Angels and Demons
Review
Professor Raymond R. Volkas
School of Physics
The University of Melbourne
(Photograph courtesy of CERN)
A huge physics experiment searching for the "God particle". A secret fraternity seeking vengeance against the Roman Catholic Church. (Or are they?) A gouged-out eyeball in a bloody pool on a laboratory floor. Within 10 minutes this fast-paced thriller, from Ron Howard out of Dan Brown, takes you from the world of renaissance religious intrigue to the universe of today as revealed by particle physics. It's all rollicking good fun, but please don't take it too seriously!
As a particle physicist myself, it was a thrill to see "Large Hadron Collider" splashed across a big wide Hollywood screen, even if the sequence filmed at the CERN laboratory near Geneva is all over in just a few minutes. We get a glimpse of this highest of high-tech science, and the camera takes us inside the beam-pipes and the particle detectors to see super-high energy protons smash together to reveal the secrets of the universe. Was that the God particle I saw whizzing by??
Could this hold the god particle? A scene from Angels and Demons
(Photograph courtesy of Sony Pictures)
Physicists have used the LHC to produce antimatter, a "highly combustible material" as the film curiously terms it. When antimatter comes into contact with matter, their mutual annihilation releases a huge amount of electromagnetic energy that, as usual, can be used for good (solving the world's energy crisis?) or for ill. A canister of antimatter, isolated in a web of electromagnetic fields powered by a battery (!), has been stolen, apparently by a secret society called the Illuminati. Rationalists who harbour a centuries-long grievance against the Church, they have surfaced to inflict death and destruction to the Vatican. The Pope is dead, the conclave is gathering in the Sistine Chapel to elect his successor, while the Illuminati (or is it?) have planted the antimatter somewhere inside Vatican City. The favourites for the papacy have been kidnapped and are in mortal danger, and the battery holding the antimatter in suspension will expire just before midnight. The Vatican will die in a blinding flash of light, unless Professor Robert Langdon, symbologist at Harvard University, can decode the clues leading to both the captives and the stolen canister. And ably assisted, I might say, by a rather hot and well-dressed Italian lady physicist, who can help you with your Latin as well as explain antimatter. It's about time Hollywood showed physicists as they really are, rather than the usual drab male nerds in lab coats!
If you love Rome as I do, you'll enjoy the frenzied chase through some of your favourite locations: the Pantheon, St Peter's Basilica, the Piazza del Popolo, Bernini's great Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, and the Castel Sant'Angelo. It is a film of tracking shots down tunnels, from the CERN beam-pipes to the secret passageways burrowing through the layers of Rome, metaphors for the foundations of the Western world perhaps.
"CERN scientists - A scene from Angels and Demons
(Photograph courtesy of Sony Pictures)
And what of the science? Here's the good news. Antimatter exists and does annihilate with matter. CERN and the LHC exist and are doing stupendous science, searching for the Higgs boson, the "God" particle that will provide the origins of mass -- the physics mass, not the Catholic Mass! University of Melbourne and other Australian physicists work there. Here's the bad news. Storing antimatter in a glass bottle using electromagnetic fields powered by a battery is sheer poppycock. And anyway, producing enough antimatter for the nefarious purposes depicted in this film is not credible. It is very, very expensive to make, and extremely time-consuming. I'm afraid that the world's energy problems won't be solved by using Europe's electricity grid to create tiny amounts of antimatter at CERN.
So, is science in conflict with religion, or do they complement each other? All this talk about the "God" particle is rather loose, it must be said, and the LHC will not literally re-create the Big Bang as sometimes stated. So no conflict there, as far as I can see. But is there a deeper conflict? That's an interesting debate, but don't expect that sort of illumination from this film. Just enjoy your viewing experience, and the Roman travelogue!
