Chapter 16 Chapter fifteen

Langdon quietly followed Victoria and Kohler, and together they returned to the main hall, where Langdon's strange journey began.Victoria's springy stride -- like an Olympic diver's -- oozes with unearthly strength. Langdon is convinced that this strength undoubtedly benefits from the flexibility, coordination and stability that yoga emphasizes.He could hear her deliberate breathing, as if she was using it to filter out the infinite grief in her heart. Langdon wanted to offer her a few words of sympathy.He understands her current mood very well, because he has also experienced the sudden pain of losing his father.He still remembered the funeral, a rainy, dark and gloomy day, the third day after his twelfth birthday, and the house was full of his father's colleagues in gray uniforms.They shook his hand, squeezed it tightly, and muttered words like heart failure and stress.His mother quipped tearfully that she could read the stock market just by holding her husband's hand...his pulse was like her personal stock ticker.

Once, when his father was still alive, Langdon heard his mother repeatedly nagging him to "stop and enjoy the flowers."So that year Langdon bought his father a Christmas present, a small blooming glass rose, the prettiest thing Langdon had ever seen...it was on the wall in the sunlight Cast a touch of colorful light.As soon as the father opened the gift, he couldn't help but kissed his forehead. "It's so cute!" He repeatedly praised, "We need to find a safe place to put it." My father searched around, and finally found a dusty shelf in the darkest corner of the living room, and carefully placed it on the shelf. Glass roses are placed on top.Within a few days, Langdon moved the stool himself, removed the flower, and returned it to the store without his father noticing that the flower was gone.

The elevator "bang" brought Langdon back to reality.Victoria and Kohler walked ahead and stepped into the elevator.Langdon stared at the open elevator doors, hesitating. "What's the matter?" Kohler asked, with a hint of concern in his tone, but more impatience. "Nothing," Langdon said as he forced himself into the cramped space.He would use the elevator only when it was urgent and necessary. In most cases, the spacious and free stairs were his first choice. "Dr. Witler's laboratory is underground." Kohler seemed to have guessed his thoughts.

Not bad, Langdon thought.As soon as he lifted his legs and stepped into the elevator door, he immediately felt a gust of cold wind blowing up from the deep elevator shaft.The doors closed and the elevator began to slide downward. "There are six floors." Kohler said blankly, like an instruction from an analytical instrument. Langdon imagined the emptiness and darkness in the elevator shaft, staring blankly at the ever-changing floor display, hoping to overcome his fear.Strangely, he found that the elevator stopped only twice, the lowest floor and the LHC. "What does LHC mean?" Langdon tried to hide his uneasiness.

"," Kohler said dryly, "a kind of particle accelerator." Particle accelerator?Langdon seemed to have overheard it a few times.He first heard the term at a dinner at Dunster Hall, Cambridge.Many colleagues showed up, and so did a physicist, Bob Brownell, looking furious. "The bastards aborted the plan!" Brownell swore. "What plan was aborted?" someone asked immediately. "SSC!" "what?" "!" Someone shrugged and said, "I never knew Harvard was building this thing." "Not Harvard!" he yelled. "America! This will be the most powerful particle collider in the world! One of the most important scientific projects of this century! It has cost two billion dollars and the Senate has stopped it Got this project! God damn it, these lobbyists with Bibles around their necks!"

It took Brownell a while to calm down, and he began to explain that the particle accelerator is a huge circular tube, in which the magnetic field is switched rapidly and alternately, which can "push" the particles in a circular motion without stopping, and the speed increases rapidly until they Reach incredible speeds.Particles running at full speed can spin inside the tube at 180,000 miles per second. "That's almost the speed of light," exclaimed a professor. "Exactly." Brownell went on to say that by allowing a pair of particles to accelerate in opposite directions in the tube, and then collide with each other to knock out their constituent elements, scientists can see the most basic constituents of nature. "Particle accelerators," Brownell asserted, "are the defining elements of the future of science. Experimentation through particle collisions is the key to our understanding of the infinite mysteries of the universe."

One Harvard poet, Charles Pratt, seemed to be less than impressed.He said: "Sounds like a primitive way of understanding science ... like breaking a clock and identifying the internal parts." Brownell threw down the fork and stormed out of the room . So CERN also has a particle accelerator?As Langdon pondered, the elevator began to descend again.A circular tube for impacting particles, and he wondered why they had to bury it in the ground. The elevator stopped with a bang, and Langdon felt the floor beneath his feet, feeling a burst of relief.However, as the elevator doors slowly slid open, this relaxed energy quickly disappeared without a trace.Langdon found himself in a strange world once again.

This is a flat concrete passage, extending infinitely to the left and right sides, wide enough for an eighteen-wheeled cart to pass through.Wherever they stood, the lights were on, but after they passed by, it was dark.Langdon could almost feel the weight of the gravel and stone above his head as the dark wind gusted and rustled, reminding them that they were now deep underground.In an instant, he was nine years old again... The darkness brought him back... Back to the darkness that suffocated him for five hours, the haunting shadow.He clenched his fist tightly, and he must beat it away. Victoria had been silent since stepping out of the elevator, just striding forward in the dark, leaving them far behind.The fluorescent light on the top of the front flickered all the way, illuminating her path, which was really disturbing. Langdon couldn't help but sigh in his heart. Den and Kohler followed from a distance, and the lights went off automatically behind them.

"The particle accelerator," Langdon whispered, "is just in front of this tunnel?" "It's right here." Kohler pointed to the left, a chrome-steel pipe running along the inner wall of the passageway, shining in the dark. Langdon followed the trend, puzzled. "This is the accelerator?" This device was nothing like what he had imagined. The pipe was unusually straight, about three feet in diameter, extending horizontally forward in the tunnel, and disappeared into the darkness ahead. The high-tech sewage pipe was still there. Pretty much, Langdon thought to himself. "I thought particle accelerators were round."

"The accelerator is circular," Kohler explained, "and it looks straight, but that's just an optical illusion. The circumference of the tunnel is so large that we can hardly see its curvature—just As we look at the earth." Langdon was dumbfounded. Is this a circle? "But... God! Then it's too big!" "The Large Hadron Collider is the largest instrument in the world." The words reminded Langdon of a scene. He remembered hearing the pilot of the "European Nuclear Center" talk about a huge instrument buried in the ground.But—"Its diameter is more than 8,000 meters... as long as 27,000 meters."

Langdon's brain was spinning rapidly, "Twenty-seven kilometers?" He stared at the director, then turned to stare at the passage in the darkness ahead, "This passage is twenty-seven kilometers long? Isn't that...more than sixteen kilometers long? Miles are long!" Kohler nodded, and said: "This tunnel is dug into a standard circle, starting from this point and returning after a circle, it is equivalent to running all over the streets and alleys of France, and the particles running at full speed before the collision can pass through in one second. Turn more than 10,000 times inward." Langdon stared at the passage in front of him dumbfounded, and his feet felt weak, "Are you saying that 'CERN' dug up millions of tons of soil just to collide these tiny particles?" Kohler shrugged. "Sometimes we have to move mountains and seas to discover the truth."

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