Origin: (Robert Langdon Book 5) Read online

  I remember that, Langdon thought. The Harvard biology faculty had thrown a department party they billed as BYOB: Build Your Own Bacterium.

  “There was, of course, a strong reaction from modern religious leaders,” Edmond said, placing air quotes around the word “modern.”

  The wall display refreshed to the homepage of a website—creation.com—which Langdon recognized as a recurring target of Edmond’s wrath and ridicule. The organization was indeed strident in its Creationist evangelizing, but it was hardly a fair example of “the modern religious world.”

  Their mission statement read: “To proclaim the truth and authority of the Bible, and to affirm its reliability—in particular its Genesis history.”

  “This site,” Edmond said, “is popular, influential, and it contains literally dozens of blogs about the dangers of revisiting Miller-Urey’s work. Fortunately for the folks at creation.com, they have nothing to fear. Even if this experiment succeeds in producing life, it probably won’t happen for another two billion years.”

  Edmond again held up the test tube. “As you can imagine, I would like nothing more than to fast-forward two billion years, reexamine this test tube, and prove all the Creationists wrong. Unfortunately, accomplishing that would require a time machine.” Edmond paused with a wry expression. “And so … I built one.”

  Langdon glanced over at Ambra, who had barely moved since the presentation started. Her dark eyes were transfixed by the screen.

  “A time machine,” Edmond said, “is not that difficult to build. Let me show you what I mean.”

  A deserted barroom appeared, and Edmond walked into it, moving to a pool table. The balls were racked in their usual triangular pattern, waiting to be broken. Edmond took a pool cue, bent over the table, and firmly struck the cue ball. It raced toward the waiting rack of balls.

  An instant before it collided with the rack, Edmond shouted, “Stop!” The cue ball froze in place—magically pausing a moment before impact.

  “Right now,” Edmond said, eyeing the frozen moment on the table, “if I asked you to predict which balls would fall into which pockets, could you do it? Of course not. There are literally thousands of possible breaks. But what if you had a time machine and could fast-forward fifteen seconds into the future, observe what happens with the pool balls, and then return? Believe it or not, my friends, we now have the technology to do that.”

  Edmond motioned to a series of tiny cameras on the edges of the table. “Using optical sensors to measure the cue ball’s velocity, rotation, direction, and spin axis as it moves, I can obtain a mathematical snapshot of the ball’s motion at any given instant. With that snapshot, I can make extremely accurate predictions about its future motion.”

  Langdon recalled using a golf simulator once that employed similar technology to predict with depressing accuracy his tendency to slice golf shots into the woods.

  Edmond now pulled out a large smartphone. On the screen was the image of the pool table with its virtual cue ball frozen in place. A series of mathematical equations hung over the cue ball.

  “Knowing the cue ball’s exact mass, position, and velocity,” Edmond said, “I can compute its interactions with the other balls and predict the outcome.” He touched the screen, and the simulated cue ball sprang to life, smashing into the waiting rack of balls, scattering them, and sinking four balls in four different pockets.

  “Four balls,” Edmond said, eyeing the phone. “Pretty good shot.” He glanced up at the audience. “Don’t believe me?”

  He snapped his fingers over the real pool table, and the cue ball released, streaking across the table, loudly smacking into the other balls, and sending them scattering. The same four balls fell in the same four pockets.

  “Not quite a time machine,” Edmond said with a grin, “but it does enable us to see the future. In addition, it lets me modify the laws of physics. For example, I can remove friction so that the balls will never slow down … rolling forever until every last ball eventually falls into a pocket.”

  He typed a few keys and launched the simulation again. This time, after the break, the ricocheting balls never slowed down, bouncing wildly around the table, eventually falling into pockets at random, until there were only two balls left careening around the table.

  “And if I get tired of waiting for these last two balls to drop,” Edmond said, “I can just fast-forward the process.” He touched the screen, and the two remaining balls accelerated in a blur, streaking around the table until they finally fell into pockets. “This way I can see the future, long before it happens. Computer simulations are really just virtual time machines.” He paused. “Of course, this is all fairly simple math in a small, closed system like a pool table. But what about a more complex system?”

  Edmond held the Miller-Urey vial and smiled. “I’m guessing you can see where I’m going with this. Computer modeling is a kind of time machine, and it lets us see the future … perhaps even billions of years into the future.”

  Ambra shifted on the couch, her eyes never leaving Edmond’s face.

  “As you can imagine,” Edmond said, “I am not the first scientist to dream of modeling the earth’s primordial soup. In principle, it’s an obvious experiment—but in practice, it’s a nightmare of complexity.”

  Turbulent primordial seas appeared again amid lightning, volcanoes, and massive waves. “Modeling the ocean’s chemistry requires simulation at the molecular level. It would be like predicting the weather so accurately that we knew the precise location of every air molecule at any given moment. Any meaningful simulation of the primordial sea would therefore require a computer to understand not only the laws of physics—motion, thermodynamics, gravity, conservation of energy, and so forth—but chemistry as well, so it could accurately re-create the bonds that would form between every atom within a boiling ocean stew.”

  The view above the ocean now plunged beneath the waves, magnifying down into a single drop of water, where a turbulent swirl of virtual atoms and molecules were bonding and breaking apart.

  “Sadly,” Edmond said, reappearing on-screen, “a simulation confronted by this many possible permutations requires a massive level of processing power—far beyond the capability of any computer on earth.” His eyes again twinkled with excitement. “That is … any computer except one.”

  A pipe organ rang out, playing the famous opening trill to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor along with a stunning wide-angle photograph of Edmond’s massive two-story computer.

  “E-Wave,” Ambra whispered, speaking for the first time in many minutes.

  Langdon stared at the screen. Of course … it’s brilliant.

  Accompanied by the dramatic organ soundtrack, Edmond launched into a fervent video tour of his supercomputer, finally unveiling his “quantum cube.” The pipe organ climaxed with a thunderous chord; Edmond was literally “pulling out all the stops.”

  “The bottom line,” he concluded, “is that E-Wave is capable of re-creating the Miller-Urey experiment in virtual reality, with startling accuracy. I cannot model the entire primordial ocean, of course, so I created the same five-liter closed system that Miller and Urey used.”

  A virtual flask of chemicals now appeared. The view of the liquid became magnified and remagnified until it reached the atomic level—showing atoms bouncing around in the heated mixture, bonding and rebonding, under the influences of temperature, electricity, and physical motion.

  “This model incorporates everything we have learned about the primordial soup since the days of the Miller-Urey experiment—including the probable presence of hydroxyl radicals from electrified steam and carbonyl sulfides from volcanic activity, as well as the impact of ‘reducing atmosphere’ theories.”

  The virtual liquid on-screen continued to roil, and clusters of atoms began to form.

  “Now let’s fast-forward the process …,” Edmond said excitedly, and the video surged ahead in a blur, showing the formation of increasingly complex compounds. “Aft
er one week, we start to see the same amino acids that Miller and Urey saw.” The image blurred again, moving faster now. “And then … at about the fifty-year mark, we start to see hints of the building blocks of RNA.”

  The liquid kept churning, faster and faster.

  “And so I let it run!” Edmond shouted, his voice rising in intensity.

  The molecules on-screen continued to bond, the complexity of the structures increasing as the program fast-forwarded centuries, millennia, millions of years. As the images raced ahead with blinding speed, Edmond called out joyfully, “And guess what eventually appeared inside this flask?”

  Langdon and Ambra leaned forward with excitement.

  Edmond’s exuberant expression suddenly deflated. “Absolutely nothing,” he said. “No life. No spontaneous chemical reaction. No moment of Creation. Just a jumbled mix of lifeless chemicals.” He let out a heavy sigh. “I could draw only one logical conclusion.” He stared dolefully into the camera. “Creating life … requires God.”

  Langdon stared in shock. What is he saying?

  After a moment, a faint grin crept across Edmond’s face. “Or,” he said, “perhaps I had missed one key ingredient in the recipe.”

  CHAPTER 92

  AMBRA VIDAL SAT mesmerized, imagining the millions of people around the globe who, right now, just like her, were fully engrossed in Edmond’s presentation.

  “So, what ingredient was I missing?” Edmond asked. “Why did my primordial soup refuse to produce life? I had no idea—so I did what all successful scientists do. I asked somebody smarter than I am!”

  A scholarly bespectacled woman appeared: Dr. Constance Gerhard, biochemist, Stanford University. “How can we create life?” The scientist laughed, shaking her head. “We can’t! That’s the point. When it comes to the process of creation—crossing that threshold where inanimate chemicals form living things—all of our science goes out the window. There is no mechanism in chemistry to explain how that happens. In fact, the very notion of cells organizing themselves into life-forms seems to be in direct conflict with the law of entropy!”

  “Entropy,” Edmond repeated, now appearing on a beautiful beach. “Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart. In scientific language, we say ‘an organized system inevitably deteriorates.’” He snapped his fingers and an intricate sand castle appeared at his feet. “I’ve just organized millions of sand grains into a castle. Let’s see how the universe feels about that.” Seconds later, a wave came in and washed away the castle. “Yup, the universe located my organized grains of sand and disorganized them, spreading them over the beach. This is entropy at work. Waves never crash onto beaches and deposit sand in the shape of a sand castle. Entropy dissolves structure. Sand castles never spontaneously appear in the universe, they only disappear.”

  Edmond snapped his fingers again and reappeared in an elegant kitchen. “When you heat coffee,” he said, pulling a steaming cup from a microwave, “you focus heat energy into a mug. If you leave that mug on the counter for an hour, the heat dissipates into the room and spreads itself out evenly, like grains of sand on a beach. Entropy again. And the process is irreversible. No matter how long you wait, the universe will never magically reheat your coffee.” Edmond smiled. “Nor will it unscramble a broken egg or rebuild an eroded sand castle.”

  Ambra recalled once seeing an art installation called Entropy—a line of old cement blocks, each more crumbled than the last, slowly disintegrating into a pile of rubble.

  Dr. Gerhard, the spectacled scientist, reappeared. “We live in an entropic universe,” she said, “a world whose physical laws randomize, not organize. So the question is this: How can lifeless chemicals magically organize themselves into complex life-forms? I’ve never been a religious person, but I have to admit, the existence of life is the only scientific mystery that has ever persuaded me to consider the idea of a Creator.”

  Edmond materialized, shaking his head. “I find it unnerving when smart people use the word ‘Creator’ …” He gave a good-natured shrug. “They do it, I know, because science simply has no good explanation for the beginnings of life. But trust me, if you’re looking for some kind of invisible force that creates order in a chaotic universe, there are far simpler answers than God.”

  Edmond held out a paper plate on which splinters of iron filings had been scattered. He then produced a large magnet and held it beneath the plate. Instantly, the filings leaped into an organized arc, aligning perfectly with one another. “An invisible force just organized these filings. Was it God? No … it was electromagnetism.”

  Edmond now appeared beside a large trampoline. On its taut surface were scattered hundreds of marbles. “A random mess of marbles,” he stated, “but if I do this …” He hoisted a bowling ball onto the trampoline’s rim and rolled it onto the elastic fabric. Its weight created a deep indentation, and immediately the scattered marbles raced into the depression, forming a circle around the bowling ball. “The organizing hand of God?” Edmond paused. “No, again … it was just gravity.”

  He now appeared in close-up. “As it turns out, life is not the only example of the universe creating order. Nonliving molecules organize themselves all the time into complex structures.”

  A montage of images materialized—a tornado vortex, a snowflake, a rippled riverbed, a quartz crystal, the rings of Saturn.

  “As you can see, sometimes the universe does organize matter—which seems to be the exact opposite of entropy.” Edmond sighed. “So which is it? Does the universe prefer order? Or chaos?”

  Edmond reappeared, now walking down a pathway toward the famed dome of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “According to most physicists, the answer is chaos. Entropy is indeed king, and the universe is constantly disintegrating toward disorder. Kind of a depressing message.” Edmond paused and turned with a grin. “But today I’ve come to meet the bright young physicist who believes there is a twist … a twist that may hold the key to how life began.”

  Jeremy England?

  Langdon was startled to recognize the name of the physicist Edmond was now describing. The thirtysomething MIT professor was currently the toast of Boston academia, having caused a global stir in a new field called quantum biology.

  Coincidentally, Jeremy England and Robert Langdon shared the same prep school alma mater—Phillips Exeter Academy—and Langdon had first learned of the young physicist in the school’s alumni magazine, in an article titled “Dissipation-Driven Adaptive Organization.” Although Langdon had only skimmed the story and barely understood it, he recalled being intrigued to learn that his fellow “Exie” was both a brilliant physicist and also deeply religious—an Orthodox Jew.

  Langdon began to understand why Edmond had been so interested in England’s work.

  On-screen, another man appeared, identified as NYU physicist Alexander Grosberg. “Our big hope,” Grosberg said, “is that Jeremy England has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life.”

  Langdon sat up a bit straighter upon hearing that, as did Ambra.

  Another face appeared. “If England can demonstrate his theory to be true,” said Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Edward J. Larson, “his name would be remembered forever. He could be the next Darwin.”

  My God. Langdon had known Jeremy England was making waves, but this sounded more like tsunamis.

  Carl Franck, a physicist from Cornell, added, “Every thirty years or so we experience these gigantic steps forward … and this might be it.”

  A series of headlines flashed across the screen in rapid succession:

  “MEET THE SCIENTIST WHO COULD DISPROVE GOD”

  “CRUSHING CREATIONISM”

  “THANKS, GOD—BUT WE DON’T NEED YOUR HELP ANYMORE”

  The list of headlines continued, joined now by snippets from major scientific journals, all of which seemed to proclaim the same message: if Jeremy England could prove his new theory, the implications would be earth-shattering—no
t just for science but for religion as well.

  Langdon eyed the final headline on the wall—from the online magazine Salon, January 3, 2015.

  “GOD IS ON THE ROPES: THE BRILLIANT NEW SCIENCE THAT HAS CREATIONISTS AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT TERRIFIED.”

  A Young MIT Professor Is Finishing Darwin’s Task—and Threatening to Undo Everything the Wacky Right Holds Dear.

  The screen refreshed, and Edmond reappeared, striding purposefully along the hallway of a university science facility. “So what is this gigantic step forward that has so terrified Creationists?”

  Edmond beamed as he paused outside a door marked: ENGLAND LAB@MITPHYSICS.

  “Let’s go inside—and ask the man himself.”

  CHAPTER 93

  THE YOUNG MAN who now appeared on Edmond’s display wall was physicist Jeremy England. He was tall and very thin, with an unkempt beard and a quietly bemused smile. He stood before a blackboard filled with mathematical equations.

  “First,” England said, his tone friendly and unassuming, “let me just say that this theory is not proven, it’s just an idea.” He gave a modest shrug. “Although, I admit, if we can ever prove that it’s true, the implications are far-reaching.”

  For the next three minutes, the physicist outlined his new idea, which—like most paradigm-altering concepts—was unexpectedly simple.

  Jeremy England’s theory, if Langdon understood it correctly, was that the universe functioned with a singular directive. One goal.

  To spread energy.

  In the simplest terms, when the universe found areas of focused energy, it spread that energy out. The classic example, as Kirsch had mentioned, was the cup of hot coffee on the counter; it always cooled, dispersing its heat to the other molecules in the room in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

  Langdon suddenly understood why Edmond had asked him about the world’s Creation myths—all of which contained imagery of energy and light spreading out infinitely and illuminating the darkness.