Skip to main content

Entertainment Tonight searches for angels and demons at CERN

Entertainment Tonight offers you a chance to see inside the world's largest science experiment mentioned in the upcoming movie Angels and Demons.

The prime-time television show broadcasts Thursday and Friday, Feb. 12-13, from CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics research on the border of France and Switzerland.

Three rings are visible, the smaller shows the underground position of the PS, the middle ring is the SPS with a circumference of 7 km and the largest ring (27 km) is that of the former LEP accelerator with part of Lake Geneva in the background. Courtesy of Cern.

Three rings are visible, the smaller shows the underground position of the PS, the middle ring is the SPS with a circumference of 7 km and the largest ring (27 km) is that of the former LEP accelerator with part of Lake Geneva in the background. Courtesy of Cern.

CERN serves as one of the settings for Angels and Demons, to be
released by Sony Pictures in May.  The movie is based on the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, which explores the boundary between science and religion through an action-packed mystery.

Angels and Demons focuses on a plot to destroy the Vatican using a small amount of antimatter. In the book, that antimatter gets stolen from CERN and the heroine is a CERN scientist.

It is unclear how closely the movie will follow the book. In past interviews, Dan Brown has discussed the role CERN played in his book. CERN has posted a Q&A section on its Web site to clarify the distinctions between the events in the book and real-life science at CERN.

The movie stars Tom Hanks and is directed by Ron Howard.

You can see a trailer of the movie here.

We had a review of the book in the first issue of symmetry magazine, and included a scan of the title page, autographed by Dan Brown, in which he cautioned, "Remember, it's fiction!!"