Cool, very interesting read.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? lol

Ah, so those were just the particles they found then eh?

Been a while since I read that article... it was something really weird about mining for it.  You know, on second thought it might of been Dark Matter.  That would make a lot more sense.

They ever think up any good theoretical uses for anti-matter outside of "perfect unstopable bomb."

They have found traces of dark matter at the bottom of mines, allegedly. I know what you're referring to though, but I'm not sure anything ever came out of it.

As for uses, it would make an amazing fuel I would imagine. A lot of energy is released when matter and antimatter meets, surely it can be practical for something in the future.

Yeah, that's what I was talking about.  Just woke up, so the mind is a bit foggy.  Had  a cold last few days.

Yeah, that's a good point too...  bombs do also make good fuel.  Slightly pessimistic today I guess.

I can only imagine how pumped those scientitsts who did it were. 

Probably STILL pumped.

Actually, you know the link I posted on your wall, I'm pretty sure that it has an interview with the people we're talking about who discovered traces of dark matter in the mine. 

I like the whole LHC thing. You have to like a machine that looks like that. 

But... I'm not a professor , nor a super smart scientist , so , what is the use of crashing these atoms into each other ? Yeah , to find out more about our universe wen it was very young. But aren't there more useful things to put those billions of dollars in ? Like finding something as an alternative to oil , medical development , space exploration ? 

Well as we've mentioned in the thread, the formation of anti-matter atoms is allowing them to be studied for the first time, and antimatter may hold potential for producing massive amounts energy. So that's something practical.

But, as always, we wont understand the full applications of what we discover until we've discovered it (although we can hypothesise).

An analogy would be Einstein's theory of general relativity. When Einstein developed it nearly 100 years ago it had no foreseeable practical applications, but since then we have used that knowledge to develop many practical things like satellites. What seemed like a theory with few practical applications theory now underpins modern society.

There's a quote that fits well here, but I can't remember who said it right now. It's something like "I can't think of anything more useless than the invisible light that has been discovered".

By invisible light he meant the non-visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is now responsible for things like television, radios, x-rays machines, microwave ovens, space telescopes, etc. It seemed useless at the time, but it turned out to be one of the most important discoveries of all time.

Yeah. Whenever people compain about how science is useless or not worth the investment to me I just tell them that they should give me their hd tv and computer since its so useless?

That shuts them up.

So that pretty much flew over my head...How about the Yankees?