Answer 1:
Maybe. Scientists at CERN have already
succeeded in making individual anti-Hydrogen
atoms (one positron and one anti-proton bound
together) and trapping them for up to 15
minutes. That's impressive in many ways, but
it's a long way off from producing useful
quantities of antimatter. It's also important
to remember that it took a tremendous amount of
energy to create those few atoms. Someday it
might be possible to make antimatter with much
less energy (and by possible I mean it doesn't
violate the known laws of physics) but we're a
long way away from that point.
However, antimatter does some practical uses
today. PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans
are used in medicine to image the human brain
and other organs. In a PET scan the patient is
injected with a small amount of radioactive
material called a tracer. As the tracer decays
it emits positrons which collide with electrons
in the patients body and give off very short
bursts of gamma rays. These gamma rays are
measured by an array of very sensitive detectors
and the data is used to construct a 3d image of
the organ. (see click here)
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Answer 2:
Well, history has shown us that scientific
advances in the future are often even more wild
and exciting that what people can think of in
the present, so I'm hesitant to use the
word "never" when talking about what scientific
technology we'll have developed in the future.
Right now, the biggest problem with antimatter
is that we have no way to contain it (since it
just annihilates when it hits any kind of normal
matter), so there's no way to store it once it's
been created. However, it's possible that at
some point, someone will solve this problem.
There is a bigger problem with using
antimatter for energy, though: there is little
to no antimatter in the universe! If we wanted
to use antimatter for energy, we would need to
create it from scratch, which would require huge
amounts of energy. It would be much more energy
efficient to just use the energy directly,
rather than using it to create antimatter.
So, although I can't say whether or not we'll
ever use antimatter in the far future, because
of the above problems, it seems like it almost
certainly will never be used in our
lifetimes.
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