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?