"Brown, Dan - Angels and Demons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Dan)

The floor of the room was a mesh grid, like a giant sheet of chicken wire. Visible beneath the grid was the
metallic blur of a huge propeller.
"Free fall tube," Kohler said, stopping to wait for him. "Indoor skydiving. For stress relief. It's a vertical
wind tunnel."
Langdon looked on in amazement. One of the free fallers, an obese woman, maneuvered toward the
window. She was being buffeted by the air currents but grinned and flashed Langdon the thumbs-up sign.
Langdon smiled weakly and returned the gesture, wondering if she knew it was the ancient phallic symbol
for masculine virility.
The heavyset woman, Langdon noticed, was the only one wearing what appeared to be a miniature
parachute. The swathe of fabric billowed over her like a toy. "What's her little chute for?" Langdon asked
Kohler. "It can't be more than a yard in diameter."
"Friction," Kohler said. "Decreases her aerodynamics so the fan can lift her." He started down the the
corridor again. "One square yard of drag will slow a falling body almost twenty percent."
Langdon nodded blankly.
He never suspected that later that night, in a country hundreds of miles away, the information would save
his life.
8
When Kohler and Langdon emerged from the rear of CERN's main complex into the stark Swiss
sunlight, Langdon felt as if he'd been transported home. The scene before him looked like an Ivy League
campus.
A grassy slope cascaded downward onto an expansive lowlands where clusters of sugar maples dotted
quadrangles bordered by brick dormitories and footpaths. Scholarly looking individuals with stacks of
books hustled in and out of buildings. As if to accentuate the collegiate atmosphere, two longhaired hippies
hurled a Frisbee back and forth while enjoying Mahler's Fourth Symphony blaring from a dorm window.
"These are our residential dorms," Kohler explained as he accelerated his wheelchair down the path toward
the buildings. "We have over three thousand physicists here. CERN single-handedly employs more than
half of the world's particle physicists-the brightest minds on earth-Germans, Japanese, Italians, Dutch, you
name it. Our physicists represent over five hundred universities and sixty nationalities."
Langdon was amazed. "How do they all communicate?"
"English, of course. The universal language of science."
Langdon had always heard math was the universal language of science, but he was too tired to argue. He
dutifully followed Kohler down the path.
Halfway to the bottom, a young man jogged by. His T-shirt proclaimed the message: NO GUT, NO
GLORY!
Langdon looked after him, mystified. "Gut?"
"General Unified Theory." Kohler quipped. "The theory of everything."
"I see," Langdon said, not seeing at all.
"Are you familiar with particle physics, Mr. Langdon?"
Langdon shrugged. "I'm familiar with general physics-falling bodies, that sort of thing." His years of high-
diving experience had given him a profound respect for the awesome power of gravitational acceleration.
"Particle physics is the study of atoms, isn't it?"
Kohler shook his head. "Atoms look like planets compared to what we deal with. Our interests lie with an
atom's nucleus-a mere ten-thousandth the size of the whole." He coughed again, sounding sick. "The men
and women of CERN are here to find answers to the same questions man has been asking since the
beginning of time. Where did we come from? What are we made of?"
"And these answers are in a physics lab?"
"You sound surprised."
"I am. The questions seem spiritual."
"Mr. Langdon, all questions were once spiritual. Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have
been called on to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. The rising and setting of the sun was once