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Angels and Anti-Matter
Having watched the movie last night, I must say that I was disappointed. It is just not possible to insert much textual information into a two-hour movie without boring the average movie-goer. But without the textual data, the storyline lacks substance. Below are excerpts from my column of April 06, 2005 titled Angels and Terrorists: “I will admit that I have, perhaps, been reading one novel too many. In particular, the novel Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown, who wrote it before he wrote The Da Vinci Code (which has made him a multi-millionaire). “My interest in The Da Vinci Code was sparked by its detailed references to the Gnostic Gospels, the Council of Nicaea, and Emperor Constantine the Great, subjects which I had previously been doing some reading on, to satisfy my curiosity. (See my article “Da Vinci’s Code,” Aug. 19, 2004.) “I picked up Angels and Demons at a bookstore in The Podium last Christmas, not because it was also by Dan Brown, but because its plot revolved around anti-matter, in which I have a layman’s interest, it being an integral part of my personal cosmology. “(Anti-matter is the opposite twin of matter: its electrons are positively charged and its protons are negatively charged, the exact opposite of matter. The laboratory evidence is that when matter collides with anti-matter, they annihilate each other in a burst of pure energy. And if this is all Greek to anyone, the question has to be asked, “What’s the anti-matter? Don’t you understand sub-atomic physics?”) “In Angels and Demons, a scientist working in the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire or CERN near Geneva has discovered a way to isolate and collect anti-matter. CERN is a real institution and is only one of two in the world with an underground particle accelerator, more than two kilometers in diameter (if memory serves), that accelerates sub-atomic particles to speeds approaching the speed of light, preparatory to collision. In the novel, the scientist is brutally murdered and his canister of anti-matter is stolen by person or persons unknown. “Dan Brown’s formulaic hero, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, is enlisted to track down the killer or killers because the murdered scientist’s chest has been burned with a mysterious symbol. Langdon eventually deciphers it as the ambigram of the Illuminati, a secret society going back to the time of Galileo and made up of scientists and thinkers who hate the Catholic Church for the blind faith that it supposedly encourages. “If all this sounds familiar to those who have read The Da Vinci Code, it is because both plots were cast in the same mold. For the Priory of Sion, read the Illuminati; for the Holy Grail, read the canister of anti-matter; for the murdered curator of the Louvre, read the murdered scientist at CERN; for the beauteous (French) niece of the Louvre curator, read the beauteous (Italian) daughter of the CERN scientist, as Langdon’s female sidekick; for mysterious clues in the paintings of Da Vinci, read mysterious clues in the statues of the sculptor Bernini. “And the only reason I am writing about Angels and Demons now is because the action takes place in the Vatican while the cardinals are having their conclave to elect a new Pope. The bad guys who stole the canister of anti-matter from CERN have smuggled it into Rome with the intention of detonating it during the conclave, which would have blown all the cardinals and everyone and everything else in the Vatican to high heavens. “There is non-stop action as Langdon and his beauteous sidekick, who happens to be a nuclear physicist, frantically search for the canister in the different rooms and crannies, each minutely described, of the Vatican, as the cardinals meet in the Sistine Chapel to elect the next Pope. “Four of the conclaving cardinals are kidnapped and are murdered one by one as Langdon and the beauteous Vittoria rush from one mysterious clue to another imbedded in Bernini statues located in different parts of Rome, until the final denouement in the dungeons of the Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. “Seven years ago (or 1998), Dan Brown could have written a novel about a bunch of religious fanatics (not necessarily from the Opus Dei) who hijack two airliners, with the intention of crashing them against the World Trade Center, but are prevented from doing so by the timely intervention of his hero Robert Langdon and his beauteous Negro-Oriental-American Indian sidekick, working from mysterious clues spray-painted on Manhattan subway coaches. “That novel could have been in the New York Times bestseller list for 150 weeks and could have been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks, to be premiered in a Times Square theatre on, let’s see now…… September 11, 2001?” End of excerpts from my 2005 article titled Angels and Terrorists. In my article of September 10, 2008 titled The God Particle, I wrote about the efforts of real-life scientists at CERN, the same CERN in Dan Brown’s novel, “to find a sub-atomic particle that has only been theorized by physicist Peter Higgs of Scotland, called the Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle. Higgs’ boson is supposed to explain what gives mass to matter…… “I do not claim to understand quantum mechanics or the String Theory, but some four decades ago I developed my own cosmology. “In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end. Four decades ago, astronomers and physicists were divided between the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory as the most logical explanation of the cosmos. In time, the Big Bang theory won out, and the CERN experiment seeks to find out what happened during the first billionths of a second after the Big Bang, from which the rest of the cosmos is said to have evolved. “But even if they were to find that out, it would still leave unanswered the next logical question of what happened, or what was there, before the Big Bang. In my cosmology, this question is not the final riddle because there is no beginning and there is no end. “In classical physics, it was believed that matter and energy were separate entities that could not be created or destroyed, one into or from the other. But in relativistic physics, it is accepted that matter – or more correctly, mass – and energy are two aspects of the same reality, expressed in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2..(Sorry, but I do not know how to click exponents on the computer.) The energy of a quantity of matter is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. “In my cosmology, there is no beginning and there is no end because mass is constantly being transformed into energy, as in black holes; and energy is constantly being transformed into mass, as in Big Bangs. It is a process that happens and has happened all through time all throughout the universe, of which we know only a fraction, even with the most powerful optical and radio telescopes. “But even with this limited empirical knowledge, I find it hard to imagine space where there is nothing, not even light from distant galaxies. Where there is nothing, there is also no time, time attaining a reality only from the movement of celestial bodies relative to each other. “The CERN scientists believe that the collision of high-speed protons may reveal not only the God Particle, but also the existence of as many as eleven dimensions, seven more than what we are aware of : length, width, depth and space-time. And the key may be, in my cosmology, the presence, origin and behavior of anti-matter. “The matter that we know in our daily lives is made up of atoms with nuclei of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, around which orbit negatively charged electrons. But scientists know from their experiments that there is also such a thing as anti-matter, which is made up of the mirror opposites of matter: negatively charged protons and positively charged electrons (called positrons). Scientists also know that when matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other, producing pure energy. “In my cosmology, there are both matter and anti-matter in the cosmos, and when they collide –as they possibly do more often than we are at present aware of – they annihilate each other and produce pure energy which scientists have not yet fully learned how to track. There is no beginning and there is no end……” |
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