Science Events Audio

Angels & Demons The Science Revealed: Why Physicists Would Love To Trap Antihydrogen, But The Vatican Need Not Fear... "Angels & Demons" (2000) was Dan Brown's first thriller to feature Robert Langdon, a Harvard University professor enmeshed in a conspiracy to destroy Vatican City with antimatter stolen from CERN. As in Brown's later novel, "The Da Vinci Code" (2003), Langdon must decipher symbols left in ancient architecture and art that link medieval secret societies with a modern-day murder plot. According to Fajans, the amount of antimatter that the book's villains steal from CERN would be more than sufficient to destroy Vatican City and a portion of Rome. Antimatter is the ultimate explosive, annihilating completely when it comes into contact with ordinary matter to produce pure energy. No one has yet succeeded in trapping any antiatoms, he said. Two groups of physicists use the Antiproton Daccelerator at CERN - not the Large Hadron Collider - to slow down antiprotons enough