Friday, May 29, 2009

Angels and Demons at CSU

We saw the movie:
Then we went to a lecture!
Did you know that parts of Angels and Demons were actually filmed in the Large Hadron Collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN? ...And that there's no way Vittoria Vetra, played by Ayelet Zurer in the movie could have held antimatter in that small container. ...and yes, the antimatter really could have blown-up Rome!

Dr. Miguel Mostafa
Dr. Mostafa is a Professor at Colorado State University and an expert on ultra high energy cosmic rays! He was nice enough to tell us all about antimatter and stuff! There is a particle physics community in Fort Collins! 


So, what is antimatter? What does the Large Hadron Collider do? Why do particle physicists do what they do?

Dr. Mostafa explained it all! 
After the lecture, we met with some of the professors and made them feel welcome to the non-physicist community. We hope they take a break from their cosmic ray detectors and meson accelerators once in a while and do this again!

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