Comment & Analysis
The European Particle Physics Laboratory – better known as CERN – suffered a blow to its image last year. Critics of the lab worried its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment could create black holes that would suck in the Earth and destroy it.
Their fears proved fruitless: the LHC atom-smasher was switched on for the first time in September 2008 – and the Earth survived. More prosaically, however, the high energy particle accelerator suffered a failure of two superconducting bending magnets, which meant the experimental unit had to be shut down. It is hoped that it will be restarted in September.
The LHC looms large in a new movie, Angels and Demons, based on the book of the same name by Dan Brown, author of the bestselling The Da Vinci Code. Here too, its influence is malign: the film sees the instigators of a plot to destroy the Catholic Church steal a flask of antimatter from CERN to use as a bomb beneath Vatican City. Once again, it’s the “perils” of the pursuit of science that are highlighted; but be sure to take those perils with a liberal pinch of salt.
Hollywood has no problem with playing fast and loose with experimental physics in Angels and Demons. Scientists who have seen the film take pains to point out that while the scriptwriters have got the odd thing right – one eighth of a gram of antimatter would indeed detonate with a force equivalent to one third the yield of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima – the science behind Angels and Demons is implausible.
First, it would take billions of years of operation of the 27 km underground LHC structure to collect such a volume of antimatter. “The quantities of antimatter at CERN are not enough to blow up a communion wafer,” says Dave Wark, professor of physics at Imperial College London. Second, even if such an amount were created, it would be impossible to contain it in a manmade vacuum. Third, anyone coming into contact with such a flask would receive a lethal dose of radiation within seconds. And so on.
But the scientists I spoke to at a preview screening of the movie, including Professor Wark and Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool, didn’t seem to mind. They are thrilled that their baby, the LHC, is used prominently in Angels and Demons. The movie itself is OK: it borrows liberally (some might say to the point where litigation could ensue) from David Fincher’s classic 1995 serial killer flick Seven. The plot trundles along amiably enough, with Ewan McGregor as a Catholic priest grappling with a papal succession and Tom Hanks as a Harvard heathen brought in to help track down the killer.
Much of the story is concerned with the conflict between faith and science, and the possible harmonisation of the two. Wark says: “It’s true that most of the scientists I know are atheists, or, more properly, agnostics, but there are some fine scientists who have faith too. Science and religion tend to become problematic when science is used to answer moral questions, or, conversely, when religion is used to describe the natural world.”
Does Hollywood have a duty to play fair with science? Or is it good enough just to get science into the movies, however misrepresented? Does it irritate the physicists among you when science stretches the bounds of plausibility on the silver screen? And, dare I say it, if engineers had their time on celluloid, how would you like them to be portrayed?