Recent content by John Tillinghast

Dan--you've got the right idea, but what matter is how far you can displace the point of action, not the time it takes for the force to propagate. Consider a simple lever arm (with a mass at one point). You provide a push at one point. The rest of the lever is carried along by forces inside the...

Antimatter is produced by the decay of carbon-11; there are a few atoms of C-11 in any bit of charcoal or pencil "lead". Unfortunately (or fortunately) carbon-11 is extremely rare, and there's no way to make the atoms decay. Then you'd have to capture the positrons before they interact with the...