Antimatter offers no energy conservation, which is a big problem. Is antimatter the "God particle?" Rolf Landua anwered "no," and reminded us it had nothing to do with the popular Higgs boson.Ĭan it be used as a new energy? Is it, really, "the energy source of the future?" Probably not. He also tried to answer some of the book's allegations about antimatter. Some of them made us laugh, such as the way they mixed our two mountain ranges and added Mont Blanc over the Jura to make it look more impressive on screen, or the incredible sounds they associate with the protons' moves in the LHC.īut that's fair play: a movie has to be impressive, to use pictures and sounds to tell its story whenever possible.
Rolf Landua showed us a few scenes from the movie. He was trying to understand the scientific matters of the story, and to make the movie more realistic and believable. Ron Howard, the director of the Angels & Demons movie, actually visited CERN in 2007 with part of the movie's staff to find out more about antimatter and these mysterious "antimatter traps" used in the book to conserve and transport antimatter. His conference answered theoretical questions such as "What is antimatter?", "Where is it made?", "How can it be studied?" and at the same time compared the reality of CERN's research to Dan Brown's hypothesis: is antimatter "the energy source of the future?" Can it be used to design a powerful bomb? Explaining complex questions such as antimatter to any audience sounds pretty difficult, yet Rolf Landua managed it perfectly. The conference was a great example of scientific popularization.
Rolf Landua was kind enough to let me summarize his talk for GeekMom. I was lucky enough to attend with my students a conference by CERN physicist Rolf Landua ( who could have inspired Dan Brown for his character Leonardo Vetra), in which CERN scientists answer Dan Brown's allegations about antimatter in his novel Angels & Demons. I don't remember if I already mentioned it on GeekMom, but I live and teach near Geneva, on the border between France and Switzerland, thus very close to the CERN and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC is used as a common name in the area, even by complete non-geeks).
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