Antimatter

In thirty years of lecturing and broadcasting about science, I have been asked about antimatter more often than any other topic. On 4 October 2007 I appeared on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 discussing antimatter with Melvyn Bragg, Val Gibson, and Ruth Gregory. That broadcast led to many emails and letters requesting news about antimatter. Among these was a disturbing new feature: the belief that antimatter would make weapons, create awful destruction, and that work by the US military had inspired Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, which stars an antimatter bomb made, allegedly, at CERN.