A murder plot at CERN? Yes, at least in Angels and Demons, Dan Brown’s 2000 best-selling novel. The Sony Pictures movie based on the book will be released on 15 May.
In Angels and Demons, a secret society wants to steal antimatter from CERN to build a bomb and destroy the Vatican. Part of the movie was filmed at CERN. The lab’s actual antimatter storage apparatus is “a small and visually uninspiring facility,” says CERN spokesman James Gillies, “so we took them to ATLAS,” one of the main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In Brown’s book, notes Gillies, “it’s the LHC that is creating stored antimatter. That’s complete nonsense.” Antimatter is in fact created—but not necessarily captured and stored—in all high-energy collisions.
Also unrealistic is the amount of antimatter needed by the plotters in Angels and Demons. In fact, only tiny quantities can be made; the...
