Angels & Demons

I've written about Angels & Demons before and the fact that I didn't get to be part of the press event at CERN. Which turned out to be a good thing, considering some of the television segments which where made about that visit. Particle physics groupies? What the?

I'm in two minds about the book and movie really. I dislike the book for all its inaccuracies, particularly those which pertain to CERN and the physics which we do here. Ivy League like grounds? Our own airport and plane? The proton is the antimatter partner of the electron? We're trying to measure the mass of the neutron? The Z boson is massless? Seriously, how hard is it to get somebody to check the correctness your manuscript?

However, I don't really mind the publicity that it gives us, since this time it's a little more positive than the scares about the LHC destroying us all by producing black holes when we started up last year. It's nice that people have heard of CERN and since it's book they aren't scared that we are building a bomb of anitmatter.

And of course CERN is taking advantage of all this and people have organised a series of lectures around the US of A explaining the science behind it all. I had a look at the template talk that was made and it's quite good really. I've always found it very hard to explain what I do and all the science to people outside the field since I've never had to understand it without the background. Luckily, there are many other people out there much better at it than me.