Angels, demons and protons

How CERN is using Dan Brown's bestseller to bring attention to its nuclear research

In April this year, the 50-year-old European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), situated on the Swiss-French border near the town of Meyrin held an open day, like every other research facility.

Their previous open days however, although popular, had not prepared them for what was to follow. Nearly 30,000 visitors trooped into CERN on that day, demanding to see the 29 km long underground tunnel called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

While the LHC is a fascinating project (it collides protons with protons to study the effect and the constituents of matter in concentrated doses), the people who trooped in for a look-see were there for the same reason the French tourism department has started the Da Vinci tour of the Louvre: author Dan Brown's bestseller Angels and Demons.

In the book, protagonist and religious symbolism expert Robert Langdon is called to CERN to investigate the murder of scientist Vittorio Vetra, who is killed because he has created one of the most powerful bombs in the world, one that fuses the energy of anti-matter.

What the CERN education and comunication group (ECG) saw that day spurred them on to add a new page to their website, The Angels and Demons page.

Here, very patiently, all myths and erroneous research by Brown is set right. "Not that we are not grateful," says the philosophical James Gillies, head of the ECG and author of the book How the World Wide Web was Born.

"The way I see it, there were three ways in which we could have reacted to the book. We could have protested against it and ended up looking like bigoted fools; we could have ignored it, which wouldn't have helped; or do what we do now, use the book to stoke interest in scientific research," says Gillies.

"The most frequently asked question is whether we too are producing the anti-matter bomb: the answer is no. Anti-matter is useful in that it helps us look at the basic structure of matter but since anti matter is not available naturally, we have to produce it. A huge amount of anti-matter produces very little energy, so it's too expensive to be a source of energy," says Gillies.

CERN scientists are also depicted as agnostics by Brown, except for the unfortunate Vetra who is shown as being too devout. Life at CERN is also depicted as regimented and cold, something that on the annual cross-country marathon day, the day we visited the facility, appeared very far from the truth.

"Most physicists believe in philosophy "" several of our scientists have read the Bhagvad Gita "" and as for regimented lives, well, if you stay around for the marathon, you can see what we do in our free time," he says.

As we are lowered into the LHC through a lift, Guiseppe Gubel, a scientist with CERN, explains the proton-proton collider. "It is impossible not to believe in God if you are a physicist," he says with a flourish.

What CERN approves of about the book is that it places the facility's achievements in proper perspective. "People don't realise that the World Wide Web was born in CERN, in 1989, devised by Tim Berners Lee," says Gillies. After scientific attention being US-centric for so long, CERN appears to be enjoying its moment in the sun.

In fact, the research facility is now planning to go one up on the web. In order to analyse data from the LHC, which will be flying at 40 million per second, the IT section of the CERN has devised the World Wide Grid.

The Grid, as it is called, will consist of 1,00,000 personal computers (PCs). Says Leen Chandra Wadia, associated with the Grid, "the Grid will be ready by 2007, and only 10 per cent of the PCs will be in CERN, the rest will be spread all over the world and we shall be sharing the data."

Set up in 1954 to counter European brain drain to the US, it is ironic that attention on the facility has been brought on by an American writer, and through the use of inaccurate data.