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Excerpt from the Introduction
Like two photons dancing in quantum entanglement, the new Hollywood blockbuster Angels & Demons will connect the dots across time and space to join up with the culture-changing, paradigm-shifting phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code novel six years earlier. With Tom Hanks reprising his role from The Da Vinci Code film as symbologist Robert Langdon (and, according to Hollywood insiders, having vowed to mature and deepen his portrayal) and Ayelet Zurer set to move from little-known Israeli actress to global “It girl” through the crucible of playing the brainy/sexy/mystical entanglement expert, Vittoria Vetra, Angels & Demons looks to be a better film than The Da Vinci Code was.
Likewise, many readers thought Angels & Demons was a better book than The Da Vinci Code as well. First published by novelist Dan Brown in 2000, Angels & Demons was, in many ways, the rough draft for The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003. As a novel, Angels & Demons virtually flopped when it was first available. It garnered very few reviews, sold only modestly, and generated next to no buzz. But resurrected and republished in the wake of the spectacular success of The Da Vinci Code a few years later, Angels & Demons was reincarnated as a global bestseller—and now a major motion picture—in its own right.
With fascinating insights into the centuries-old debate between science and religion wrapped into the fabric of its thriller plot, Angels & Demons is as relevant and topical as a Hollywood blockbuster can be. Dan Brown’s storyline uses the metaphor of two different “cathedrals”: The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its acronym, CERN), is the world’s most advanced physics research lab. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, it is the “cathedral of science.” St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the epicenter of the Catholic Church, is the “cathedral of religion.” These two cathedrals, like two atomic particles, come smashing into each other as the story progresses through its twenty-four-hour time clock and its race-against-time-to-save-civilization plot. (Note that FOX would adopt the twenty-four-hour ticking time bomb scenario a year after the publication of Angels & Demons for its hit television series 24.)
Each cathedral has experienced a significant real-world change since Angels & Demons was published at the dawn of this decade. The Vatican went through its mysterious internal political machinations to select Pope Benedict XVI after the 2005 death of Pope John Paul II. Ironically, Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons novel—and our Secrets of Angels & Demons, which had just been published at the time of John Paul II’s death—were seized on by the media and ordinary citizens alike as guidebooks to understanding the papal selection process. Vatican officialdom, which had been silent about the worldwide Da Vinci Code craze while Pope John Paul II was still in reasonable health, suddenly lashed out at The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Powerful conservative cardinals—some aligned with the future Pope Benedict—declared Dan Brown’s books to be works of heresy and demanded that they be banned from bookstores and libraries. Denouncing these American potboilers became part of the internal political struggle as the papal conclave convened to choose a new pope.
More recently, in 2008, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful and fiendishly complex particle accelerator, came on line, allowing scientists to try and create a mini “big bang” and perhaps plumb the birth of our universe. That summer, magazine covers, TV specials, and Internet debates reached a fever pitch of frenzy in arguing about whether the LHC could trigger the end of the world as we know it. In fact, the Collider promises to yield a rich trove of scientific insights into the behavior of the subatomic particles that are the essential infrastructure of all matter. In doing so, it will provoke new ideas and debates about the origins and meaning of life.
Angels & Demons foreshadowed all this at a time when most lay citizens had never heard of CERN, particle accelerators, or antimatter….
… TO READ THE COMPLETE INTRODUCTION, PLEASE SEE THE BOOK