Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons recently made its way onto the silver screen, and has drawn massive audiences due to the overwhelming popularity of the book, as well as the film’s star-studded cast. However, few may stop to consider the principles of physics behind the story. Enter Scott Menary of York’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Menary is one of several Canadian and American particle physicists who are giving free public-friendly lectures at universities across the continent to elucidate the science behind Angels and Demons. Although many of the principles in the film are extremely complex concepts in theoretical physics, in his lecture at York’s Accolade West Hall in late May, Professor Menary managed to make the Higgs Boson and antimatter accessible to even a science-illiterate audience.
In Angels and Demons, Harvard Symbologist Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) is called to CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to examine the symbol on the chest of a dead physicist, only to discover that a group of scientists called the “IIluminati” has resurfaced to seek vengeance upon their archenemy, the Catholic Church. Langdon discovers the Illuminati have plotted to destroy the Vatican using antimatter they have stolen from CERN.
CERN, Professor Menary explained, is the world’s largest research laboratory for particle physics and houses the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator 100 metres underground. By accelerating and smashing protons along a 27-kilometre track, scientists are able to better understand the laws of nature while attempting to recreate the conditions that existed when the Big Bang occurred. Upon generating these conditions, scientists hope to discover the nature of mass as defined by the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Standard Model is a theory that accounts for all of the forces in the universe, except gravity, and stipulates that particles produced in the Big Bang did not have mass. According to the Standard Model, particles acquire their mass by moving through space and by interacting with a specific particle, which endows each of the other particles with mass. This unseen molecule, which occupies all of space, was named the “Higgs Boson”—or the “God particle” as it is referred to in Angels and Demons. Menary mentioned that the “Higgs Boson is the lynchpin of the standard model; something like it has to exist or the entire system is wrong.” Essentially, if the particles in the Big Bang were created without mass, there must be something out there that gave them mass.
In addition to possibly producing the Higgs Boson particles, physicists at CERN are producing antimatter particles, such as those believed to have formed during the Big Bang. Antimatter particles are identical in mass but opposite in charge to physical matter.
The Big Bang hypothesis posits that at the moment the universe was created, particles and antiparticles existed in equal amounts. However, one second after this moment of creation, the antimatter, as well as most matter, completely disappeared and only a small amount of matter was left to create the stars, the galaxies, and planet Earth.
Antimatter does not exist on earth—it needs to be produced at CERN in the Large Hadron Collider through a process of extremely high energy particle collisions. Antiparticles annihilate when they collide with particles. In order to trap them, the antiparticles need to be decelerated from 96 per cent to 10 per cent of the speed of light. They also need to be stored in a “Penning Trap Ultrahigh Vacuum” so that they do not come into contact with matter. In very simple terms, if antimatter were to interact with matter in real life, an explosion would occur.
In Angels and Demons, one gram of antimatter is expected to destroy the Vatican once released from the Penning Trap. Even though one gram of antimatter could in fact destroy the Vatican (it could even destroy all of Rome and the surrounding area), it is unrealistic for Brown to claim that the production of this one gram is even possible. CERN is only capable of producing one billionth of a gram of antimatter per year. It would take one billion years to produce just one gram of antimatter!
Although Dan Brown may not have used particle physics principles with complete accuracy in his book, Dr. Menary explained that this invisible, destructive molecule does in fact exist, and it’s simply a matter of separating fact from fiction.
