DAN BROWN’s novel Angels and Demons begins with the big bold word “FACT”. It continues: “The world’s largest scientific research facility – Switzerland’s Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) – recently succeeded in producing the first particles of antimatter.” That much is true: CERN really does exist. It is the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, and it really does make antimatter. The story is about a plot to destroy the Vatican using antimatter stolen from CERN. And much of what follows is pure fiction.
That CERN exists at all probably came as news to a lot of Brown’s readers, many of whom have subsequently taken the time to find out what this mysterious place really is. What they have discovered is that while much of the science in the book is pure invention, the real science is every bit as fascinating.
When Angels and Demons first appeared in 2000, it provoked a ripple of interest in CERN. But when Brown’s next book, The Da Vinci Code, came out a few years later and sold in the millions, people started buying Angels and Demons in droves. Interest in CERN soared, and the centre soon put up a website to respond to the enormous demand for information about antimatter that resulted. In its first month, the site received nearly 70,000 hits – not bad for a physics lab.
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Dan Brown visited CERN in the 1990s while researching the book. CERN’s press officer then, a Scotsman who now lives in California, dimly remembers showing a wannabe American author around the laboratory. At that time, not many Americans had heard of CERN. Today, when he tells his neighbours that he once worked at CERN, the reaction is “Wow! That’s cool!”. Thanks Dan!
The CERN described in Angels and Demons is undoubtedly cool. It looks like an Ivy League university. The director-general is a larger-than-life character worthy of a James Bond movie. The lab owns a private jet capable of crossing the Atlantic in just an hour. Would that it were true. There is little that is correct about the science in Angels and Demons. To some scientists this is an outrage, to others it’s just amusing. To me, it really doesn’t matter. The whole of the book is so clearly fiction that few people take the science at face value. Instead, they turn to CERN to find out what antimatter is really about.
In the book, just a gram of antimatter is stolen from CERN. As Brown correctly points out, when antimatter meets matter, the mass of the two is converted into pure energy in a process vastly more efficient than nuclear fission. This, he claims, could be used for destructive purposes, which makes for a gripping thriller, or for peaceful purposes, as a new source of energy. But there’s a flaw in the logic. To generate energy, you would need a source of antimatter, which simply doesn’t exist in nature. You can’t go out and mine it. You have to make it, and that is a very energy-inefficient process.
Brown is quite right that CERN makes antimatter. We’ve been making it for decades to help us understand, for example, why there appears to be no naturally occurring antimatter in the universe. But in all that time, we’ve made less than a billionth of the quantity stolen in Angels and Demons. If we could gather it all together and annihilate it with matter, the energy released would light a single light bulb for just a few minutes. Even if a gram of antimatter did exist, transporting it would not be a simple matter of picking up a bottle and walking off. The kind of antimatter Dan Brown’s villain takes to Rome cannot be contained.
“Antimatter will never solve the world’s energy problems, and it will never be used to make a bomb either”
So, sadly, antimatter will never solve the world’s energy problems, and happily it will never be used to make a bomb either. That’s not to say that it can’t be used at all. Apart from its importance in research, antimatter is used in hospitals on a daily basis. It is matter-antimatter annihilation that allows positron emission tomography (PET) scanners to produce images that are vital in some forms of medical diagnosis, frequently for cancer. PET works by detecting the two photons that are produced when an electron in the body annihilates with its antimatter counterpart, a positron, which is released inside the patient by a radioactive isotope.
Some forms of cancer treatment already rely on bombarding tumours with particles to kill cancer cells. Today, these techniques use protons or carbon ions. In the future, antimatter may have a role to play. A recent experiment at CERN has taken the first steps towards testing whether antiprotons can kill cancer cells.
CERN is a very open laboratory. Anyone who wants to find out about antimatter can visit and click the “Spotlight on” button. And the lab has an on-site exhibition and a visitor programme that takes in the antimatter facility.
By telling people that CERN exists, Dan Brown has provided us with the opportunity to share the excitement of fundamental research with a whole new audience. And in the case of antimatter, the truth is every bit as strange and exciting as the fiction.
