/sci/ - Science & Math

Bumpin', didn't know how much traffic you got. Definitely in need of some help here.

Must...play...EVE!

What happens when you 'destroy' an atom is that you seperate the protons and neutrons at the core of this atom. These protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. However, as soon as you pump enough energy into breaking up the quarks in a proton / neutron, you actually have enough energy to just create a new proton / neutron, which is why we dont even know how you would do it theoretically. Also, as far as we're aware, quarks are not constructed out of smaller particles, hence seperating a quark into its constituents is not possible.

So you'd have to figure out some other mechanic. Perhaps something like converting the particle itself into energy or something, but that would give you too big explosions. I dunno.

>>4858794
So, pretending you could bind two atoms together and destroy them as one, would that produce a larger or smaller reaction than, hypothetically, destroying a quark? Would one of them be, hypothetically, still ridiculously powerful, but more....for lack of a better word, dense in its energy release?

>>4858798
'Binding atoms together' is what makes molecules. I guess that what would happen if you would split two atoms at once you'd just get twice the amount of released energy.

There's this nifty table that shows you the amount of binding energy of atoms which you might be interested in. It's like a rising slope up to Fe (which is iron, right? I always forget) and a descending slope afterwards. It's the reason why you use big atoms when considering fission and small atoms when considering fusion to produce energy.

If by 'destroying' a quark you mean converting a quark into pure energy, that would produce way, way more energy. Like, astronomically more. I don't know the exact numbers, but you can picture it like this: the energy released by fission is just a fraction of the binding energy of an atom. Now consider taking not just a fraction of the binding energy, but ALL binding energy AND the entire rest mass. That's what you'd get if you could turn an atom and all its quarks into energy rather than just using regular fission.

>>4858798
Fuck it go for space opera science.
Quarks are paired you cannot seperate this pairing, the strength of the bond goes up exponentially with distance.

Seperate them with space awesome power stuff.

Say that the space between gains wierd properties, call it a quark pair splitting field. Feed stuff in it is 100% converted to energy along the E=MC^2 line.

Have fun with your space opera techno babble!

Captain the QPSF is collapsing!
Reverse the polarity!
genius captain!

>>4858812
This is obviously the way to go. 'Quantum fluctuations in the spacetime continuum' is the second best explanation to any question, following '42'

By destroy do you meant tear apart, or actually annihilate the matter?

Because tearing apart quarks or small atoms COSTS you energy. Quarks in particular require so much energy input to separate that the energy will spontaneously generate new quarks, so you'll get more of them and they'll never have actually separated from each other.

Annihilating matter (as in matter/antimatter), on the other hand... One atom won't generate a noticeable amount of energy, but it'll still be a much better return than trying to crack apart anything smaller than an iron atom.