in the AU show "Rake." He gives great monologues on all sorts of subjects.



In one, he is talking about human behavior, and how even though we share 98% of our DNA with a chimpanzee, they manage to not get caught up in all the messes that we humans generate, living for the moment rather than in the future. So my original quote as Sluggr-2 was "I have more chimp DNA than the average person" until that Chimp DNA forgot its password (actually a computer cleaning program decided to remove all my stored passwords for me, bugger all).

One thing I think Travelers failed to do was establish that they have specialized teams making stuff in the 21st using 26th knowledge. Trevor said that he made the comms in his spare time, but to me it would be better that a specialized comm team put stuff together rather than them having to reinvent the wheel with each team, just as Marcie picks up her specialized hi-tech medical bag from a team dedicated to putting them together.

42 What is 6 x 9? Explains a lot.

My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

Who knows what the government is doing and hiding from us. The antimatter part of the series is told under the assumption that it's a secret government research. Or you can think of it as an alternate reality. Whatever works for you, just enjoy the show :)

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

CERN is not the only research facility with a particle accelerator, nor is it necessarily doing the same work or with the same goals as those other facilities. And those are just known facilities. Certainly there are classified ones as well whose purposes could be anything.

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

An antimatter production facility would cost more than Trump's ridiculous border wall, and consume as much power as a dozen major cities (maybe a lot more than that depending on capacity). It would be awfully hard to set one up in secret without anyone noticing either the construction itself or the copious expenditures involved - which would only go up if the complex had to be hidden from view.

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

Trump's wall is indeed ridiculous, including the cost. I'm only stating facts. CERN is not the only facility with a particle accelerator, other facilities do not necessarily have the same goals as CERN and it's likely there are classified facilities with particle accelerators whose goals are unknown. And hiding power consumption isn't as difficult as you'd think. Hell, maybe the 2003 East Coast blackout was all about that. We should write a screenplay. Also, who said nobody would notice? Who even said it couldn't be a multi-government effort? See? The screenplay is writing itself.

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

If it was a multi-government effort, the Travelers' mission would be complete. No wars. Come to think of it creating the false belief that the world faced a common threat and had to pull together might be the best way to accomplish their goal. Even if they have to cast themselves in the role of the bad guys to pull it off.

If you read feasibility studies on antimatter production, you'll see that an entirely different type of high power, low precision accelerator is needed to produce macroscopic quantities. Along with two additional decelerator or cooling rings which take the antiprotons and positrons produced at a wide range of energies and reduce the energy spread, then bring them down to (more or less) a stop, where they're combined to make antihydrogen. A single long linear accelerator with a pair of interlocking synchrotrons at one end, which the antiparticles feed into. When I say the complex would be expensive as hell I'm not kidding! And it would be a sprawling campus covering many square miles. If we were building one all by ourselves, every country with surveillance satellites would see it and figure out its purpose pretty quickly, since there's no other reason for that particular combination of facilities in one spot.

And don't forget the power requirements. One gram of antimatter contains about the same amount of energy released by the first atomic bombs. To produce it, you have to generate at least that much the slow way, in power plants. More in practice since no process is completely efficient. In this case, if you could get a 30% conversion efficiency that would be spectacular! We're talking about rows and rows of very big power plants. Each one capable of running a city. So not only would it be impossible to keep the project secret from other governments, the civilian press would be sure to learn about it long before it went online. A multinational effort would still go public like it or not. Governments are no longer the only ones with eyes in the sky, after all.

Re: Antimatter and the suspension of disbelief….

Why would their mission be complete? Multigovernment could mean just NATO countries and Japan.
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