IIT - Inventing the Future

On June 2, IIT Professor Christopher White led an interactive lecture on the science behind the recent book-turned-movie Angels & Demons. In the book, protagonist Robert Langdon races against time to stop the zealot Illuminati group from destroying the Vatican. The diabolical plot involves the theft of a quarter of a gram of antimatter from the CERN research facility in Geneva, Switzerland. The book explains that if antimatter comes into contact with matter, it will create a massive explosion – large enough to destroy the entire Vatican City.

Dr. White was introduced by Dr. Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate and Director Emeritus of Fermilab (a particle accelerator facility in the Chicago suburbs). Dr. Lederman gave us a brief quiz to test our scientific knowledge and spoke briefly about the need for scientific literacy in the American public. He is also the author of The God Particle, a book referenced in Angels & Demons that explains the elusive Higgs boson particle, which is believed to be the particle that gives mass to everything.

The lecture aimed to answer the question: Is the science in Angels & Demons right? And, as with many books that blur the lines between science and fiction, the answer was yes and no. Antimatter is a real scientific phenomenon that scientists around the world are studying at places like CERN and Fermilab. It is found when protons that have been accelerated to very high speeds collide. The basic concept behind antimatter is that the particles of antimatter are the opposites of those found in matter. For example, the opposite of the electron would be a small positive particle, called a positron. When matter and antimatter interact, they do in fact create a tremendous explosion. One quarter of a gram of antimatter reacted with a quarter gram of matter would be enough to destroy the Vatican. The book got all of these things right.

Where the book begins to diverge from reality is actually in the details of the production of antimatter. Fermilab is currently the largest producer of antimatter and they only produce a few nanograms each year. (CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will be able to produce more once it is fully operational, but this is not currently the case.) According to Dr. White, it would take Fermilab over 109 million years to develop a quarter gram of antimatter. Another flaw in the plot is that, currently, no one is producing all of the particles needed for a stable mass of antimatter to form – they’re only creating certain particles because they are only colliding protons. Furthermore, in the movie, the antimatter is stored in small, moveable containers that can be easily stolen and hidden. In reality, antimatter is stored in large, complex tanks that frequently lose particles in small explosions.

So, antimatter exists, but there isn’t much of it and we don’t fully understand it yet. We don’t make enough to use it as a power source or for rocket propulsion, but we make enough to study it. Does antimatter have any practical uses? Yes. It’s called positron emission topography, more commonly referred to as a PET scan, a common medical procedure. PET scans make use of radioactive decay, one type of which emits positrons which medical imagers can detect to make pictures of active tissues in the body. There are still many things to be discovered and understood about anitmatter. Perhaps in the future, there will be more practical uses for antimatter discovered and our scientists might begin to unlock the secrets of mass or the laws of physics that antimatter follow (which are slightly different from the laws of physics as we know them). Whatever the case, the world is in need of more brilliant physicists like Leon Lederman and Chris White.

You can learn more about particle physics and watch the lecture by Chris White online: http://www.iit.edu/publications/iittoday/angels/.  I am interested in hearing your thoughts about the lecture.

Thanks,

Samantha Staley