Sunday, January 13, 2008

Angels and Demons, Yin and Yang


I never really thought much of Dan Brown. after that whole Davinci Code controversy and book of lies, I didn't think that he was much of an author. But when I read his book Angels and Demons, I found that Dan Brown can do two things right: do research and make very interesting, convincing, and captivating lies. So in fact, he's a pretty cool writer! In fact, the one part in the book that interested me the most was his inclusion of an cannister that contained a quarter gram of antimatter. If I remember correctly, antimatter is the opposite of matter and as Dan Brown wrote in his book, when matter and antimatter collide, they cancel each other out in an annihilation. This creates large amounts of energy which makes it possibly the most productive energy source on the planet. Pretty cool. I'm pretty sure the most scientist have ever achieved in creating antimatter were tiny little blips of positrons. The highly unstable nature of the antimatter in the book meant that it had to be stored in a vacuum and was hovered in that vacuum by two powerful magnets opposite of each other. I'm not sure how well the magnets would work though. Heck, I'm not even sure how antimatter would react to an magnetic field. Anyway, the way the antimatter was created was by firing large amounts of energy in opposite directions through the world's largest particle accelerator. The energy crashed into each other and effectively reversed the equation E=mc^2, proving that matter could be created into energy as energy is created from matter in a nuclear reaction. so that means that a quarter gram of antimatter could effectively create... ((3.00e8)^2)0.0025 = 2.25e14 J?! or at least something along those lines. In the book it was somewhere along the lines of 5 kilotons. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. What this means is that a little BB sized pellet of antimatter is 1/3 the strength of the bomb dropped on hiroshima. WOw. Dan Brown did do his research. Even if the whole satanic cult thing isn't real.

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