14 DAY TRIAL // The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) is currently trying to reassure people of the fact that it's physically impossible to create antimatter in the world's largest particle accelerator, so as to allay fears that have been growing over the past years. In Dan Brown's book, “Angels & Demons,” the author depicts the destruction of the Vatican via the use of antimatter stolen from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near the Swiss-French border. Now, CERN officials are collaborating with the producers of the movie in order to ensure that the collider is depicted as scientifically-accurate as possible, so as to avoid mass panic in people that do not know how accelerators work.
“As Dan Brown correctly points out, when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, leaving only energy behind. One of the great mysteries of the universe today is how enough matter has survived to provide the building blocks for stars, planets, and even us,” CERN representatives said in a statement.
“The scientists here have been incredibly helpful in explaining the science to us, and giving us access to some incredible places. I think what they're doing here is fantastic,” the director of the new “Angels & Demons” movie, Ron Howard, added in another statement. He also directed movies such as the “Da Vinci Code,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13,” and pointed out that he was thoroughly amazed at the work being done at the LHC, as he and some other crew members had access to several sensitive areas of the project.
At the beginning of the Universe, some 13.7 billion years ago, matter and antimatter are though to have formed in equal amounts, but somehow, in the meantime, matter prevailed and gave birth to everything space comprises today, including galaxies, black holes, cosmic dust, and all things in between. CERN researchers maintained that antimatter was not necessarily bad, if used correctly. “Preliminary experiments carried out at CERN have shown that antimatter particle beams could be very effective at destroying cancer cells,” they explained.
For example, positron emission tomography, also known as PET scan, relies on the principles of antimatter to create viable diagnostics for cancer presumptions. But the scenario depicted in Dan Brown's book is exaggerated to the extreme, hypothesizing that entire cities could be wiped out from the face of the Earth with sufficient amounts of antimatter. However, realistically speaking, there is absolutely no way for that to happen, on account of the fact that sufficient quantities will never be produced, at least at the LHC.