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Re: starship-design: antimatter fountain: popsci article



jimaclem@juno.com writes:
 > Well, here's the short of it.  It appears that a magnetic field of
 > sufficient field density might act like a mass.  By constructing a series
 > of magnetic, probably superconducting, arrayed as to produce a set of
 > interference nodes, one of constructive interference, and others of
 > destructive interference, with the constructive node contained within the
 > destructive nodes, for shielding (for lack of a better term), and
 > operating at a resonant frequency, (I don't know what yet), a micro
 > sized, artificial hyper mass might be made.  This concept might also
 > prove able to generate sufficient field strengths to contain large masses
 > of antimatter, as well as the old science fiction idea of "force fields".
 > 
 > Tell me what you think.

My take is that it would be much more efficient to just use
electrically-charged or magnetic antimatter and conventional electric or
magnetic field generation methods.

Equivalency of mass and energy cuts both ways.  While an electromagnetic
field can have mass, the mass can be no more than the energy in the
field.  So creating a field dense enough to have a high mass means
converting at least that much mass into energy.  In the case of trying
to do this with a magnetic field, you would also be limited by the
requirement that a magnetic field is produced by moving electric charge
(unless Kyle can build us a lot of miniature monopoles :-).  If these
field fluctuate, as you describe, then your device would also start
radiating photons like mad.