Blog . Jiboneus

So I’ve started reading Dan Brown’s novel, Angels and Demons, which was in one of my to do list. First of all this book is really hard to put down once you start reading it. If you think the terrorist group Al-Qaeda is scary, check out the Illuminati in this book. I wont get into the plot much, just get the book and read it, but I would like to talk about some of the thing mentioned on the book, facts and fictions.

Let’s start from the beginning. Robert Langdon (the main character, a Harvard symbologist professor, whatever it is) got a call form the director of CERN (an European Organization for Nuclear Research) and somewhere in that conversation, it was mention something about CERN created the WWW (World Wide Web). Before this I was always thought that the Internet was develop at ARPA (Advance Research Projects Agency) now known as DARPA (Advance Research Projects Agency) in the United States. It seems that both are correct.

Although the Internet was research and develop over at ARPA but back then the Internet is just a network of networks. The part that makes the Internet useful, the part that shape the Internet to it is now. The WWW part was developed over at CERN. Yes i Google up CERN. Sir Tim Berners-Lee conjure up the concept of hypertext and stuff at CERN. The first original webpage ever is kept here.

I always thought the first webpage is a porn site and the first e-mail ever sent was a viagra ad.

What is CERN anyway? It’s a nuclear research center located at the border of Switzerland and France. It’s internationally own, original signatories were Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and was later joined by Austria, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Hungry, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. Oh well read about CERN over at wikipedia or visit CERN site.

CERN also has a page about facts and fiction of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. I would suggest you to read the book finish first before checking out that page.

By the way, there is actually such a thing as the Large Hadron Collider over at CERN.

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