{"id":4285,"date":"2009-05-21T00:10:42","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T04:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=4285"},"modified":"2009-05-21T00:10:42","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T04:10:42","slug":"angels-demons-and-tedium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/angels-demons-and-tedium\/","title":{"rendered":"Angels, demons and tedium"},"content":{"rendered":"

I watched the film \u201cAngels and Demons” this evening. If you are tempted, don\u2019t bother: the religion is wrong, the science is more or less wrong and it commits the cardinal (not a pun, really) sin of being boring: the hero played by Tom Hanks is Indiana Jones on a valium overdose. The supposed contention\u00a0 between religion and science is part of the plot, but in such a ham-fisted way that even the casual viewer will come away convinced that there is no contention. There is an anti-matter bomb whose only reason for being in the film, as far as I can tell, is so the heroine can talk about the God particle<\/a>. The Higgs boson actually has no more to do with God than any other particle; nevertheless, its appearance is portrayed as\u00a0 somehow challenging God since it was present “at the moment of creation”<\/em>. The anti-matter bomb also blows up, of course, but, really, an anti-matter bomb isn\u2019t terribly practical<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Antimatter is a real substance, first theorized in 1928. “Every time you squeeze a lot of energy into a small space, you produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter,” Landua explains. “Nature doesn\u2019t like to create just one sort; it always produces both to keep a balance. I compare it to digging a hole in the sand, and then you have a pile next to it. You can\u2019t do one without the other.” The first antielectron was produced in 1932, and particle accelerators helped scientists create the first antiproton in 1955. Antimatter was first produced at CERN in 1995, though not by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But unlike in the movie\u2014where CERN has produced a gram of antimatter\u2014the facility has actually only produced a small amount of the substance. “In the movie, we switch on the LHC and it produces a gram of antimatter in a few minutes,” Landua says. “That\u2019s not possible for two reasons: It would need much more energy to do it\u2014with present efficiency, it would take 10 ^ 22 joules\u2014and the reality of how quickly antimatter can be produced \u2026 it would take about a billion years to produce a gram. We can make about a billionth of a gram in a year.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of this I could forgive if I had been entertained: alas, the film is dull. The acting is stilted, the characters unconvincing and the plot silly. The worst part is the Tom Hanks character wasn’t killed, so he could be back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I watched the film \u201cAngels and Demons” this evening. If you are tempted, don\u2019t bother: the religion is wrong, the science is more or less wrong and it commits the cardinal (not a pun, really) sin of being boring: the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[1243],"class_list":["post-4285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-popular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}