"Angels & Demons" - Distinguishing truth from fiction

Dan Brown's best-selling novel "Angels & Demons" was published in French on 2 March. A web page on CERN's public site is dedicated to separating truth from fiction in this novel.

After the extraordinary success of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code", one of his earlier novels "Angels & Demons", published in 2000, has now become a best seller and has generated a flood of questions about CERN. This detective story is about a secret society, the Illuminati, who wish to destroy the Vatican with an antimatter bomb stolen from - wait for it - CERN!

Inevitably, CERN has been bombarded with calls about the technologies described in the novel that are supposed to be under development in the Laboratory. The Press Office has always explained that, even if the novel appears to be very informative, it is in fact a mixture of fact and fiction. For instance, according to the novel CERN is supposed to own a plane that can cover the distance between Massachusetts in the United States and Switzerland in just over an hour!

To help those interested in disentangling fact from fiction, last year CERN launched an explanatory web page (http://www.cern.ch/Public/Content/Chapters/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html). The page got 69 000 hits in January alone ! Now that the French edition of the novel had been published, French-speaking readers will be able to consult an explanatory page in French.