Some Thoughts On Angels And Demons
My cosmologist friend and I worked it on the back of an envelope after the movie. He used to work in CERN. A gram of antimatter is about enough energy to boil 10,000,000 kettles. Not blow up Rome.
Speaking of blowing up Rome, this is movie is based on a set of ideas so idiotic, they could only be believed by the type ignorant enough to fail to understand that a “5 kiloton” airburst is more dangerous than a land detonation.
Also, doesn’t it reveal something about how deep Dan Brown’s anti-Christian ideology goes that the “hero” doesn’t have to die to “sacrifice”, and his annunciation is met by… a round of applause. A cup of tea to celebrate this limp paganism I say!
A much better final line would have been, “his action is not dependent on whether you believe or not”. But a hint of Barthian genius is really too much to ask.
Finally, at last a movie that gives creedence to all those Northern Irish protestant paranoias. All the problems of the world are caused by a Norn Irish Catholic (with a bizarre Dublin accent who fought in some kind of war that Italy engaged in… Ethiopia in the 1920s??)
Your Correspondent, Despises movies filled with nothing but scenes where someone explains what is going on
I’m smiling inside at the idea of a rep from the Amazonian death cult in ‘temple of doom’ tut tuting and making similar comments re the the obvious misrepresentations and anti-bias to his religion in THAT movie. Not a great movie, to be sure and you’re right about the ‘someone is always explaining what’s going on’ but its in the linage of Indiana Jones and should be watched thus. It’s maybe scrapes 3 stars where as crystal skull scraped a 2. I’d say.
The blasphemy in your comment Monkey is to compare Angels & Demons with the great Temple of Doom!
yeaaaah. maybe so. i wonder though whether we look back with rose colored glasses. maybe i was pleasantly surprised with A&D as i was expecting another dan brown car crash. Temple of Doom was certainly the weak link in the trilogy though, even though i LOVED it at the time, i must admit
Aye i think the monkey is on to something. If you dont fall in love with a movie when it comes out theres a good chance you never will. Some films considered classics look really dated to new audiences… i never saw any of the star wars trilogy until around 2000 and found them kind of tame and somewhat boring. Mind you some films never date. Whats the key?
If your friend worked in CERN he’s right not me, but I keep getting that a gram of antimatter would make a explosion equal to 28.5 Hiroshima bombs, which is roughly equal to what it takes to boil that many kettles. Not that it makes Dan Brown any more intellectually deep or anything.
Well we did our sums in our head on the walk through the car park. But seeing as we’ve failed to produce stable anti-matter in a similar way to how Jesus failed to produce offspring, it might all be irrelevant.
I think Akkad is right about it being lots of Hiroshima bombs per gram. Somewhere, on a floppy disk, on an old PC, I have a powerpoint presentation that explains all this. If only I had a floppy disk drive…
I’m not sure that producing it would be that big a problem, it would just take a very loooooong time and need lots of energy – but I don’t think it’s so much a stability problem. I was never a real physicist though, only a theoretical one. But I remember real physicists giving talks at conferences I was at, and it all seemed to be to do with magnets. Or something.
Well I am not even a real computer scientist anymore, and computer scientists were never real scientists so I’ll just bow out of this little conversation and make sure to never trust the mental arithmetic of a cosmologist again.