After the firestorm of Vatican opprobrium for “The Da Vinci Code” three years ago, the producers of “Angels & Demons” may have counted on further ecclesial disapproval to help publicize today’s opening of the “Code” sequel. The official Roman Catholic response, however, has been relatively sanguine–perhaps, as Elizabeth Lev points out on Politics Daily, because Ron Howard’s films make the church look so swank. Cardinals aren’t the only ones who may come out of “A&D” looking cool. The film had already raised the stock of another misunderstood group: particle physicists. (Possible spoiler after the jump).

The preposterously complex plot of “Angels & Demons” includes an attempt to swipe antimatter in order to build a bomb. The movie, like Dan Brown’s book, spends a lot of time gushing over the Large Hadron Collider, an actual scientific facility in Switzerland where scientists will soon resume their search for the sexily named “God particle” (which physicists prefer to call the Higgs boson). Suddenly, physicists from Los Angeles to Geneva are being sought out to answer the question, “Could an antimatter bomb really blow up the Vatican?”
According to Columbia University professor John Parsons the answer is yes, but only if they had 1.25 million years to generate a sufficient amount of antimatter. Okay, so the science stinks, but physicists seem to agree that they need all the glamour they can get.
Complete “Angels & Demons” features on Beliefnet.