Science
Angels & Demons: Good Movie, Bad Science
Several days ago Andy D. and I went to see the new film Angels & Demons based on the novel of the same name written by Dan Brown. Andy and I were expecting more nods to religion than there were and the movie was often delightfully irreverent, at times leaving the two of us doubled over in laughter at jibes which seemed largely wasted on the rest of the audience… Fort Wayne’s lack of humor toward religion notwithstanding I rather enjoyed the movie and would recommend it; that said, if you want any degree of scientific realism in your movies than I wouldn’t recommend getting your hopes up.
Angels & Demons makes several highly inaccurate depictions of antimatter, it shows CERN creating 3 marble sized amounts of antimatter from a single run of the LHC, it also claims that one of these marble sized chunks of antimatter is capable of destroying Vatican City in an explosion on scale with a small nuclear warhead. One thing that they did get (partially) right is that some antimatter can be contained inside an electromagnetic field.
Scientists have been creating antiparticles in laboratories for over 50 years and in 1995 CERN was the first laboratory to create anti-atoms. According to a CERN official they have produced roughly 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter which would be capable of releasing energy and gamma radiation on the scale of a small firecracker… Be afraid, be very afraid… Do antimatter and matter destroy each other on contact? Yes… Does it release energy when this happens? Yes… Is it a quantity of energy that could ever make an effective explosive? No…
The containment system depicted (while stylized for Hollywood) does have some fact behind it. Charged antimatter can be contained within a magnetic field, neutrally charged antimatter however cannot and to date there is no effective containment system for it. It also requires a great deal of energy to maintain these fields. Since only charged particles can be contained in these electromagnetic traps the particles of like charge are constantly repelling each other, requiring ever increasing amounts of energy to contain larger amounts of antiparticles. Because of this, the small self contained system depicted in the film containing a quantity of antimatter significantly larger than all the antimatter created by scientists to date, is pretty much impossible…
If you can turn off your desire for scientific accuracy for a few hours, Angels & Demons is an enjoyable movie which, if nothing else, left me wanting to learn more about antimatter.
Resources for further reading…
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The Angels & Demons: Good Movie, Bad Science by Joel Klinepeter, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Ambigram, Angels & Demons, Anti-matter, Anti-particle, Antimatter, Antiparticle, Catholicism, CERN, Dan Brown, European Organization for Nuclear Research, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, Particle Physics, Pope, Tom Hanks, Vatican City Discussion
7 comments for “Angels & Demons: Good Movie, Bad Science”
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Nice post. I love the links. CERN might get some new fans after seeing the movie. Too bad it wasn’t great on the science but it looks like CERN made a website about it.
The score and shoots of Rome were beautiful too. Oh and Catholics have some funky outfits. Overall, it was a good movie and while there was accommodation made for religion it overall favored skepticism.
I’m looking forward to seeing this movie also. Thanks for the write-up.
I can imagine the audience’s (lack of) response to some of the humor in the movie pointed towards religion. When I watched Talladega Nights in the theater, quite a few people in the audience didn’t find the reference to baby Jesus as being very funny. The same was true for the movie Borat. I loved it when Sacha Cohen attended the crazy evangelical church service with the pastor speaking in tongues. Didn’t go over too well with the church folk in attendance.
Haha! Only Andys may comment on this post!
Andy D or Joel, did you read the book? I did, a long time ago, and I feel like in that book they only produced a few hundred molecules of anti-matter, rather than however many millions it would take for a small marble-sized amount.
This, of course, is nothing compared to the elusive and highly-scientific red matter as seen in Star Trek, NOVA, and Scientific Amerian Frontier. That can create a black hole, and if you fly your ship through it, you can travel through time!
lol- go Andy’s.
No, didn’t read this book. I did read the Divinci Code though and found it to be an engaging work of fiction.
Despite what Joel said, I believe what he meant was: C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!
I was quite annoyed that the Vatican finally allowed Tom Hanks and the physicist (don’t remember the characters’ names) into the archives, only to have her rip out a page from what appeared to be the finally copy of one of Gallileo’s pamphlets. It felt like sacrilege to see professors treat invaluable texts like that.
I also didn’t think it was irreverent as you guys found it to be. Maybe that’s just me.