Page 75 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)

As the embassy limousine turned left onto Mánes?v Bridge, Katherine opened a bottle of Kofola cola from the limousine’s bar and took a long sip. Langdon waited as she gazed out at the spires of Prague Castle. She seemed to be organizing her thoughts for what she was about to say.

I want to hear everything, he thought, still unable to imagine what Katherine could have discovered that would trigger someone to destroy her manuscript. Or commit murder…

“Okay,” Katherine said, lowering the bottle and turning to him. “There’s a scientific phenomenon called the replication crisis. Are you familiar with it?”

Langdon had heard the term bandied about by his colleagues in the science department. “If I’m not mistaken, it refers to any experimental result that occurs once and cannot be replicated.”

“Precisely,” she said. “And over the past fifty years, dozens of highly respected scientists have produced a range of laboratory results that strongly support nonlocal consciousness. Some of these experiments have yielded results that are truly mind-boggling…and yet attempts to repeat them have either failed or produced inconclusive results.”

Like cold fusion, Langdon thought.

“It’s actually quite maddening,” Katherine said, frustration in her voice. “Most of these nonrepeatable results stem from meticulously executed, peer-reviewed experiments, carried out by skilled, reputable scientists.”

“Even so, their results are discredited?”

“Entirely. There’s an intellectual war raging in my field between the local and nonlocal models of consciousness.

The inability of noeticists to replicate certain results has become the battle cry of materialists everywhere—skeptics like Gessner who will denounce your experiment as deceptive and brand you an overeager charlatan or fraud. ”

Langdon was not surprised. In his field of religious history, published claims were brutally debunked as part of the battle between believers and nonbelievers.

Fraud was commonplace. The Shroud of Turin—the alleged burial cloth of Christ—had now been radiocarbon-dated to 1,200 years after Christ. The famous “James Ossuary Inscription” of 2002 had been revealed as counterfeit.

The influential imperial decree known as the Donation of Constantine had been revealed as a clever forgery manufactured by the Church to consolidate power.

We proclaim the Truth that serves our needs.

“There is one PSI experiment in particular,” Katherine said, “that has become a lightning rod in this ongoing storm. It was first performed in the early 1980s by a highly respected scientific team who worked with rigorous care and produced inconceivable results. Unfortunately, those results have proven nonrepeatable, despite countless follow-up attempts.”

“The Ganzfeld experiment,” Langdon offered.

Katherine looked impressed. “You know about that?”

“Only recently,” he admitted. “After your rather jaw-dropping book pitch about nonlocal consciousness, I decided to do some reading in the field.”

“I would feel flattered,” she said, “but I’m guessing you were double-checking that I wasn’t crazy.”

Langdon laughed. “Not at all. I was truly interested.”

The Ganzfeld experiment, he had learned, consisted of placing a subject into a sensory deprivation chamber and asking a second subject to “mentally transmit” images to him.

The experiment was carried out over many sessions, and the results overwhelmingly displayed the existence of mental telepathy.

Strangely, the astonishing level of statistical success displayed in that first series of attempts had never been replicated, even by the same team, resulting in a firestorm of criticism and allegations of deceit.

“And if you read about Ganzfeld,” she said, “then you probably also read about social scientist Daryl Bem—one of the Ganzfeld experiment’s most vocal defenders and author of the controversial 2011 article ‘Feeling the Future.’?”

“I read that one too,” Langdon admitted, recalling the intriguing subtitle: “Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.”

Bem’s article described an experiment in which he had shown participants a list of random words and then, after removing it, had asked them to recall as many words as possible from the list. The next day, he gave the participants a short selection of words chosen completely at random from the original list and told them to memorize those words.

Incredibly, the test results from day one clearly indicated that participants were far more likely to recall words that they would see again on day two— after the test!

Wait a minute! Langdon recalled thinking, bewildered. You can study after a test? The future affects the past?

Troubled, he had taken the Bem results to a colleague in the physics department—a bow-tied Oxford grad named Townley Chisholm—who seemed surprisingly unfazed by the data.

Chisholm assured Langdon that “retrocausality” was indeed real and had been observed in numerous experiments, including one called “the delayed-choice quantum eraser.”

Chisholm described it as “a tricked-out version of the classic double-slit experiment.” The original, Langdon knew, had stunned the world by proving that light traveling through a double-slitted barrier could move either as a particle or as a wave…

and, inconceivably, it seemed to “decide” which way to act each time based on whether someone chose to observe it.

The “delayed choice” modification, Chisholm explained, incorporated the use of entangled photons and mirrors to effectively “delay” the observer’s real-time choice of whether to observe…

until after the light had revealed how it was going to act.

In other words, the scientists forced the light to react to a decision that had not yet been made.

The mind-boggling result was that the light was not fooled at all.

It somehow anticipated what choice the observer would make in the future…

as if the universe already knew what would happen before it had happened.

Later, after googling the experiment, Langdon was able to get his head around only enough to accept that some very smart minds believed future events did indeed affect past events…and that time was capable of flowing in reverse.

“I have to admit,” Langdon said, frowning at Katherine, “the mere idea of retrocausality gives me cognitive dissonance.”

“You’re not alone,” she replied. “You should see how my visitors react to the plaque on my desk. It says: ‘Today’s experiences are the result of tomorrow’s decisions.’?”

As much as Langdon tried to open his mind to retrocausality, he found it impossible to accept. “But time moving backward makes no sense! There must be some other explanation.”

“There is, but you won’t like it much better,” Katherine said.

“The other possibility is that all the nutjob ‘universal consciousness’ folks are correct…and the universe knows all things. In this view, the universe isn’t bound by linear time as humans perceive it.

Instead, it operates as a timeless whole where past, present, and future coexist.”

Langdon’s head was starting to hurt. “What about your book? You were talking about the replication crisis…and how it plagues PSI and noetics?”

“Yes, it does, like no other field, and it’s unfair.

” Katherine took a sip of her drink. “Consider the field of athletics. If an athlete has an amazing Olympic result and sets a world record—something that has never occurred before, and which nobody else can replicate—we don’t decide the television cameras played a trick, or the audience was hallucinating.

We see it simply as a remarkable result.

Just because you can’t perform the same thing twice, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. ”

“Fair point…but that’s sports. This is science. Repeatability is a key part of the scientific process.”

“Yes, and I agree that repeatability is a reasonable burden of proof at the macroscopic level. But at the quantum level, things work differently, Robert. The quantum world is understood to be unpredictable. In fact, unpredictability is quite literally its most agreed-upon trait!”

Another fair point, he realized.

“The language of the quantum world,” she said, talking faster now, “is literally the language of unpredictability —probability waves, quantum fluctuations, uncertainty principles, probabilistic tunneling, chaos, quantum interference, decoherence, superpositions, dualities. All of this translates loosely to ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen because the classical rules of physics don’t apply! ’?”

“Okay, so consciousness—”

“Consciousness is not a flesh-and-blood organ in your body. Consciousness exists in the quantum realm. It is therefore extremely difficult to observe with any predictability or repeatability. You can use your consciousness to observe a bouncing ball, but when you use your consciousness to observe your consciousness …you get an endless feedback loop. It’s like trying to observe what color your own eyes are, without the use of a mirror.

As intelligent or persistent as you are, you can’t possibly know, because you can’t observe your eyes with your eyes—any more than you can observe your consciousness with your consciousness. ”

“Interesting. And you make this point in your book?”

“Yes, along with the argument that repeatability, as a burden of proof, is an unreasonably high bar when studying consciousness. It’s doing damage to the field and destroying careers.”

Langdon wasn’t sure how to respond. It was a fascinating concept, but in light of what they’d been through today, he had expected something more controversial…or dangerous…to warrant the kind of attention she had drawn. “So, this is the backbone of…your discovery?”

“Heavens no!” Katherine laughed loudly. “I was simply explaining why consciousness is such an elusive beast to hunt. My discovery is tangible. I found something amazing through a series of experiments.” She leaned toward him and smiled.

“And by the way, yes, these experiments I was able to repeat. ”

In Random House Tower, the elevator pinged, and Jonas Faukman stepped out onto a collage of colored floor tiles.

The seventh floor was like stepping into a parallel dimension, a place where he knew his tension would dissipate.

Here were none of the orderly bookshelves, muted tones, and straight lines that defined the other floors at PRH.

The seventh floor was a winding maze of brightly colored “work pods” decorated with cartoon art, inflatable palm trees, beanbag chairs, and stuffed animals.

Children’s books: playful decor. Serious business.

In addition to this division’s pleasantly whimsical setting, Faukman appreciated that there was nothing childish about its coffee machine—a Franke A1000 with FoamMaster technology—a far cry from the Nespresso pods on the other floors.

Sometimes, late at night, Faukman would sneak in here with a manuscript, make a double espresso, and plop down in a beanbag chair to edit under the watchful eye of a giant Winnie-the-Pooh on one side of the lounge and the mischievous smile of seven-foot-tall Cat in the Hat on the other.

Tonight, as the machine ground his coffee, Faukman breathed in the aroma, trying to ease his fears.

The arrest of the operatives downstairs should have been a relief, but he felt no real contentment; the whereabouts of Robert and Katherine were still unknown, and he felt increasingly desperate to know they were safe.

Alex Conan had already solved one vexing question:

Who stole Katherine’s manuscript?

But the startling answer now begged a second question.

Why?

Jonas Faukman had devised a plan to unravel that mystery.