“Is it?” Ambra said. “I’ve seen books that argue Darwin was entirely wrong.”
“What she says is true,” Winston chimed in from the phone, which was recharging on the table between them. “More than fifty titles were published over the past two decades alone.”
Langdon had forgotten Winston was still with them.
“Some of these books were bestsellers,” Winston added. “What Darwin Got Wrong…Defeating Darwinism…Darwin’s Black Box…Darwin on Trial…The Dark Side of Charles Dar—”
“Yes,” Langdon interrupted, fully aware of the substantial collection of books claiming to disprove Darwin. “I actually read two of them a while back.”
“And?” Ambra pressed.
Langdon smiled politely. “Well, I can’t speak for all of them, but the two I read argued from a fundamentally Christian viewpoint. One went so far as to suggest that the earth’s fossil record was placed there by God ‘in order to test our faith.’?”
Ambra frowned. “Okay, so they didn’t sway your thinking.”
“No, but they made me curious, and so I asked a Harvard biology professor for his opinion of the books.” Langdon smiled. “The professor, by the way, happened to be the late Stephen J. Gould.”
“Why do I know that name?” Ambra asked.
“Stephen J. Gould,” Winston said at once. “Renowned evolutionary biologist and paleontologist. His theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ explained some of the gaps in the fossil record and helped support Darwin’s model of evolution.”
“Gould just chuckled,” Langdon said, “and told me that most of the anti-Darwin books were published by the likes of the Institute for Creation Research—an organization that, according to its own informational materials, views the Bible as an infallible literal account of historical and scientific fact.”
“Meaning,” Winston said, “they believe that Burning Bushes can speak, that Noah fit every living species onto a single boat, and that people turn into pillars of salt. Not the firmest of footings for a scientific research company.”
“True,” Langdon said, “and yet there are some nonreligious books that attempt to discredit Darwin from a historical standpoint—accusing him of stealing his theory from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who first proposed that organisms transformed themselves in response to their environment.”
“That line of thought is irrelevant, Professor,” Winston said. “Whether or not Darwin was guilty of plagiarism has no bearing on the veracity of his evolutionary theory.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Ambra said. “And so, Robert, I assume if you asked Professor Gould, ‘Where do we come from?’ he would reply, without a doubt, that we evolved from apes.”
Langdon nodded. “I’m paraphrasing here, but Gould essentially assured me that there was no question whatsoever among real scientists that evolution is happening. Empirically, we can observe the process. The better questions, he believed, were: Why is evolution happening? And how did it all start?”
“Did he offer any answers?” Ambra said.
“None that I could understand, but he did illustrate his point with a thought experiment. It’s called the Infinite Hallway.” Langdon paused, taking another sip of coffee.
“Yes, a helpful illustration,” Winston chimed in before Langdon could speak. “It goes like this: imagine yourself walking down a long hallway—a corridor so long that it’s impossible to see where you came from or where you’re going.”
Langdon nodded, impressed by the breadth of Winston’s knowledge.
“Then, behind you in the distance,” Winston continued, “you hear the sound of a bouncing ball. Sure enough, when you turn, you see a ball bouncing toward you. It is bouncing closer and closer, until it finally bounces past you, and just keeps going, bouncing into the distance and out of sight.”
“Correct,” Langdon said. “The question is not: Is the ball bouncing? Because clearly, the ball is bouncing. We can observe it. The question is: Why is it bouncing? How did it start bouncing? Did someone kick it? Is it a special ball that simply enjoys bouncing? Are the laws of physics in this hallway such that the ball has no choice but to bounce forever?”
“Gould’s point being,” Winston concluded, “that just as with evolution, we cannot see far enough into the past to know how the process began.”
“Exactly,” Langdon said. “All we can do is observe that it is happening.”
“This was similar, of course,” Winston said, “to the challenge of understanding the Big Bang. Cosmologists have devised elegant formulas to describe the expanding universe for any given Time—‘T’—in the past or future. However, when they try to look back to the instant when the Big Bang occurred—where T equals zero—the mathematics all goes mad, describing what seems to be a mystical speck of infinite heat and infinite density.”
Langdon and Ambra looked at each other, impressed.
“Correct again,” Langdon said. “And because the human mind is not equipped to handle ‘infinity’ very well, most scientists now discuss the universe only in terms of moments after the Big Bang—where T is greater than zero—which ensures that the mathematical does not turn mystical.”
One of Langdon’s Harvard colleagues—a solemn physics professor—had become so fed up with philosophy majors attending his Origins of the Universe seminar that he finally posted a sign on his classroom door.
In my classroom, T > 0.
For all inquiries where T = 0,
please visit the Religion Department.
“How about Panspermia?” Winston asked. “The notion that life on earth was seeded from another planet by a meteor or cosmic dust? Panspermia is considered a scientifically valid possibility to explain the existence of life on earth.”
“Even if it’s true,” Langdon offered, “it doesn’t answer how life first began in the universe. We’re just kicking the can down the road, ignoring the origin of the bouncing ball and postponing the big question: Where does life come from?”
Winston fell silent.
Ambra sipped her wine, looking amused by their interplay.
As the Gulfstream G550 reached altitude and leveled off, Langdon found himself imagining what it would mean to the world if Edmond truly had found the answer to the age-old question: Where do we come from?
And yet, according to Edmond, that answer was only part of the secret.
Whatever the truth might be, Edmond had protected the details of his discovery with a formidable password—a single, forty-seven-letter line of poetry. If all went according to plan, Langdon and Ambra would soon uncover it inside Edmond’s home in Barcelona.
CHAPTER 43
Nearly a decade after its inception, the “dark web” remains a mystery to the vast majority of online users. Inaccessible via traditional search engines, this sinister shadowland of the World Wide Web provides anonymous access to a mind-boggling menu of illegal goods and services.
From its humble beginning hosting Silk Road—the first online black market to sell illegal drugs—the dark web blossomed into a massive network of illicit sites dealing in weapons, child pornography, political secrets, and even professionals for hire, including prostitutes, hackers, spies, terrorists, and assassins.
Every week, the dark web hosted literally millions of transactions, and tonight, outside the ruin bars of Budapest, one of those transactions was about to be completed.
The man in the baseball cap and blue jeans moved stealthily along Kazinczy Street, staying in the shadows as he tracked his prey. Missions like this one had become his bread and butter over the past few years and were always negotiated through a handful of popular networks—Unfriendly Solution, Hitman Network, and BesaMafia.
Assassination for hire was a billion-dollar industry and growing daily, due primarily to the dark web’s guarantee of anonymous negotiations and untraceable payment via Bitcoin. Most hits involved insurance fraud, bad business partnerships, or turbulent marriages, but the rationale was never the concern of the person carrying out the job.