July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Lillie’s last post. She has been writing with us since August 2020.

Y’all. 

Settle in for a vague review of Origin by Dan Brown, and a thinly-veiled rant about how we (mis)understand science in pop culture. Woohoo!

First, I think it’s only right that I confess that I have never written a proper book review. There’s something about the idea of a book review that seems—okay, I’ll say it—pretentious. In a way that makes me nervous and reminds me that I am not an English major, I studied engineering (and somehow the post still lets me write for them). Take that as my disclaimer, you English/writing majors of the post calvin, that I have no illusions of knowing what I’m talking about when it comes to writing.

Second, you should know that I love data. More specifically, I love well-represented data that helps laypeople understand science better, ask good questions, and get a taste of the wonder I experience when I learn something new. I’m a firm believer that there are only two reasons to make a graph that the average adult cannot interpret accurately: 1) incompetence and 2) malice. 

When I started listening to an audiobook version of Dan Brown’s Origin, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was just looking for a murder mystery to pass the time, and didn’t realize Dan Brown is like famous or whatever. The basic premise of the book is a murder mystery—sort of. 

There’s this fancy tech genius and devout atheist who claims to have made a discovery that will make all religions obsolete, and he’s making a huge, dramatic deal about presenting his findings. Naturally, Edmund (the aforementioned genius) throws a fancy gala at the Guggenheim to announce his discovery. But, moments before he shares the ground-breaking information, he is murdered!

What ensues for the rest of the book is the story of Edmund’s former professor and the Guggenheim curator trying to find out who killed Edmund and still find a way to share Edmund’s discovery with the world. The whole book centers on the questions Where did we come from? and Where are we going? (“Cotton-Eyed Joe” got stuck in my head a lot while listening to this book, so readers beware). 

Honestly, the plot was great. Twist and turns and little clues for you to put together, wrapped in a satisfying cocoon of imagery and symbolism and interplay between religion, architecture, art, and science. Commentary on art, conjecture about Edmund’s discovery, and an ambiguous relationship with some really advanced AI make for an interesting mystery to unravel, with likable characters and delightful plot twists. I liked the book. 

But then. THEN. Then they got to the part about Edmund’s discovery. 

What gets me is that this whole big reveal of his science hinged, mainly, on two things: 1) Edmund was able to, by himself, prove something no one had ever done before, but he would immediately be taken at his word and everything in the world would change, and 2) a really crap definition of Newton’s Second Law, aka entropy.

*John Mulaney voice* Now, we don’t have time to unpack all of that. 

But I literally had to stop listening to the book for a few hours when I got to this part because I got so unreasonably frustrated with this very bad science. (Which probably says more about me than it does the plot of the book, but here we are.) 

My anger at author Dan Brown can be summarized as follows, taking my two major points of contention one at a time:

1. Peer-review is a thing that happens in science for a reason. This just totally glossed over the challenges of doing good science and the necessary collaborations that help form scientific consensus. It reduced science to a black box and one rich, resourced, smart, (dead) white guy with the assumption that he was right. I cannot emphasize enough that science Does. Not. Work. That way. Or at least it shouldn’t.

2. Essentially, the deal was that Edmund (the supposed genius) had forgotten entropy in his first models, but including entropy made everything make sense.

I…I was a bit speechless about this one. Because no self-respecting scientist would ever exclude entropy in a thermodynamic analysis (and that’s something that would have been caught in—wait for it—peer-review). There was a bad description of the heat-death of the universe and thermodynamic equilibrium.

I spent four years learning about how entropy works, and the thing I took away from that can be summarized in a quote from a professor my junior year:

“Understanding entropy basically comes in three stages: Stage One, you learn a bit of math and can do some calculations, so you think you understand entropy. (You don’t.) Stage Two, you learn a bit more and have to start applying Newton’s Second Law, and realize you have no idea how entropy works, but you can still do the math. Step Three, you still really have no idea how entropy works, but you can talk about it at a dinner party and make yourself sound smart.”

I think Dan Brown tried to skip right to Step Three without going through the thermodynamic agony of Step Two. Suffice it to say, I was not impressed.

But, at the end of it all, the mystery of Edmund’s discovery, and his murder, was solved. Questions of theology were effectively raised and left unanswered, and some really fun prose leaves a lot of room for literary analysis, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

Apart from the bad science, it was a great read.

1 Comment

1. 

   Laura Sheppard Song on July 19, 2023 at 5:11 pm

   No English major could have written a review this entertaining and informative! It takes me back to a former professor’s equally scathing rant about the egregious art historical oversights central to the plot of The Da Vinci Code. I love hearing different people’s specialized areas of expertise applied to broad experiences and media in real life. Thanks for this 🙂

   Reply

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment *

Name *

Email *

Website

Δ

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.