Angels and Demons

Just one week after finishing my last book by Dan Brown, I have completed another: Angels and Demons. The famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon makes his appearance again in this science versus religion thriller involving a long-lost secret brotherhood, blind piety, and half of a gram of antimatter.

Brown once again proves his aptitude for captivating the reader with unimaginable twists, unraveling secrets in the plot while intermixing true facts about science, religion, and the Illuminati—an ancient society that promoted science over religion. The depth of detail in all facets is truly remarkable, yet the author really shows his true colors with the hidden pagan symbols intermixed in the center of modern religion.

Brown does show a bit more fictional drama here than in The DaVinci Code, speaking of X-33s, slush hydrogen, bio-entanglement physics, and portable antimatter traps. Still, he includes information that is fairly accurate with respect to the rest—antimatter is real, CERN and its particle accelerators exist, antimatter traps are in the works. Brown fails to mention the symmetry violation that scientists know exists (oddly enough, the scientists at CERN proved this), a violation that allowed matter to rule over antimatter, despite their presumed creation in equal amounts during the Big Bang. Also, at the very end, a character goes on to mention how she wants to prove the neutrino has mass, but this has already been done by scientists in the real world. Upon close inspection of the dates, however, the last revelation was not yet made by scientists at the time of publication of this book.

Angels and Demons is definitely worth a read. It consumed all my time today, as engrossed in it as I was. I could not even put the book down, opting to read instead of completing important tasks. It was worth every minute, allowing me to escape into my imagination and hold on for the wild adventure that unfolded in my mind.