If it is proven that that anti-matter is repelled by gravity does that mean hover-boards will become a reality in our lifetimes? What are some of the potential practical applications?
We may still see some normal devices which use antimatter in one way or another.
To put things into perspective, 1kg (~2.2lb) of antimater + 1kg of matter = 2* (9×10^16 J/kg) of energy, TNT = 4.2×10^6 J/kg so that works out to 42,000,000,000 kg of TNT or a 100 mega ton bomb which is larger than the largest H bomb ever tested.
PS: The other issue is unlike gas which is fairly stable, any sort of containment failure = detonation.
Don't worry. The design is impractical anyway - regulating the "anti-mass" would be extremely difficult. Just when you got it balanced, the kid would drink a glass of water and the board would sink into the ground.
Due caution would indeed be advisable when selling these gadgets, though. A matter-antimatter collision of 50kg would be equivalent to about 2.1 gigatons of TNT, or about 400 times more powerful than the most powerful hydogen bomb ever developed, so it would indeed caused a "considerable amount of damage".
Nah, you just need a miniature collider inside the board, manufacturing more anti-matter as necessary.
And obviously, it would be powered by annihilating matter/antimatter together, via a small Mr. Fusion at the back.
If a nuke fails, nothing happens. If antimatter containment fails, your entire arsenal of antimatter weapons go up at once.
For a similar reason, nitroglycerin is strangely unpopular for both civilian and military purposes.
It would be heinously expensive and would require the kind of energy input that only gigawatt-grade nuclear power plants could provide. Rather than using a complicated, failure prone and inefficient way to transform nuclear fission into destruction, it would be simpler and more effective to lob a nuke with the same amount of uranium or plutonium.
Hence, for your day-to-day megadeath needs, thermonuclear weapons will remain the tool of choice for the foreseeable future.
I guess thermonuclear weapons are cheaper, though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_hole#Traversable_wormholes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
which have been observed a few times in colliders
the pieces of Universe that is more than 13B light years from us are moving with speed faster than light relative to us. The machinery behind it is space expansion. And by definition that is using energy less or equal to the universe's energy. So that is the start. The Alcubierre drive is the idea of how to use the same principle on much smaller scale. It is very doubtful that it would require more energy than moving the whole galaxies [which, let me repeat, are moving faster than light relative to us and to each other]