Tending to Geekiness

Last night, we went to see Angels and Demons.

It was very glossy, very well made, and ultimately a huge pile of horse manure.

I took a dislike to the film within the first few minutes – a few minor spoilers follow, there is another warning before major spoilers.

The pope dies, and the film moves to CERN where they’re firing up the LHC (which already has the badly wrong publicity about it destroying the world by creating mini-black holes). They show nervous people firing up the machine, with beautiful graphical displays showing the collisions as they happen… which given the rate of collisions is not on. That’s minor though.

What really annoyed is that within seconds three containers filled with significant amounts of antimatter. One of these containers is promptly stolen, and is used as the macguffin in the rest of the film.

This is ridiculous. The amount of energy needed to create the antimatter in these quantities is mindblowing. The LHC will create antimatter, but in microscopic quantities. The storage ring used to contain the antimatter whilst enough is made is huge, and certainly not the size of a can of coke. To use a magnetic bottle in this way, it’d have to be ionic antimatter, and electrical effects would be seen if in those quantities. Think electrostatic jumper and scale that by orders of magnitude. Anti-atoms would be neutral not be held in a magnetic bottle. At one point the rent-a-physicist (who is also an expert in toxins) proclaims that the biggest worry at CERN was that their work would be co-opted by the energy companies. Anti-matter would be a compact store of energy, but it wouldn’t be a source of energy, and making antimatter is vastly inefficient.

The LHC at CERN isn’t about generating and storing antimatter in little bottles – it’s about smashing particles together at high velocity to try and work out how the universe works at a fundamental level. Though the energy involved is high for the particles involved in each collision, the absolute amount of energy involved in each collision is negligible (most of the energy put into CERN goes to heat, rather than into the collision).

Okay, with the "science" part over, let’s look at the actual plot. I’ll put a break in here for those reading the RSS feed.
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