So the Higgs may be scientifically fascinating, but what does it have to do with blowing up the Vatican? Not much, really. It is mentioned in the film as a bit of scientific window-dressing to try to give a portentous feel of Great Ideas being debated in what is really just a pretty standard body-count whodunit. There is some mention of the conflict between science and religion, but only in clichés. The search for the Higgs is dubiously claimed to be science intruding into religion by touching the actual moment of the Creation, and on this point you can forgive the filmmakers, because it was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman who engaged in a bit of poorly-considered hyperbole when he coined the term "The God Particle" for the Higgs (to sell books). In reality, the Higgs field is just one of many fields in the Standard Model, and a Higgs boson has no more spiritual significance than an electron (and we are far from the energies needed to probe the earliest physics which took place at the beginning of the Big Bang, so we are not touching the moment of creation). 

On the whole, the science presented in A&D is actually no worse than in the average Hollywood movie, and quite a bit better than some. The typical Star Trek film has many more basic scientific flaws, but they get away with it because lots of scientists were closet Trekkers when growing up so they keep their mouths shut. So I guess the question we should ask is: "Why is the science in most Hollywood movies so ridiculous?" 

I got some insight into that years ago when I actually helped make a Hollywood movie — The Saint. Central to the plot of that film was "The Secret of Cold Fusion", a set of formulas written on a piece of paper conveniently stored in Elisabeth Shue's bra. Through a path too tortuous to go into here, my colleague Victor Christou and I ended up equipping a set with old nuclear physics and chemistry lab equipment. While we were working, the art director brought us the version of the secret of cold fusion that one of their artists had drawn up. It was intended to look like complex physics equations, and it did indeed consist of mathematical symbols, but it was total gibberish, ignoring all the meanings implicit in those symbols. It would be like showing a note in Latin supposedly written by Julius Caesar that said "EVCXO MNLFOEI". All those letters are indeed used in Latin, but that combination can't possibly be a meaningful Latin phrase, just as the symbols I was shown could not possibly encode any meaningful physics. When I complained, the art director pointed out that nobody watching the movie would notice or care. I told him that anybody with any knowledge of science would, so he let Victor and I rewrite the Secret of Cold Fusion into the form actually used in the film. I can prove this because I buried a mistake in the formulas (the constant in front of Fermi's Golden Rule #2 is the wrong way up), which the keen-eyed will notice. 

I tell this story partly to point out that I am probably the only scientist on earth who has had a publication concealed in a top Hollywood actress's bra, but mainly because it shows the real reason that there are so many science errors in Hollywood films. Film-makers are telling stories, they aren't teaching science, and they only worry about factual errors when they think that these will bother the viewers. That doesn't just apply to scientific errors, it applies to everything (as any historian will tell you about Braveheart). 

Of all the scientists I have heard complain about the scientific errors in A&D, I haven't heard a single one complain about the timeline. The hero, after all, is shown in his office at Harvard talking to a Vatican official after a morning swim, and there are plenty of students walking around the campus, so it is at least 8am. He then watches the sun set in Rome that very evening after already having been quizzed at the Vatican and run around the city chasing lost cardinals for at least an hour. That can't be done (minimum flight time Boston to Rome is a little under eight hours, call it seven with a fast private jet, and there is a six-hour time difference, plus a minimum hour to/from the airports, so on the clock you can't make it in less than 14 hours, add to that the time he had already spent in Rome and it would have been after 11pm, too late to see the sun set). Nobody objected because nobody noticed. So the bottom line is that Hollywood directors think they can include gross scientific errors in their plots because their audience won't notice, and given the frequency with which you see people claim that anti-matter could be an energy source, they appear to be right. The solution is obvious, if difficult to implement — raise the general level of scientific awareness. I am afraid that is a job we can't (and shouldn't) leave to Hollywood.