Dan Browned/Dan Brown

Dan Brown, Trope Namer of Dan Browned, gets his own page due to the absolutely monstrous amount of the eponymous activity found in his myriad works. Due to the scrapping of the last page due to natter, ill-will, et. al., there is such a thing as notability. Citations are done like the following:

• Blah Dan Brown Blah Blah Critical Research Failure Blah Blah Hollywood Style Blah. Example Website

As well, anything about religious inaccuracies will not be represented on this page, due to a) The Bible being a work with wide interpretations, and b) the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement.

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 healthcare system as useless and incompetent - in fact, it is ranked 7th in the World by the WHO (for comparison, the USA's is 37th).
• The book states that the etymology of "sincerely" is a combination of two Latin works "sine" and "cera", meaning "without wax". A popular, but entirely wrong, urban legend. Storied Words by Jeff Jeske
• The book confuses how 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. WordLingo
  • The book also confuses the purpose of a public key with that of a private key.
• 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...
• The book has a short description involving decrypting a code that is wrong on several levels. Firstly, the code was thought by the characters to be "Mandarin symbols", when Mandarin refers to a spoken language (which is, like many other Sinic languages, represented in writing by Chinese zi). The character then realizes that the symbols are "Kanji language", but Kanji is a component of the Japanese writing system, not a language of its own. It is further ridiculous to think that everyone in the NSA could confuse Chinese with Japanese, as Japanese writing makes use of two separate syllabaries (kana) which are not present in Chinese. Even if they did, the meanings of the characters are identical between Japanese and Chinese; only pronunciation changes. Switching languages would have the approximate effect of pronouncing the word "tomato" as "to-MAH-to" rather than "to-MAY-to" and expecting this to have an effect on the word's meaning. 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 text scrambled by a randomizer.
• That's not even to mention the central conceit of the book, which is that 1. the NSA has a computer that can carry out successful brute-force attacks on modern cryptographic systems, which is basically theoretically impossible 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.

Angels & Demons

• 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 make than it produces. Someday, hopefully, but certainly not now. CERN
  • Not now, not ever. Energy does not work that way.
• No, CERN can't blow up the world whenever it wants like in the book. It doesn't have enough antimatter, for starters. History.com ^[dead link]
  • Although a major plot device was that two scientists at CERN secretly developed a method for collecting bomb-level amounts of antimatter, and one was killed to get it. It was stated in the book that they could not achieve such levels until the characters discovered the fictional method.
• A news commentator says that Ventresca was elected pope by "Adoration" when the crowd cheered him after they thought he had saved Vatican City from the antimatter. 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. Third, Acclamation required a spontaneous unanimous proclamation by the electors present (not the crowd outside) that a person should be Pope. A crowd cheering somebody's name would not be sufficient. 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, anybody 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
  • In the novel, it was the "electors present", not only the crowd, that cheered: all the cardinals were moved by the crowd to chant, and in doing so, gave their consent. The other two points are valid, however.
• 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)

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 jargon means something else entirely, and of those possibilities mentioned, only the first one is feasible, water bullets are use 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, they already have a base there Wikipedia.
• Japan's Seven Gods of Good Fortune (Shichi-fukujin) are misidentified as Shichigosan, which is something completely different. Wikipedia 1&Wikipedia 2

The Da Vinci Code

• Right in the fracking title. "The [My-Father-Was-]From-Vince Code" should be a red flag to Leonardo Da Vinci studiers of the Dan Browning from the very title. SF Gate Article
• No, Leonardo Da Vinci was not "flamboyantly homosexual". No law-abiding citizen was 'flamboyantly' anything besides heterosexual due to the laws of the the time. The Da Vinci Hoax
• The Knights Templar didn't do anything besides conquer and maintain territory in the Levant. They were also largely illiterate and likely uneducated, thus making it 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. GlassWeb
• If there are any descendants of Jesus, it'd be a sizeable group, not a select few. Slate
• In the description of Madonna Grotto 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, this hand clearly belongs to Peter. It being pointed away from Jesus is thought to symbolize Peter's violent reaction to Jesus' arrest.
• Also, Brown has Teabing suggest that the apostle sitting to Jesus's right was actually Mary Magdalene, Jesus's supposed wife. It represents the apostle John, who was frequently depicted as youthful and slightly feminine. Wikipedia Plus if that one were a woman, then the Last Supper would be short one apostle.
• What about that monk from Opus Dei? Even though Opus Dei was specifically founded for people who live "in the world"? (In other words, people who aren't members of religious orders.)
  • What about that monk? "As of 2015, there were 93,986 members of the Prelature, 91,020 lay persons and 2,094 priests." Wikipedia
• Ironically, 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; 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.)
• Also Constantine the Great and the First Council of Nicea had nothing to do with making Christianity the official religion in the Roman Empire. Constantine only made it a legal religion, and the Council decided in questions like the divinity of Christ. It was Emperor Theodosius 65 years later who declared Christianity to be the state religion.

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, however 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. {{{1}}}
• While its 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 criticsed- 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