CERN role in thriller is boon for public outreach

A murder plot at CERN? Yes, at least in Angels and Demons, Dan Brown’s 2000 best-selling novel. The Sony Pictures movie based on the book will be released on 15 May.

In Angels and Demons, a secret society wants to steal antimatter from CERN to build a bomb and destroy the Vatican. Part of the movie was filmed at CERN. The lab’s actual antimatter storage apparatus is “a small and visually uninspiring facility,” says CERN spokesman James Gillies, “so we took them to ATLAS,” one of the main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In Brown’s book, notes Gillies, “it’s the LHC that is creating stored antimatter. That’s complete nonsense.” Antimatter is in fact created—but not necessarily captured and stored—in all high-energy collisions.

Also unrealistic is the amount of antimatter needed by the plotters in Angels and Demons. In fact, only tiny quantities can be made; the CERN website says it would take 2 billion years to produce the amount of antimatter needed for the fictional bomb.

Still, Gillies and others at CERN say they were impressed by film director Ron Howard’s efforts to get the science and science culture right. For example, CERN scientists suggested such phrases as “resonant antiproton product” and “establish colliding beams” to the filmmakers. The CERN scenes appear before the opening credits, says Gillies. “The action is concentrated in Rome, but CERN is referred back to.” And, he adds, “scientists will cringe a bit. One subtext is a perceived clash of science and religion, so [the filmmakers] couldn’t avoid a God particle, which they link to antimatter.”

But there is no doubt that Angels and Demons has been a boon to CERN. “The hits on our website went up by a factor of 10” when the book came out, says Rolf Landua, the CERN researcher who most closely parallels the leading antimatter scientist in the book. “We are trying to hook onto the movie now and in the next few months, so we have an Angels and Demons exhibition here [at CERN] and an Angels and Demons tour. It’s a fantastic opportunity to reach a lot of people.” Similarly, US particle physicists are urging their ranks to reach out to the public with lectures keyed to the film. (For preparatory materials and other information for giving or hosting a lecture, and for a link to a discussion of CERN-related facts versus fiction in Angels and Demons, visit http://www.uslhc.us/Angels_Demons .) But perhaps the biggest outreach event will be this fall, if Angels and Demons star Tom Hanks accepts CERN’s invitation to return to the lab to press the on switch when the LHC is ready to restart.