Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
‘Angels’ and CERN scientists: Creativity smackdown
Ever read the book Angels & Demons ? It’s author Dan Brown’s first thriller featuring the character of Robert Langdon, the religion scholar who solves the mystery in Brown’s more famous later work, The Da Vinci Code.
Angels & Demons has all of Da Vinci Code’s vast conspiracies, arcane lore, lurid and/or mind-blowing secrets, high-level criminal creeps and full-out-flashy, H-bomb-explosion-sized climaxes – only more so. The end of the story is so grossly and hilariously over the top that I could hardly make myself turn the pages: Brown writes it as if he were the kid in Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, heaping up ever-wilder and more ridiculous fantasies until you just want to throw the book out the window or smack him or both.
A&D has been made into a movie – like Da Vinci, starring Tom Hanks as Langdon – that opens Friday and I can’t wait to see if it makes all of Brown’s literary hyperventilating more believable, or even less so. But, to get to the point, the film release got me thinking about CERN, the particle-physics laboratory that figures in the A&D plot.
It sounds like SMERSH or THRUSH or some other James Bond-type evil organization. In fact, it’s a world-renowned scientific organization started in the mid-1950s by many European nations that still collaborate on the running of CERN and its enormous facility on the Franco-Swiss border, where some of the world’s best minds study the nature of subatomic particles and forces with the help of the newly repaired and gargantuan Large Hadron Collider.
What those minds do there may not read quite as melodramatically as Brown’s novel, but is a creative adventure of far greater significance: They are literally trying to figure out how the Universe works. In the process, they’ve come up with other things, too – for instance, the World Wide Web was invented there, as a means for scientists to share information.
The CERN site contains as many pages and layers of fascinating information as Angels & Demons has plot twists. One of the things I like best about it is the quote from Albert Einstein that amounts to their company motto: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I guess Dan Brown took that to heart.
