Back when I was at the now defunct Alliance for Life­long Learn­ing (an e‑learning ven­ture put togeth­er by Stan­ford, Oxford and Yale), we did a reli­gion course that keyed off of Dan Brown’s Da Vin­ci Code. No one thought high­ly of the book, but the dean of the Yale Divin­i­ty School believed that the book’s pop­u­lar­i­ty (and the ques­tions it raised about reli­gion) cre­at­ed a good teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty. And he was right. Fast for­ward sev­er­al years, and we now have Dan Brown’s oth­er book, Angels & Demons, get­ting released as a major film too. So, why not use this as an occa­sion to talk about the sci­ence invoked by the film? UC Berke­ley has done just that. (Watch here). And so has Carnegie Mel­lon. CM pref­aces the video fea­tured above as fol­lows: 

Could you real­ly destroy the Vat­i­can using a small amount of anti­mat­ter made in the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? Thats the ques­tion Carnegie Mel­lons Man­fred Pauli­ni seeks to answer in the lec­ture Angels and Demons: The Sci­ence Revealed. Dr. Pauli­ni, an exper­i­men­tal par­ti­cle physi­cist and mem­ber of the CMS exper­i­ment at CERNs Large Hadron Col­lid­er, dis­cuss­es the sci­ence facts and fic­tion in the movie Angels and Demons, based on Dan Browns best-sell­ing nov­el.

Dr. Pauli­ni talks about the physics at the heart of Angels and Demons, which focus­es on what hap­pens when mat­ter and anti­mat­ter meet. The absence of prac­ti­cal­ly any anti­mat­ter in the uni­verse is cru­cial to our exis­tence, and under­stand­ing that absence is one of the big chal­lenges of par­ti­cle physics.