She Blinded Me With Science

The Cockcroft Walton at Fermilab. (Courtesy of Fermilab Visual Media Services)

The world premiere of Angels & Demons came with a special series of lectures. Now I haven't seen the movie yet but I was able to attend a lecture at my favorite science place - Fermilab.

The connection between the movie and the physic lab is the use of antimatter in the plot. I don't know who thought of the creating the series of lectures but I find it a brilliant idea to use the marketing of the movie to generate an interest in science.

Besides being conveniently located for me, Fermilab is currently the largest producer of antimatter (oh did you think this stuff didn't exist?). Very small amounts of the stuff is spinning around their rings.

The lecture was given by the lovely Dr. Marcela Carena.

She explained the facts regarding antimatter. As Hollywood typically does it exaggerated the use of antimatter and incorrectly created some situations with it. One big mistake is the amount of antimatter the bad guys steal in the movie. Scientist have never produce an amount anywhere near the amount in the movie plot.

In the movie the antimatter is taken from CERN, which will soon become the world's most powerful particle accelerator (they had a few startup problem so Fermilab is still the leading current active one). Here's a few facts from the CERN site:

Even if CERN used its accelerators only for making antimatter, it could produce no more than about 1 billionth of a gram per year. To make 1 g of antimatter - the amount made by Vetra in the movie - would therefore take about 1 billion years. The total amount of antimatter produced in CERN’s history is less than 10 nanograms - containing only enough energy to power a 60 W light bulb for 4 hours.

Dr. Carena pointed off some very interesting facts about antimatter in her lecture.

• Antimatter is responsible for the light coming from the sun
• Antimatter is used in medicine - the PET scan
• It was first seen (and measured) in 1932 by Carl Anderson in a cloud chamber.

You can watch the Fermilab lecture here.

Here's a web site about the lecture series.


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