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Eager to get in on all the fun with science, some wannabe scientists in Europe are looking to coax new insight about the nature of anti-matter out of the universe with some good ol’ fashioned brute force lasering. And if all goes according to plan, the thing will be powerful enough to tear apart space-time! Wait. WAT.

The only way that this massive amount of power is able to be harnessed is if the amount of time that it’s being used for is insanely small. The 200 petawatt pulses will only last 1.5 x 10^-14 second, which is about the same amount of time that it takes for light to travel from one side of a human hair to the other, if you shave the hair down by 90%. 200 petawatts is significantly more power that our entire race generates at any given moment, and in fact more total power than Earth receives from the sun.

The point of all this is to try to explore some of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, which suggests that space is actually a giant party of random particles that are popping in and out of existence too fast for us to see. The hope is that a laser this powerful might actually be able to tear apart the vacuum of space-time itself, revealing the matter and antimatter underneath.

-dvice

Well that’s good. You know I’ve harnessed that amount of power before, and it did last for an insanely small amount of time. So that’s a check. But Science damn you, it can’t be good to go around tearing up the universe with your Schwartz like that.

As if the time traveling sabotage of the Large Hadron Collider wasn’t a heads up that we’re about to collapse the universe with science fiction paradoxes, we’re going to tempt fate even further by threatening to rip it apart. “Alright Universe. Tell ya what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you til the count of 1.5 X 10^-14 to reveal your secrets, before I pump your atoms full of 200 petawatts. PEW PEW PEW!! Keep the change you filthy animal.”

[New Scientist] via [dvice]

Want more Wannabe? Follow WG on Twitter @wannabe_genius and the author @mickeyvee.