Angels and Demons

I just finished reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, one of the best thrillers ever. I couldn’t put it down after starting to read it(it was as good as Da Vinci Code). I know that some people say that they are anti-Catholic novels and about the many protests world wide against the release of the Da Vinci COde movie, but being a devout Catholic myself I totally disagree with them. Actually I'm looking forward to that movie.

To me being a catholic is a lot more than the ‘Church’ and though I love and respect the Catholic church, I am aware that there have been instances where the Church has been in the ‘wrong’. To me being a Catholic is mainly about living the kind of life that Jesus Christ lived here on earth and following his example. Personally I don’t believe in the underling meaning of the Da Vinci Code about Jesus’ blood line, but think of it as an exciting piece of fiction.

Angels and Demons deals with moral issues such as the age old debate between Science and Religion. It outlines many of the internal workings of the Vatican as a plot to blow up the Vatican unfolds during the conclave (voting process for a new Pope). I thought of posting some photos of the places mentioned in the book as I was really curious as to how they looked. (Now I really want to visit these places!)

On the top, Inside Sistine Chapel and St Perter's Basilica is below.

The swiss guard

One thing that I found really intriguing about both Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons was the symbology, the mysteries and the secret codes and how they were solved in the end.

If you've read the books and want to find out the secrets and about the locations check the official Dan Brown website.

Being a techy myself I also found the info about the CERN labs and antimatter really interesting and so I did some research on those.

Look at the pic, it looks like it’s straight out of a sci-fi movie. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), commonly known as CERN, is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated just west of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The acronym originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established in 1952.

One of the major inventions that came out of CERN is World Wide Web initiated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. So all of us bloggers are indebted to CERN!

Would you believe that there actually is a real X-33 space plane which can travel at Mach 15! (over 10,000 mph.) This cruises at an altitude of almost 100 miles high, on the edge of space. Imagine tavelling in one of these! Wow!

ANTIMATTER – Antimatter or contra-terrene matter is matter that is composed of the antiparticles of those that constitute normal matter. If a particle and its antiparticle come in contact with each other, the two annihilate, producing photons and possibly other particle/antiparticle pairs that are endowed with a large amount of energy (the difference between the rest energy of the products of the annihilation and the rest energy of the original particle/antiparticle pair). This is the wikipedia definition and I can’t really make much sense of this, but thought it an interesting concept.

According to the CERN official website There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy "source". Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature: we have to make every particle at the expense of much more energy than it can give back during annihilation.

Spoiler Warning

I also thought of including the 4 locations believed to be the Illuminati Alters of Science and the Illuminati Lair according to the book. Yes, they really do exist and they are all works of Bernini.

Illuminati Alter of the Earth

Habakkuk and the Angel

Illuminati Alter of the Water

Fountain of the four rivers

Illumunati Alter of Fire

Ecstasy of St Theresa

Illumunati Alter of Air

West Ponente near the Obelisk

Illunianti Lair

Castle of St Angelo