Re: starship-design: antimatter fountain: popsci article

[jimaclem@juno.com]

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997 10:07:17 -0700 Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>
writes:
>
>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.
>

Hmm, good point on the matter energy equivalency.

Jim