back to article Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real?*

So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing? …

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      1. CaptainHook
        Grenade

        "how many Wales' would that devastate?"

        Depends on how close the device is to the wedding party.

      2. Wommit
        Thumb Up

        Re : AC

        27 quids worth of civic improvements.

  1. Matthew 17

    I do hope Ultrahypercold is an actual word

    The world is a better place for it.

  2. Steven Jones

    Misleading R4 BBC coverage

    I got seriously annoyed by the sloppy coverage of this by BBC R4 news last night, partly repeated on the Roday programme this morining.

    Crime number one - repeated on the Today programme. Stating that antimatter is the opposite of matter (whatever that would be). It's not - if it was it would have odd properties like negative mass. Instead it's material made from a bunch of sub-atomic particles that have the reverse electric charge (like the electron/positron particle/antiparticle pair). Some neutral particles, like anit-neutrons are made up of antigluons which carry this property (and some are their own antiparticles).

    Crime number two - stating this was the first time antimatter had been created. It's not - antiparticles with mass count as matter. Instead, these were the first captured antiatoms.

    Crime number three - stating that when matter and antimatter encounter one another they produce nothing. Wrong. They produce a lot of energy in the form of photons. Indeed if if didn't do that, then there wouldn't be much of a story to be made about a matter/antimatter bomb.

    This might seem immaterial, but it's not - it's fundamental. Shame on you BBC. Puns fully intended.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Yes!

      "Instead it's material made from a bunch of sub-atomic particles that have the reverse electric charge (like the electron/positron particle/antiparticle pair)"

      More correctly, opposite quantum numbers.

      You need inverse spin, inverse electric charge (+/-), inverse color charge (blue/antiblue), inverse baryon number, inverse hypercharge. Did I forget anything?

      1. Tom 13
        Coat

        Only to reverse

        the polarity of neutron flow. That things gonna blow!

      2. Steven Jones

        Ok - it's been a while...

        I'm not sure all those quantum properties apply to all sub-atomic particles, but fair enough. It's been nearly 35 years since I did anything like quantum chromodynamics, and I'm not sure it stuck then. My memory is failing, but not so badly as to spot sloppy reporting by the BBC.

        Heaven knows what Fox News makes of it. Probably reported as a new terrorist threat.

  3. tanstaafl28
    Happy

    CERN and antimatter.

    Has the LHC ended the world yet?

    http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

    We're talking such small amounts that it's laughable.

  4. Red Bren
    Coat

    Who's the funny looking old bloke in the picture?

    That's not Simon Pegg?!!

  5. Graham Marsden
    Black Helicopters

    "have publicly speculated..."

    "...about planting an antimatter bomb in a government funding office"

    Wow! It's a good job they didn't tweet about it!!

  6. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    Odd they went with magnetic confinment

    These techniques (keeping atoms cool (IE slow moving) and pushing them about seem to a key bit of quantum computer research.

    AFAIK they tend to use lasers to move neutral atoms around.

    Now anti-matter quantum computer *would* be impressive.

    Not very compact but *any* attempt to hack it would probably shut it down with a 100m crater.

    Now that's what I call *effective* security.

  7. FrancisKing

    Being even more pedantic

    " in fact it would take 300 billion years by his estimates."

    Before the Haber process was invented, producing ammonia in industrial quantities was very difficult. To fuse hydrogen and nitrogen required a lot of heat and pressure.After the Haber process, using iron as a catalyst, it was all much easier.

    What happens when they figure out what makes antimatter tick? Do we get an anti-Haber process?

  8. Apocalypse Later

    And in the canteen kitchen...

    ...the cooks free up an unspecified quantity of counterspace.

  9. sinisterpictures
    Happy

    Priests? Pope's inner circle?

    "the likelihood of finding a priest in the Pope's inner circle"

    I would imagine the likelihood of such a discovery to be quite high no?

  10. bugalugs

    @ The Original Ash et al

    The 1/3g of mass was what they couldn't account for when they'd done all the sums, representing mass that was " destroyed " not that which had merely fissioned and

    dispersed explosively.

    The first atom bomb was exploded at Amolgordo, New Mexico in the Trinity test of July 16th 1945, more than 65 years ago, btw.

  11. Ronny Cook

    Catholic dilithium monopoly

    Clearly if they want to contain additional antimatter they will need access to dilithium crystals.

    For obvious reasons it's clear the Vatican is holding their dilithium monopoly very closely indeed.

  12. Sureo
    Flame

    ...but actually it is outrageously rare...

    If antimatter wasn't rare, wouldn't the universe annihilate itself?

  13. TheOtherHobbbes
    Grenade

    You forget

    that with poor English and worse writing, anything is possible.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    We're getting ahead of ourselves here.....

    Surely we must have an intermediate step from going from existing nuclear technology straight to antimatter. I propose that we finish the development and commercialization of "Back to the Future"-style Mr. Fusion!! Once society has that much cheap energy, everyone with a decent backyard will have an antimatter-producing collider!!

    Then we can worry about someone evaporating the Vatican.....

    1. Chemist

      "society has that much cheap energy"

      Energy will never be cheap !

  15. Andus McCoatover

    "Remember, Remember the Fifth of November"...

    ...Antimatter, Treason and Plot.

    Now, there's an idea...

    Am I such an old git I can remember something like that??

  16. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    The anti-lewis

    The 1 at the end of lewis's name signifies that he is the matter (+1) version of Lewis, if he ever meets lewis(-1) we are in trouble

  17. mmiied

    not real boffins

    "...and it would seem only a mild one in powering possible future starships"

    see not real boffins

  18. Alex Walsh

    Below 1k

    Lewis, if the boffins at CERN can't get below 1 degree Kelvin, they need to have a chat with the boffins at the ultra low temperature physics dept at my old University- Lancaster. They've got into the micro Kelvin range:

    http://www.physics.lancs.ac.uk/research/condmatt/ult/dilut.htm

    Silly boffins, they should have popped along the road to Morecambe, it's even colder there.

  19. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    "The boffinry community"

    Excellent phrase.

  20. Colin Millar
    Boffin

    anti-schmatter - pah!

    I reckon it doesn't even exist.

    Probably just a dead mouse in the circuits somewhere causing a faulty reading.

  21. Doug Glass
    Go

    Antimatter Spelled Backwards ...

    ... is Rettamitna.

    Read all about it here:

    http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi?dir=/intl/en_et/&page=/news%3Fned=en_et

    Slow day.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Antiparticles

    Hmm,

    Its more likely that someone will figure out how to harvest the naturally occurring antiparticles present in the solar wind (iirc something in the order of a gram per day) and this increases when there is a large solar flare.

    So a superconducting magnetic scoop could be used to channel them into a collector where they can be stored and hopefully used for scientific research or propulsion.

    AC, because he doesen't want a visit from the Inquisition..

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