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science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.”
I hope Ludwig van Beethoven gets his cut, Langdon thought, fairly certain that the original inventor of bone conduction technology was the eighteenth-century composer who, upon going deaf, discovered he could affix a metal rod to his piano and bite down on it while he played, enabling him to hear perfectly through vibrations in his jawbone.
“Zeus’s followers were so resistant to giving up on their god that the conquering faith of Christianity had no choice but to adopt the face of Zeus as the face of their new God.”
“For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.”
Ruthless, violent, and uncompromising, Francisco Franco had risen to power with the military support of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. He killed thousands of his opponents before seizing total control of the country in 1939 and proclaiming himself El Caudillo—the Spanish equivalent of the Führer. During the Civil War and well into the first years of dictatorship, those who dared oppose him disappeared into concentration camps, where an estimated three hundred thousand were executed.
Spain’s pacto de olvido—a nationwide political agreement to “forget” everything that had happened under Franco’s vicious rule—meant that schoolchildren in Spain had been taught very little about the dictator. A poll in Spain had revealed that teenagers were far more likely to recognize the actor James Franco than they were dictator Francisco Franco.
towering Gaudí chimneys that resembled futuristic chess pieces—helmeted sentinels that allegedly had so impressed filmmaker George Lucas that he’d used them as models for his menacing storm troopers in Star Wars.
For more than a century, Gaudí’s controversial Basílica de la Sagrada Família had been under construction, relying solely on private donations from the faithful.
the Palmarian Church, which, according to Spain’s national newspaper, El Pais, has its own “pope” and has canonized several ruthless leaders—including Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler—as saints!
The origin of the ampersand was always one of the first things Langdon taught his symbology classes. The symbol “&” was a logogram—literally a picture representing a word. While many people assumed the symbol derived from the English word “and,” it actually derived from the Latin word et. The ampersand’s unusual design “&” was a typographical fusion of the letters E and T—the ligature still visible today in computer fonts like Trebuchet, whose ampersand “” clearly echoed its Latin origin.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. —WINSTON CHURCHILL
Quantum computing, rather than using a binary method of storing information, made use of the quantum states of subatomic particles, resulting in an exponential leap in speed, power, and flexibility.
‘dissipative structures’—collections of molecules that have arranged themselves in structures that help a system disperse its energy more efficiently.” England quickly illustrated how tornadoes were nature’s way of dispelling a concentrated area of high pressure by converting it into a rotational force that eventually exhausted itself. The same held true for rippled riverbeds, which intercepted the energy of fast-moving currents and dissipated it.
“Simply stated,” England continued, “matter self-organizes in an effort to better disperse energy.” He smiled. “Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order. These pockets are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and they thereby increase entropy.” Langdon had never thought of it until now, but England was right; the examples were everywhere. Langdon pictured a thundercloud. When the cloud became organized by a static electric charge, the universe created a bolt of lightning. In other words, the laws of physics created mechanisms to disperse energy. The
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“The dawn of Homo sapiens,” Edmond said, “occurs at 200,000 BC,
the wisdom of Churchill, who warned us: ‘The price of greatness…is responsibility.’ ”
“May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.”
Anthropological data clearly showed that cultures practicing religions historically had outlived nonreligious cultures. Fear of being judged by an omniscient deity always helps inspire benevolent behavior.
RELIGION: BECAUSE THINKING IS HARD.
Love is from another realm. We cannot manufacture it on demand. Nor can we subdue it when it appears. Love is not our choice to make.
the words of our countryman Jorge Santayana—” “ ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
the other lesson history has taught us—that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion…that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them. It is these voices—these choirs of empathy, tolerance, and compassion—that I pray one day will sing from this mountaintop.”
Love is not a finite emotion. We don’t have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.
“We should all do what so many churches already do—openly admit that Adam and Eve did not exist, that evolution is a fact, and that Christians who declare otherwise make us all look foolish.” Langdon stopped short, staring at the old priest. “Oh, please!” Beña said, laughing. “I don’t believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect—” “—intended us to forgo their use?”
