19

Langdon, Vittoria, and Kohler enter Leonardo Vetra’s futuristic private lab, which appears deserted despite the evidence that someone used Vetra’s stolen eye to bypass the retinal scanner. Vittoria is shaken by being in her father’s workspace, while Kohler searches for signs of theft and notices a circle of transparent canisters mounted on short steel pillars.

Kohler presses Vittoria to reveal what her father had been working on, saying secrecy is no longer possible. After calming herself through a practiced breathing ritual, Vittoria explains that Leonardo’s life goal was to reconcile science and religion by showing that both seek the same truth.

Vittoria identifies the central conflict as creation: the religious claim that God made the universe from nothing versus the scientific law that matter cannot be created from nothing. She explains that the Big Bang theory, originally proposed by Catholic monk Georges Lemaître and later supported by Edwin Hubble’s evidence, still leaves science unable to explain the singularity, or the exact moment of creation.

Leonardo believed that science could eventually understand that divine moment. Vittoria reveals that her father designed an experiment to prove Genesis was possible by recreating the Big Bang on a tiny scale, using CERN’s accelerator to collide ultrathin particle beams and focus immense energy into a single point.

The experiment produced particles of matter that appeared from nowhere, which Vittoria presents as proof that matter can arise from pure energy. When Kohler questions how anyone could verify that the particles were newly created, Vittoria explains that they are not ordinary matter but a kind that does not exist on Earth.

Vittoria leads Kohler and Langdon to the chapter’s major revelation: Leonardo’s experiment created both matter and its opposite. The mysterious canisters contain the world’s first specimens of antimatter, making the stolen access to the lab far more alarming.