The plot is action-suspense formula: some stolen antimatter from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and a threat to use that antimatter to blow up the Vatican during Conclave, by the Illuminati or some scientists driven underground during the 17th century and who are now going to make the Vatican pay by killing thousands of innocent people.

‘Angels and Demons,’ the summer thriller starring science, religion and Tom Hanks, has some ‘high energy physics’ flying off. It has the ingredients of the CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest science experiment.

An associate professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University who has visited CERN many times says that ‘the scenes showing windowed corridors full of physicists walking past the collider tunnel are completely unrealistic’ because ‘there’s radiation in the tunnel which is buried 100 metres below ground’ and that it is ‘not a place for people.’

Poetic license with the science of particle physics is heavy in the movie. Moviemakers dramatically stretching scientific facts is shown with ‘the film’s treatment of antimatter as the active ingredient in a powerful bomb.’ In the book and the movie, ‘a quarter gram of antimatter (a dollar bill weighs about a gram) is trapped in a small container that could be used to produce a bomb powerful enough to destroy Vatican City.’
While it is true that annihilation ensues when matter comes in contact with antimatter, scientists at Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, say ‘it would take them 70 million years to create a quarter gram of antimatter.’

That is why movies are exhilarating. In them, anything can be possible.

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Via Science Centric

All through the days of high school drudgery, we have studied about the three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. Apparently, there is a fourth state of matter and it could help building microchips in a grand way. Researchers at the University of McGill have discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, which could be used to manufacture modern transistors and more.

The fourth matter was discovered in a device that was 100 times cooler than the inter-galactic space. After the matter was exposed to earth’s gravitation, the 2D electron system changed to a semi-3D one. This could pave way for faster and more efficient microchips and if things go well, it could dramatically reduce the prices of the chips as well.

So, the difficult-to-pronounce fourth state of matter is a thing of reality. I remember having read about the plasma state of matter, which was supposed to be the fourth state of matter. Science can be confusing, really.

Via: Gizmodo