franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) (08/31/85)
I heard a talk by Dr. Robert Forward on this subject last year. He is quite convinced that anti-matter drives are quite possible. The storage problem was not, in his opinion, the critical barrier to development; getting the anti-matter in reasonable quantities at a reasonable price was. (We can get it at an unreasonable price from particle accelators.) He was of the opinion that a lump of anti-matter in contact with ordinary matter would not explode, but "fizzle". I don't what calculations this was based on. I'm sure it would not be healthy to be around it, though. This does not mean that it is impossible to make an anti-matter bomb, of course. It just means that the trivial approach isn't good enough.