Reviewed: Angels and Demons
Dan Brown
Atria Books, New York, 2004
A religious cult has stolen 250 milligrams of antimatter from a secret laboratory at CERN, intending to use it as a "devastating new weapon of destruction" to demolish the Vatican, in Dan Brown's fictional thriller, Angels and Demons. But the real demons are in the details of antimatter production in Brown's precursor to his mega-best-seller, The Da Vinci Code.
The magnetic "trap" canister used to store the antimatter in Brown's novel is based on the very real Penning traps, which are widely used to store ions, and which have been successfully adapted to antimatter storage at CERN. And annihilating 250 milligrams of antimatter would pack quite a punch. According to David McGinnis, of the Accelerator Division at Fermilab, the explosive power would be the equivalent of about 10 kilotonnes of TNT, or about half that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Now we encounter some problems—or "reality," as McGinnis, formerly head of Fermilab's Antiproton Source, terms it. (Brown, of course, happily, knowingly and unequivocally describes the story as complete fiction; see the accompanying autograph page.)
Based on the experience at Fermilab, the largest known producer of human-made antiprotons anywhere, McGinnis estimates the power bill alone for producing one-fourth of a gram of antimatter would be on the order of one thousand trillion US dollars. As McGinnis says, "Somebody, somewhere would notice that kind of expense. It's not something that could be kept hidden by one scientist working alone in a secret basement laboratory. Also, it takes an army of people to produce the antimatter for our experiments."
At 0.6 trillion-trillion antiprotons per gram, producing 250 milligrams of antimatter would mean producing about 0.15 trillion-trillion antiprotons or antimatter particles.
"Fermilab can make antiprotons at a rate of 120 billion antiprotons per hour," McGinnis says. "At the end of Collider Run II of the Tevatron, we hope to make antiprotons at a rate of 400 billion antiprotons per hour. Even at this rate, it would take us about 40 million years to make 250 milligrams of antimatter."
Say all these hurdles are overcome; McGinnis spots yet another "fact" that defies credibility.
"The book has a beautiful young Italian woman scientist running around with a middle-aged male professor," he says. "I do not think this is possible."
Mike Perricone