Camellia Hotel 5, Hanoi (Vietnam)

metadata
  • keywords:
    • blog
    • travelling
    • Vietnam
  • published:
  • updated:
  • Atom Feed

Yesterday I started reading Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons” and I find myself disappointed after I enjoyed “The Da Vinci Code” so much. One particular passage frustrated me and almost made me discard the book completely, here it follows:

You may also download “world-tour-2007-09-01.geojson” directly or view “world-tour-2007-09-01.geojson” on GitHub Gist (you may need to manually checkout the “main” branch).

Matter from energy? Something from nothing? It’s practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility.

He is referring to particle jets from high energy collisions in the LHC at CERN. The argument is that this shows creationism and hence proof of God’s existence. Now, as a graduate of the University of Durham with a First Class Honours degree in Physics, I ask: Isn’t energy something? After all, isn’t that what Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 says? Matter is energy? Surely Dan Brown has heard of this equation? It was the result of his paper ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ which was published in 1905. I shall continue to read it and highlight any other infuriating ignorances.

This morning had two objectives: 1) Go to prison 2) Buy a train ticket. The prison in question was Hoa Lo Prison which American POWs referred to as “The Hanoi Hilton”. The French initially built the prison to house Communist rebels during their colonisation. Later it was used to hold US POWs during the Vietnam War. One of the most interesting things is that they had a guillotine left over from the French. The site is now nothing compared to what it used to be as most of the grounds are now occupied by the “Hanoi Towers”.

The train station was fair enough. I’ve got tickets for an overnighter to Lao Cao for tomorrow so I can make my own way to Sapa. This evening I’ll go and watch some Water Puppetry (what ever that is) and then have dinner at “The Jazz Club” as some live music would be cool I think.