Booth is forever intimating that he’s about to explain something important to the reader and then abruptly dropping the subject. He has all the smoke and cymbals of the Great and Terrible Oz, but can rarely muster even the fake disembodied head as a crescendo. He makes a promise, for example, in the caption to a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” — “It has been suggested that this painting alludes to suppressed secret doctrines regarding the feminine role in Christianity. We shall see shortly that this is true, but not in the way proposed by ‘The Da Vinci Code'” — that is never fulfilled; he never mentions the painting again.
Furthermore, much of the “information” Booth chooses to supply is either incorrect or, frankly, untrue. Some of these errors seem to be the result of simple ignorance. He has, for example, the idea that the “laws of probability” dictate that “a coin flipped in strict laboratory conditions will … land heads up in 50 percent of cases and tails up in 50 percent of cases.” (Probability only indicates that a coin is equally likely to land on either side on any single toss.) He entirely misconstrues the thought experiment known as Schr?dinger’s Cat — not an uncommon confusion, it’s true, but since Booth chooses to make “modern science” the villain of his secret history, complaining incessantly that it fails to understand the “deeper” philosophical issues of existence, he should at least make some effort to grasp what it does understand.
(Thanks Danny!)