ANTIMATTER: NOT AS SCARY AS WE THINK

"No!" Vittoria said from above, breathless. "We must evacuate right now! You cannot take the antimatter out of here! If you bring it up, everyone outside will die!"
Angels and Demons, Dan Brown, Pocket Books

IT WAS not so long ago that we were hearing how CERN's Large Hadron Collider would produce planet-destroying black holes. Now a movie based on Dan Brown's blockbuster (Angel's and Demons), due to hit the big screen next month, provides us with another supposed danger emanating from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland: antimatter, the seed of a weapon of unsurpassed destructive power.

While Brown's take on antimatter is fictional, the stuff itself certainly isn't. We see its signature in cosmic rays, and it is routinely made in high-energy collisions inside particle smashers the world over. In hospitals, radioactive molecules that emit antimatter particles are used for imaging in the technique known as positron emission tomography.

Brown was right about one thing, though: if you want to find out more about antimatter, CERN is the place to go. In this special feature, we explain how experiments at the laboratory are helping to answer some of our more pressing questions about this most elusive of substances.

ANGELS AND DEMONS OFFICIAL TRAILER HD



Word of the Day

Monday April 27, 2009

ken \KEN\, noun:
1. Perception; understanding; knowledge.
2. The range of vision.
3. View; sight.