“Fans at Daytona always get extra excited when officials decide to introduce some antimatter cars circling the track in the opposite direction.”
The amount of energy released by a 1,000 kg car colliding with a similar vehicle made of antimatter is 1.8 x 1020 J, which is equivalent to about 43 gigatons (or 43,000 MT) of TNT—which is also about the same energy that an asteroid 1 km in diameter striking the Earth at 20 km/s would release.
Those fans at Daytona better really enjoy their last few moments of excitement.
Which reminds me of the very first What-if: Relativistic Baseball. Which even today, 160 What-if’s later, remains one of my faves.
It also reminds me of No-Rules Nascar, in which he also mentioned Daytona and particle accelerators.
Interestingly (to me, anyway 
), the kinetic energy of the vehicles is negligible in the extreme (only 8.1 MJ total assuming they are each traveling at 200 mph). That’s just one part in 22 trillion compared to the energy released in the matter-antimatter annihilation.
Kinetic << Chemical <<< Atomic <<<< Nuclear <<<<< Antimatter.
Whole lotta less-than’s in there. 
I’m not sure I want to be on the same planet as the folks who first succeed at discovering the unknown next term in my formula.
A distinction has to be made between luminosity (total number of particles being collided) and collision electron-voltage (roughly, the speed at which they’re colliding). The NASCAR collider has great luminosity but extremely poor electron-voltage.
Also, I wish that historical graph was properly calibrated to show the actual line/curve of progress. Is collision energy a straight line function of track length, or has there been any technological improvement?
Note that’s a Log–log plot - Wikipedia. Which means the underlying best-fit straight line of that dot plot is actually an exponential function.
But it would be interesting to plot something like energy / track length over time. Something I’d rather not plot is expense over time.
How are you defining “Atomic” that’s distinct from both “Chemical” and “Nuclear”?
Power law, not exponential. y = x^p, not y=b^x. It makes a big difference: Any exponential growth function will eventually surpass any power law function.
Good point. I was taking a bit of liberty inspired by the terminology of nuclear weapons. You could rewrite what I meant as
Chemical <<< Fission <<<< Fusion
Now whether that’s good physics is a different question I defer to you about. But that’s what I meant. 
Good pimp again. Thank you.
As a professor told us “Getting a straight line on a log-log plot is not interesting. Not getting a straight line is interesting.”
Nice catchy saying.
OTOH, you chose to plot your data on a log-log plot for a reason. There’s lots of other chart types you could have chosen for different reasons.
In this case Randall picked log-log for us. So what does that tell us about @Lumpy’s good question that I was stabbing (ineffectually?) around the edges of:
Yeah, I’d like to see a chart of collision energy per particle as a function of track length. I think you’d see the effect of improvements in magnetic field densty that can be achieved
8.1 MJ is about 5e25 eV, right about where the dot is in the graph.
The latest colliders are proton-proton rather than proton-antiproton; apparently they now operate at energies where the contribution from annihilation is minor, and foregoing antiproton production and storage spares a lot of cost and complexity.
If the contribution from matter-antimatter annihilation is minor, then that evidently flips the kinetic energy to antimatter sequence that @LSLGuy posted above on its head—for particle accelerators anyway.
Nah, lousy luminosity. The Daytona accelerator has only a few dozen particles. They’re compound particles, but then, so are the ones in the LHC.
Isaac Asimov commented that most major scientific discoveries don’t start with, Eureka!" but rather, “Hmmm. That’s odd.”
Well, getting two or even three straight lines (connected by brief curved regions) on a log-log plot isn’t all that rare, either.
“Rumor has it that they’re finally auctioning off the zeppelin navigation bands, but everyone is worried that the scary boat captains will express interest.”