Sandbox / Dan Browned Dan Brown

Digital Fortress

• The depiction of Seville has been criticized by Spanish-speaking readers, among other things. [Spanish] Is Dan Brown a compulsive liar?
  • This one was simply insulting: Brown portrayed the Spanish health care system as useless and incompetent, when in fact, it is ranked 7th in the world by the WHO (for comparison, the USA's is 37th).
  • The whole issue is summed up by Brown's claim that he studied Art History at the University of Seville for a year. Not only does the university deny this, Brown also gets his art history wrong every single time in the book. The 15th-century cathedral is said to be from the 11th century and to have only one door (and another little, hidden one) when it actually has seven; the 10th century Alcazar is said to be from the 15th; and the Giralda's dangerous steps constitute a critical plot point despite the real building being notorious for not having any steps, only ramps. Digging deeper into the wound, Brown repeats his "I studied Art History in Seville" story in the foreword of the Spanish version and claims that Seville is one of his favorite cities in the world before proceeding to rip it to shreds in the actual novel.
  • The main character rents a room in Hotel Alfonso XIII, "a little four-star hotel." The real thing was built in 1928 with the express aim of being the most luxurious hotel in Europe, and it still retains a five-star rating. When coupled with the mention of tourist-trap Triana neighborhood as a crime-ridden Wretched Hive full of prostitutes and drug dealers, it is obvious that Brown is simply borrowing the names from a tourism brochure (probably printed for the 1992 World Exposition, given the continuous references to Columbus and the New World) and trying so really, really hard to make everything dangerous that it becomes an unintended parody instead. Spanish buses? They are dangerous because they drive around with the gates open. Why? To cool patients without having to turn on the air cooling system to save money. So money is invested in making buses with air cooling systems in the first place but that are never put to use to save money, and the same drivers who don't care to turn it on for the benefit of their passengers do care enough about them getting too hot to open the gates, but they don't care if the passengers fall off and break two legs and an arm so they keep driving at racing speed regardless of traffic and Seville streets being described as twisted little alleys elsewhere in the book. The setting is just one logic bomb like that after another.
  • David Becker speaks Spanish so well that he can fool a native Spaniard into thinking that Becker is a Burgos native just from hearing his voice over the phone. People in Burgos speak the standard Castilian dialect spoken by most Spaniards and used by default in Spanish media. It is simply impossible to recognize someone as being from Burgos from his accent alone.
• The book states that the etymology of "sincere" is a combination of two Latin works "sine" and "cera", meaning "without wax". A popular, but entirely wrong, urban legend^note The Romans had a word "sincerus", meaning "unmixed, pure"..^note Cf. English's status as the "Lingua Pura" from The Da Vinci Code! Storied Words by Jeff Jeske
• The book confuses the number of bits in a key scales; specifically it states that a 64-bit key has twice as many combinations as a 32-bit key. It actually has 4,294,967,296 (2^32) times as many possibilities. You would only need 33 bits to have twice as many combinations as 32. WordLingo
  • The book also confuses the purpose of a public key with that of a private key.
  • Not to mention his claim that a 64-bit key would have 64 characters, "too many for anyone to remember." In hexadecimal, a 64-bit key has 16 characters; in base 36, only 13 characters.
    • What's more, plenty of people can memorize long strings of numbers. See also Mouthful of Pi.
• The atomic elements made to create the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were different (plutonium and uranium) and not just two different isotopes of uranium. That doesn't fit with the story of course...
  • Additionally, of the two isotopes given, only one is actually fissile. Uranium-238 would not be used to create an atomic bomb.
  • The quote used in the book is "What is the prime difference between the elements responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?". He apparently identifies that these are separate elements (despite stating later that it refers to U-235 and U-238, which are isotopes of the same element), but the difference in atomic number is two, not three as stated, which is still prime and so should have been the password used.
• The book has a short description involving decrypting a code that is wrong on several levels. The code was thought by the characters to be "Mandarin symbols" but is later discovered to be the "Kanji language". First, Mandarin is a spoken language that shares its written symbols with many other Sinic languages. Assuming that by "Mandarin characters" he meant Classical Chinese or Standard Written Chinese (which is likely), there is no way to tell from the writing whether the writer spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other dialect; it's all just written in Chinese.^note Only Cantonese has a unique system of characters in common use, which even then mostly overlaps with the standard. Second, kanji is one of three symbol sets used by Japanese speakers; it is not a language of its own. Finally, the code is decrypted out of sequence, for security purposes. Translating Chinese or Japanese out of sequence would be just as impossible as reading English words scrambled by a randomizer. Hanzi Smatter
  • Dan Brown isn't totally clueless, however, as he goes on to correctly describe Kanji as a Chinese character-based writing system for Japanese on the very same page.
• That's not even to mention the central conceits of the book, which are that 1. the NSA has a computer that can carry out successful brute-force attacks on modern cryptographic systems (which is basically theoretically impossible within the lifetime of the user, unless they've gotten new technology from Sufficiently Advanced Aliens), and 2. some person invented a cryptosystem that is immune to brute-force attacks, and yet is not simply a one-time pad, which is theoretically impossible due to the fundamental nature of information.
  • Yes, the cryptosystem does turn out to be a hoax, but this is patently obvious and the plot relies on it somehow not being patently obvious, not even to the NSA.
• One plot point is that the magical algorithm is publicized, but encrypted with itself, and everyone acts as if anyone who got the key can decrypt and use it. This ignores the fact that a cryptographic key is useless without also knowing the algorithm. Reverse-engineering an algorithm when one got a key and a ciphertext sample (but no cleartext sample) might be theoretically possible when the algorithm isn't very complex, but when the algorithm is as sophisticated as claimed, this would be anything but trivial.
  • That point can be handwaved: source code, theoretical proofs, and similar stuff in plain text is bundled with binary implementation of decoder, obfuscated and jury-rigged to only accept a specific file. Though no effort from Brown himself to say even that.
• It's a major plot point that the NSA's (fictional) supercomputer cannot decrypt a particular ciphertext which it received recently. This is taken as absolute proof that the ciphertext was encrypted with some sort of ultimate encryption technique which is tough enough to beat the supercomputer. Absolutely no one mentions the obvious alternative: the supposed ciphertext is simply random data, and it can't be decrypted simply because it's random and therefore it contains no actual information.
• In the book, the aforementioned ciphertext turns out to be a virus. It was quickly decrypted and subsequently infected all sorts of critical computers. This makes no sense at all. The only way a virus can attack a machine is if the machine executes the file (this may happen with a standalone virus file, or with a virus that's embedded into a larger executable file somehow), but there is absolutely no reason why the supercomputer should attempt to execute every file which it has decrypted! Most of the time you'd only want to read the file. If you did want to execute it, there would surely be another step where somebody has to click "OK", and even then there'd be sandboxing and whatever other protections in place to prevent attacks—if the NSA had a policy of running every file it decrypts (without protection!), anyone in the world could just encrypt a common virus, email it to the NSA, and the NSA would be screwed.^note Technically, there are a few methods that would allow a weak system to be infected after simply reading the contents of a file. This requires that the contents themselves somehow "trick" the program reading them to execute code despite not being intended to (e.g SQL injection, buffer overflow, etc.). This method of attack, however, is not nearly as simple as using just a single "magical" handful of code. It's unlikely that it could infect a single system, let alone several, especially if we are talking about the NSA. It's a well-known exploit, so any decent computer system has defenses against it... unless somehow the cyphertext is also a "supervirus" that can infect anything.

Angels and Demons

• A bomb made of anti-matter to blow up the Vatican? There hasn't been enough anti-matter produced in the world to boil a cup of coffee. Also, to make a bomb out of anti-matter they would need several huge and very, very rich backers. It's been estimated that to produce even one gram of anti-matter in 2020 would cost $62.5 trillion. Anti-matter is far too expensive to make, and then there's the problem of transporting the stuff to the Vatican without it blowing up along the way. An atom of anti-matter has to be kept constantly hovering in vacuum with the help of surrounding magnets, as it would explode instantly if it came in contact with matter. It'd be much easier and cheaper (even for CERN) to just use regular bombs. Antimatter: Most Expensive Substance on Earth
• Improper use of the Italian language was noted by Italian readers, along with generally being wrong about things pertaining to Rome. (Italian) Thriller Reviews
• Contrary to what the book claims, anti-matter can't be used as a source of limitless energy due to it taking more energy to create than it produces. Although, if it could be produced efficiently and stored safely, it would be the densest energy storage medium of all (except for black holes). CERN
• No, CERN can't blow up the world whenever it wants like in the book. It doesn't have enough anti-matter, and simply hand-waving this for plot purposes doesn't suffice. History.com
• Langdon claims that the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States reads "Novus ordo seculorum," meaning "New Secular Order," and that Henry Wallace convinced Franklin D. Roosevelt to adopt it. In fact, the Great Seal was adopted in 1782, a hundred years before Roosevelt was born, and the motto is "Novus ordo seclorum," meaning "New Order for the Ages." Wikipedia
• A news commentator says that Ventresca was elected pope by "Adoration" when the crowd and cardinals cheered him after they thought he had saved Vatican City from the anti-matter. First, the proper term is "Election by Acclamation". Second, although Election by Acclamation hadn't been used since 1676, it became impossible in 1996 by Papal decree. Wikipedia
  • The film version has the Cardinals discussing electing the Camerlengo in this manner since he wouldn't be eligible otherwise. Again, a requirement of Acclamation was spontaneity. As in, the electors had to proclaim the election without negotiation or consultation. This was based on the belief that the Holy Spirit moved the electors to declare that God had chosen the person.
  • Also, unlike the film claims, any Catholic man can be elected as pope, even a layman. (If a layman is elected, he has to be first ordained deacon, then priest, and then consecrated as bishop, after which he can take office.) Wikipedia
• The book maintains that CERN created the Internet, which was created by the USA's Department of Defense's DARPA military technology research organization. CERN created the World Wide Web, which is not the same thing. This is exceptionally odd since Brown got it right in Digital Fortress. Pages 7 & 20–21 of Angels & Demons, Niels Brügger's Web History (2010)
• The book describes Langdon as a professor of Symbology at Harvard. Symbology is not a department at Harvard (or at any university for that matter)—the real-life discipline is called Semiology (as in "semantics", not "half"). Slate
  • Later books seem to retcon this one by having him refer to himself as an Art History professor, though "and Symbologist" tends to get tacked on.
• The book claims that the church Santa Maria della Vittoria is located at the Piazza Barberini, while in fact it's a bit to the west in one of the streets leading to it. Wikipedia
• Langdon wonders whether the second altar of science could be located in St. Peter's Square because it's part of Vatican City rather than Rome and all the altars are supposed to be found within the boundaries of the city of Rome. It's explained to him that St. Peter's Square has been contested territory between the authorities of Rome and those of Vatican City for centuries. A better answer would be that the Vatican is the remnant of a Papal State which for centuries extended across Italy to the Adriatic Sea; the Pope lost control of Lazio (Rome's province) only in 1870, and the present boundaries of the Vatican were fixed by treaty in 1929. Bigger Than You Think: the Vatican and its Annexes
• Perhaps most baffling is the claim that the Christian ritual of Communion was borrowed from the Aztecs. The Aztecs did have a similar practice, but it was only done by elites and anyone who's familiar with the Gospels would know that Communion predates the Aztecs by over 1000 years. Besides, there's a ton of art depicting Communion produced before 1492, the year in which Christians made their first contact with the American continent. A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMMUNION (PART I)
• Illuminati: New World Order is a collectible card game, not a computer game, and Steve Jackson Games is not a computer game company. While the Bavarian Illuminati are a group in the game, the "Bavarian" bit is not in the title. There is not an option to play the game over the internet in standard rules, though some fans have come up with this option on their own. While the players can destroy other groups or individuals, "points" are not given for their destruction. "Vatican City" can be controlled or destroyed in the game, but "The Pope" is not one of the cards.

Deception Point

• The novel mentions special "improvised munitions"—weapons that are capable of firing water at sufficient speed to shatter bones or turn sand or ice into bullets. In reality, "Improvised Munitions" in military technical language means something else entirely, and of those possibilities mentioned, only the first one is possible; water bullets are used in bomb disposal since it is incompressible and a poor conductor of electricity. Turning sand into glass bullets, however, would require a power source too big to conveniently carry, and ice bullets were shown to be ineffective. Mythbusters.
• Director Pickering addresses Rachel as "Agent Sexton". Intelligence analysts are not law enforcement officers and the NRO does not have clandestine field operatives. Wikipedia
• NASA sets up a huge camp in Ellesmere Island and does all its business unhindered. Not only is Ellesmere Island part of Canada, who would presumably also want to take part in this, but the Canadian military maintains a permanent base there: Canadian Forces Station Alert (Wikipedia).
  • Not to mention that CFS Alert is a military signals intelligence intercept facility run jointly by the Canadian military's intelligence division and the Communications Security Establishment (the Canadian equivalent of the NSA) Wikipedia so chances are they would have at least noticed a strange radio transmission, like the one made by the murdered geologist.
• Japan's Seven Gods of Good Fortune (Shichi-fukujin) are misidentified as Shichigosan, which is not a deity or a group of deities, but a traditional rite of passage for children in Japan. Wikipedia 1&Wikipedia 2

The Da Vinci Code

• Right in the title. "The from Vinci Code" should be a red flag to Leonardo da Vinci studiers of the Dan Browning from the very title.^note It's not incorrect to refer to him as "Da Vinci", (just as with surnames beginning "Von" — German for "from"), but it is informal and smacks of a lack of academic rigour since in this case it is purely an indicator of birthplace and was never substantivised as a surname. Academics either refer to him as "Leonardo da Vinci" or just "Leonardo", but never as "da Vinci", certainly not in any formal contexts. SF Gate Article
  • It was fixed in some of the translations of the novel, such as Bulgarian, Czech, and Polish, all of which included the name Leonardo in their titles. The Polish translation replaced basically all of the "Da Vinci"s found throughout the novel with the much more accurate "Leonardo"s.
• Brown claims that Rosslyn Chapel has the same layout as the Temple of Solomon. According to experts: "Rosslyn Chapel bears no more resemblance to Solomon's or Herod's Temple than a house brick does to a paperback book." Rosslyn and the Grail
• No, Leonardo da Vinci was not "flamboyantly homosexual". No law-abiding citizen was 'flamboyantly' anything besides heterosexual at the time, and, furthermore, the idea of "homosexual" as an identity with accompanying "flamboyancy" is a relatively recent concept. Leonardo was accused of sodomy as a young man in 1476 along with 3 other men, but the charges were dismissed due to lack of evidence.^note Though some say that, due to the family of one of the accused, Leonardo Tornabuoni, being associated to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted influence to have the charges dropped. His writings in later life indicate that, if anything, he was asexual and thus simply uninterested in either sex^note  Although some have argued that his writings only warned against lustfulness, and that this did not necessarily indicate that Leonardo himself was chaste. This is still an ongoing debate.
  • The Da Vinci Hoax
  • Wikipedia
• The Knights Templar mainly maintained territory in the Levant and became an exceptionally wealthy early banking service. Their degrees of literary knowledge and education varied greatly, going from basically illiterate to shockingly cultured, but in any case, their history makes it extremely improbable that they passed down any kind of geometry from Egyptians or the like. The Knights Templar: A New History., p.2
• Louvre Pyramid is composed of 673 panes of glass, not 666 panes of glass as in the book. Paris City Vision
• If there are any descendants of Jesus, it'd be a sizeable group, not a select few, because of the way genes are passed down. Slate
• In the description of Madonna Grotto◊ Brown says that John the Baptist is on the right, blessing Jesus on the left and being threatened by Virgin Mary. Aside from the... weird interpretation of this protective gesture, here◊'s another version of Madonna Grotto. A staff with a cross on it is John the Baptist's symbol. Which kid has it?
• Brown claims that counting the number of hands in "The Last Supper" leads to the discovery of a disembodied hand holding a knife. However, it has been clarified this hand belongs to Peter. It being pointed away from Jesus is thought to symbolize Peter's willingness to defend Jesus; indeed, in the Gospels, Peter cuts off somebody's ear during Jesus's arrest (and Jesus puts it right back on).
• What about that monk from Opus Dei? Opus Dei was specifically founded for people who live "in the world", in other words, people who aren't members of religious orders. An Opus Dei monk would be an Oxymoronic Being. They do have numeraries, that is, celibate members whose concept might look like monks to outsiders, but not literal monks. (Oddly, Dan Brown actually mentions numeraries in the book, meaning he managed to confuse even a notion that should dispel this very confusion.)
• Dan Brown did absolutely no research whatsoever on albinism. Silas has red eyes, shoots people from a far distance, and drives a car at high speeds at night. As outlined here by Dennis Hurley, writer and star of the parody film The Albino Code and an actual person with albinism, human albinos do not have red eyes (that's bunnies◊); their eyes are blue or slate gray but may appear to be red-tinged due to the reflection of blood vessels in the eye, caused by a lack of pigmentation in the iris. Furthermore, most albinos have very poor vision and are often legally blind as the result of abnormal development of the retina and abnormal patterns of nerve connections between the eye and the brain. In fact, vision impairment is the main aspect of the diagnostic criteria for albinism. All in all, definitely not the best candidates for that assassin position. (More information here.)
• Constantine the Great and the First Council of Nicea in AD 325 had nothing to do with making Christianity the official religion in the Roman Empire. Constantine gathered the Council in order to formalize the Christian theology and formalize it as a religion of the empire, and the Council decided mainly on topics like the date of Easter, the structure of the Church, and what to do with the Arian and Meletian heresies. It was Emperor Theodosius I, 55 years later, in AD 380 who declared Christianity to be the state religion, and this still didn't translate into a mass Christianization of the empire.^note If you are curious, King Trdat of Armenia and King Ezana of Ethiopia who proclaimed Christianity the official religion of their realms before Theodosius did, in 314 and 333 respectively.
• Brown is also responsible for a false meme which has spread throughout popular culture: that the 325 Council of Nicaea "set" the Biblical canon, the books which are considered official scripture (according to Brown, thereby suppressing those Gospels that contained the "truth" about Jesus' descendants yadda yadda yadda). In fact, Nicaea had absolutely nothing to say about the canon. On the one hand, the four Gospels had been agreed upon as the only legitimate ones as early as 175, and the other 23 books of the new testament were universally recognized by the mid-3rd century.^note At least in the Latin West; it was another two centuries before the Eastern Church recognized Revelation On the other hand, no Council officially decreed the canon as set until that of Trent in 1546 — after Leonardo's death.
• Brown cites the Gnostic Gospel of Philip as saying that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. The text actually says no such thing; while it does say Mary Magdalene had special insight into Jesus's teachings and she is referred rather suggestively to as Jesus's "companion" or "partner", those are very wide terms that do not necessarily imply they were married or together in any way, unlike what Teabing and Langdon state. (There is also a passage where it is stated he loved her more than the rest of his disciples, but the same is stated about John in the Biblical canon, so kind of a moot point.) Interestingly, Gnostics were extremely against carnal relationships and advocated celibacy even more than mainstream Christians, sometimes to the extent of banning marriage and/or breeding altogether; thus, while they would have been okay with Jesus having a romantic relationship, the idea of Jesus producing offspring would have been actually much more offensive to them than it is to Catholicism. Wikipedia
• The idea that papyrus could easily be destroyed by vinegar. Papyrus is sturdy enough to hold itself together for 2-3 millennia, so a few drops of vinegar would just make some stains.
• Teabing and Langdon explain that English is the preferred mode of communication by the Priory of Sion as it is the "Lingua Pura", the pure tongue, the only European language unadulterated by the Papist Latin. In reality, there is no European language that was not influenced by Latin to some degree (except for Hungarian and Finnish, which are Uralic, and Basque, which is a pre-Indo-European (likely native Iberian) language), and the choice of English is particularly puzzling. Although it is admittedly a Germanic language (whereas the Romance languages are descended from Latin), it borrowed heavily from French (a Latin-derived language) due to the Norman Conquest, and later from Latin directly during the Renaissance. There is really no reason for the Priory to communicate in English when there are so many other languages that fit the criteria better like Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, or Greek (all of which Renaissance scholars, but obviously not Brown, were very familiar with, particularly Arabic,^note From the thriving Italian trade with the Middle East Hebrew,^note From Biblical study and most especially Greek^note From Biblical and Classical studies (Ancient Greek) and the thriving Italian trade with the Byzantines/Greeks (Byzantine/Medieval/Early Modern Greek).). The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code
• Teabing and Langdon explain the whole idea of upward pointed arrows representing a lance, or penis, while a downward pointing arrow is a chalice, or vulva. Teabing then tries to connect this to military insignia, claiming that "the more penises a soldier has, the higher his rank." A quick glance at American and British Army ranks, to provide two examples out of the whole world, will show that the lower ranks use both symbols, and officer ranks use neither.
• According to the book, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain Christian gospels. This is untrue, as they contain no Christian texts whatsoever (one fragment was theorized to be from Mark, but this was later disproven). Most of the Nag Hammadi scrolls are Jewish studies on the Torah, Gnostic texts of several kinds, and other sectarian rules, most often thought to be of the Essene sect. Wikipedia
• Brown describes a nefarious Vatican conspiracy to hide the truth of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the world. This would be quite a feat since the Dead Sea Scrolls have never been under the control of the Vatican in the first place (and were published with no opposition from them whatsoever). The Dead Sea Scrolls
• Brown insists that the Priory of Sion, the secret society whose Grand Masters supposedly include Leonardo, Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo, is "...a European society founded in 1099, a real organization". Nowadays it's pretty much proven that it was founded by a French con man in 1956. Wikipedia

The Lost Symbol

• Langdon states that the word "Abracadabra" means "I create as I say" and is based on the word "Abrahadabra". The translation is more or less correct, but he reverses the origins: Abrahadabra is from a 20th century new age religion called Thelema, while Abracadabra was used by 2nd century Romans. Wikipedia
• Brown repeats the urban legend regarding the etymology of "sincerely" from Digital Fortress. Storied Words by Jeff Jeske
• While it's true that many of the experiments done by Katherine Solomon have been done in real life, they're hardly the conclusive truth as presented in the book. Masaru Emoto did do experiments on how thoughts could change the structure of water crystals, but they've been highly criticized — Emoto did not have controls on his experiment and has not given out his technique for others to attempt to repeat, and he's acknowledged that he just chose the pictures he liked best. The triple-blind study conducted to try to replicate the effects failed to get significant results. Wikipedia

Inferno

• Misquoting Robert Oppenheimer as saying, "I have become Vishnu, destroyer of worlds." While the original line from the Bhagavad Gita was spoken by Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, the actual quote was, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Wikiquote on this
• The opening quote, "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis", is not found anywhere in Inferno. In fact, it is several centuries more recent than Dante, being said by John F. Kennedy on West Germany Peace Corps (change from "darkest" to "hottest"), and later used by Martin Luther King, Jr. with reference to the Vietnam War. Dante did despise those who tried to remain neutral and claims that the damned would consider themselves superior to the undecided since they at least chose something. To avoid giving the damned even that pleasure, the would-be neutral are not punished in Hell proper but on the shores of the river Acheron, where they're condemned to chase an endlessly elusive banner while being stung by wasps and hornets. In Dante, Hell's worst place, its ninth circle, is not for the neutral but for traitors and is not the darkest but the lowest and coldest. The darkest place in Dante's hell is the second circle, which is for the lustful. JFK Library
• Claiming "unplanned births" are a problem in the western world in context of overpopulation, even though the average fertility rate in Europe and America is around 1.9 babies per woman: below replenishment rates. In fact, the global average fertility rate has come down from about 5 babies per woman in 1965, to about 2.4 babies per woman in 2015 and it's still dropping. Brown built the entire main plot for Inferno around the "mathematical certainty" of exponential population growth, but the world population is actually mathematically projected to stabilize between 10 and 12 billion people. Gapminder visualization
• The World Health Organization is nothing like the N.G.O. Superpower it is portrayed as in the book. In reality, the WHO has very limited funding, with member state contributions only covering 30% of the organization's budget: Tidsskriftet

---