Zatera Ul

Well, I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (the book before The Da Vinci Code). Basically the story is a race against time to decipher historical clues and track down the Illuminati, who have stolen a significant amount of antimatter from CERN and planted it somewhere in the Vatican as a time bomb, while the cardinals are assembling to elect the next Pope.

The science is a bit off. One obvious error is that Brown describes antimatter as a new, clean, efficient energy source. Yes, antimatter annihilating with matter will give off a huge amount of energy. But it takes at least this huge amount of energy to make the antimatter in the first place–because matter and antimatter are created together, and then separated.

CERN explains it all here, including how it’s just not possible to contain that much antimatter in one place–basically, magnetic fields only work on charged particles, and charged particles (of like charge) repel each other. Not that they can make antimatter in any quantity, anyway.

Another plot point is that this creation of antimatter somehow is evidence for the Christian idea of creation ex nihilo. I don’t understand where he’s coming from on this–E = mc^2 has been around for a while, and is nothing new.

Worse is when the Swiss Guard cuts the power to the Vatican to go searching for the antimatter containment canister by sweeping for its magnetic field. Why? Because right in front of the canister is a stolen wireless security camera, which has been steadily transmitting video of the canister to them all along (the canister has a display that shows the time left on its battery–when the time runs out, containment fails and the antimatter will annihilate). Track down the radio signal, you idiots! They’d have to be right on top of it to detect the magnetic field. As it turns out, the canister is well hidden, and the wireless camera has an amazingly strong signal.

Downright embarrassing is the in-passing assertion in the book that Christian communion is a borrowing from Aztec blood rituals. (MFH took the book with him this morning, so I can’t quote exactly.) Oh, come on! Like there’s no evidence of communion before the discovery of the New World!