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SOMETIMES it is the details that count, even in fiction. All it would take to destroy the Vatican is 250 milligrams of antimatter, we learn in Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons. Annihilating that 250 mg should produce as much energy as detonating 10 kilotons of TNT, about half of the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Such a small quantity might seem an easy thing to hide, and in Brown's novel it is. But alas, in the real world it probably wouldn't get past the accountants. Particle accelerators need quite a bit of energy to produce antimatter. According to David McGinnis of Fermilab, the electricity bill for producing 250 mg would be somewhere around a thousand trillion US dollars. "Somebody, somewhere would notice that kind of expense," McGinnis observes in Symmetry, a magazine published by Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.