Book Review: Origin (Robert Langdon, #5) by Dan Brown

Origin by Dan Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dan Brown is one of my favorite authors. In this book Robert Langdon is invited to attend a presentation by a celebrity geek Edmond Kirsch who was his student at Harward. During the presentation Edmond gets assassinated and Robert together with Ambra Vidal, the museum curator and also Edmond's friend, goes on a mission to show Edmond's presentation to the world. Edmond had created a super intelligent virtual assistant that could converse like a human would and was run by a new kind of Quantum super computer which was significantly better than Google's D-Wave and was called E-Wave. Edmond named his assistant Winston after Winston Churchill. Winston comes to the aid of Robert and Ambra to help them first find the password to unlock Edmond's presentation which Edmond told Robert was a sentence from a poem of 47 characters. With this vague information and his ingenious intuition to figure things out Robert Langdon first gets the password and then to the Edmond's lab and run Edmond's presentation to millions of viewers all across the world. The presentation was about 2 quintessential questions of mankind:
1. Where do we come from? - About our origin
2. Where are we going? - About the future
Edmond had found that given sufficient time the experiment to create life from chemicals in a test tube in the lab can be successful. This experiment was first conducted by UC San Diego professors in their lab and after 50 years they could not see sufficient signs of amino acid formation in the test tube and so the experiment was shelved. But Edmond realized that the time span of 50 years is nothings compared to how long it actually took life to form on earth since the beginning of earth's formation to the time when first unicellular protozoa came into existence. So he built a virtual time machine which was a data model for his super computer to make predictions with. He modeled the conditions of early days of earth with a test tube worth of chemicals just like the physical experiment and let the super computer generate the data of how things evolve with respect to time. This way he could go way ahead in time than mere 50 years and could see the formation of amino acid to unicellular to multi cellular organisms and to larger animal kind. He could also predict how the future will look like with technology becoming part of the human body.

The story line is not as interesting as other Robert Langdon books but it is still easy and fun to read.

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