Getting a Big Bang out of creativity

This is great timing:  In the wake of the May 15 release of the new Tom Hanks movie, Angels & Demons - whose wildly imaginative plot  (based on the book by Dan The Da Vinci Code Brown) involves CERN, a real-life, European particle-physics laboratory featuring the Large Hadron Collider – the New York Times has a story about the National Ignition Facility .

No, it doesn’t mass-manufacture car start parts. This NIF place is … well, it sounds even more like Technicolor science fiction than Brown’s fantasy version of CERN. It’s a football-stadium-sized building filled with mirrors and crystals and dedicated to figuring out fusion.

Fusion is the Holy Grail of energy production. Some 20 years ago, a couple of scientists claimed they had created “cold fusion” in a bottle, which might as well have been cold tea in a bottle for all the fusion it actually represented, and after being discredited and generally reviled by their peers, they slunk away into obscurity and are probably selling miracle wrinkle creams somewhere today. 

But on goes the quest to fuse simple atoms into more complex atoms and release astral amounts of clean energy. (Does clean mean no radioactivity or just no carbon? Someone should ask, don’t you think?)   So over the last 12 years or so, about 10,000 people out in Livermore, Calif., have spent $3.5 billion creating this huge House of Lasers in hopes of smashing some hydrogen atoms together, making helium and thus allowing us to keep all the lights blazing in our houses and our thermostats set on a comfy 72 for all eternity. 

This is not to scoff.  Most people never thought they’d be able to have person-to-person conversations through a black box on the wall or see live people moving around in a studio  - or on the moon! – through another, bigger box in the living room. Or  have the power to annihilate a whole city with a single bomb.  Maybe the darned NIF thing could work … just not like The Bomb, let’s hope.  

Angels & Demons endowed the collision of matter and antimatter with bomblike properties that the CERN folks have been quick to pooh-pooh for the public’s peace of mind.  If we can believe them – and, presumably, we can, because France and Switzerland, whose mutual border CERN straddles, have not exploded – we can probably believe the NIF.

So while we’re waiting for Livermore, Calif. to ignite  - in a good way! – let’s amuse ourselves by finding out the difference between CERN’s real science and the Hollywood drama of A&D’s spectacularly ruptured heavens. First question: Does antimatter produce an anticlimax?

‘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.

The story

The science