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00:00The Da Vinci Code, an explosive murder mystery that claims to reveal the 2,000-year-old secret of the Holy Grail.
00:10Its release caused worldwide controversy.
00:14We were all personally denounced by the Pope.
00:17But how much of the blockbuster film is really true?
00:21Dan Brown may have hit on something in his fiction that could be true.
00:27Did Leonardo Da Vinci leave messages in his work 500 years ago?
00:33If you want to find a real secret in The Last Supper, you don't have to look what is inside.
00:40We reveal the inspiration for the on-screen character of symbologist Robert Langdon.
00:46When people started asking me, is Robert Langdon like you?
00:50I started thinking, yeah, now that you've mentioned it.
00:53And the real mystery behind the church, The Da Vinci Code made famous.
01:00There are voids inside each of these pinnacle constructions.
01:05Real-life codebreakers uncover the extraordinary real story behind The Da Vinci Code.
01:11May 2006.
01:39The Da Vinci Code hits the big screen.
01:43Based on the book of the same name by Dan Brown and directed by Ron Howard, the film causes worldwide controversy.
01:51We were all personally denounced by the Pope.
01:54We didn't get great sacks of hate mail, just the occasional.
01:57The film's headline-grabbing claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children is presented as fact and infuriates the Catholic Church.
02:09Truth is pretty flexible when dealing with events that supposedly occurred and supposedly occurred thousands of years ago.
02:19The Da Vinci Code is the most eagerly anticipated release of the year and rakes in three quarters of a billion dollars at the box office.
02:28I think that the controversy that existed prior to the film opening only helped create more of that sort of want-to-see attitude among the potential audience.
02:42But how much of the film is really based on fact?
02:47Using one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most well-known artworks, The Last Supper, one of the key characters in the film, Sir Lee Teabing, played by Sir Ian McKellen, claims the Catholic Church is behind a 2,000-year-old conspiracy.
03:01How many wine glasses are there on the table?
03:08One? The Holy Grail?
03:10Open your eyes.
03:16According to the film, the Holy Grail isn't a cup as many believe.
03:21It's a person.
03:23And no ordinary person, but the woman who for centuries the Catholic Church branded a prostitute, Mary Magdalene.
03:31But what really incensed the church is the film's assertion that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were man and wife.
03:41Suddenly, the image of Jesus which the churches have cultivated, and around which and upon which they've built huge amounts of Western theology, begins to dissolve.
03:53The question of whether or not Jesus was ever married has been argued over for nearly 2,000 years.
04:03But the film's critics were quick to point out that the scriptures make no reference to it at all.
04:08There is complete silence on this in the Bible. It is not mentioned. That's quite interesting in itself.
04:18In the film, Sir Lee Teabing produces evidence to support his astonishing claim, the little-known Gospel of Philip.
04:26Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her.
04:33This says nothing of marriage.
04:36The Gospel of Philip does, in fact, exist.
04:39It was discovered along with 12 other papyrus books by a farmer in Western Egypt in December 1945.
04:49Scholars believe these books, now stored in Cairo's Coptic Museum, are translations of Gospels written by Jesus' disciples.
04:57Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, claims these Gospels give a very different picture of his relationship with Mary Magdalene.
05:10There are different stories in the New Testament Gospels about Mary Magdalene, but the most powerful and persistent is that she's associated with prostitution,
05:21which completely discredit her qualifications as being anyone important in the Jesus circle.
05:25Now, when you look in the Gospel of Thomas, for example, she is a disciple. She's an important disciple.
05:33But does the Gospel of Philip really prove Mary Magdalene was more than just Jesus' disciple, as claimed in the film?
05:42Dan Brown began, he says, when he saw a line from the Gospel of Philip that said,
05:48Jesus loved Mary Magdalene more than all the disciples and kissed her often on her, and then the text is broken.
05:57The missing word has never been found. But the Coptic word for mouth fits the missing space.
06:04So some experts have assumed that's the full translation.
06:07Reverend Jones believes that even if the missing word is mouth, that's still not proof that Mary was Jesus' wife.
06:19Kissing on the mouth is what family members did to each other. A family kiss would be on the mouth.
06:25It is not erotic in our sense. For us, a kiss on the mouth is pretty well exclusively erotic, except that's mother and tiny, tiny child.
06:34It was not so in the ancient world. So one should immediately assume,
06:39Kissed on the mouth, there must be some sexual frisson here.
06:41Elaine Pagels believes that's exactly what Dan Brown did assume for the Da Vinci Code.
06:51There's another way to interpret these sources, and that's the way Dan Brown didn't interpret them.
06:59In the Gospel of Philip, when it says he and Mary were constant companions and he kissed her often on her mouth,
07:05and he regarded her as his bride, it's speaking metaphorically.
07:12Many scholars have long argued that the Jesus and Mary relationship in the Gospel of Philip is not a literal, physical connection,
07:20nearly a spiritual one.
07:24But a startling new discovery has blown the debate wide open.
07:28This small scrap of papyrus, owned by an anonymous private collector, is forcing some experts to reconsider their interpretations.
07:39Believed to be a fragment of another long-lost Gospel, it was sent to Harvard University in 2010 for analysis and translation.
07:51It contains just 33 words, and the line that's causing so much excitement reads,
07:59Jesus said to them, My wife.
08:02Dan Brown may have hit on something in his fiction that could be true.
08:09If the fragment is proved to be real, it suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married.
08:17The authenticity of the Jesus Codex seems quite clear because it's very hard to fake a second-century Coptic script that's faded the way this text is.
08:31I think the evidence is very good that this is an ancient text.
08:36But the Gospel of Jesus' wife does not prove that Dan Brown was right.
08:41It proves nothing about Jesus' actual life, only that some early Christians, writing long after he died, may have believed he had a wife.
08:57But Dan Brown goes even further, claiming that 550 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci knew this secret,
09:04and encrypted one of his most famous paintings with a message revealing all.
09:11Could that be true?
09:13The Last Supper, one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous works, plays a key role in Ron Howard's 2006 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code.
09:23The film claims the figure sitting to Jesus' right is Mary Magdalene, not the disciple John, as the Church would have us believe.
09:35And that she is the Holy Grail.
09:40When I saw the movie of Dan Brown and I read the book, I was very happy because it was a very beautiful novel.
09:46But it's science fiction.
09:49Mario Todai is a Milan-based inventor and an expert on the works of Leonardo da Vinci.
09:56He spent 15 years analysing the Renaissance master's work, trying to get inside his mind.
10:03Mario doesn't believe the film's claims, and for good reason.
10:08He knows da Vinci's version of The Last Supper was just that, a version.
10:13Before Leonardo da Vinci, there are hundreds of Last Suppers, and when he painted The Last Supper, he had to follow some rules.
10:22The Ursulus wants to have the people in that position, with that smile, so people can recognise the different apostles one by one.
10:34Before Leonardo, all copies of The Last Supper looked very similar.
10:38Artists use the same formula to depict Christ's disciples.
10:44Saint Peter handles a knife.
10:47Judas carries a purse of silver.
10:50And Saint John, the youngest disciple, is always shown as a youthful, feminine-looking figure.
10:56Is this John or Maria Magdalene, is a very easy question, but it's a stupid question.
11:06Because it must be John, because Leonardo had to copy The Last Supper before him, and John looks like a woman.
11:14That's it.
11:17Cecilia Frosinini is director of the Mural Painting Laboratory at the Public Art Institute in Florence, Italy.
11:27Her team has restored works by many of the Italian masters, including seven by Leonardo.
11:37She believes it's possible to see almost anything in The Last Supper, even the basis for a blockbuster film.
11:46Because the way it looks today is very different to how the painting started out.
11:50We know that Leonardo used a very experimental technique because of the great deal of scientific investigation that were made on The Last Supper.
12:02To create The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci used an unusual method.
12:08Instead of painting onto wet plaster, he used a mixture of egg yolks, vinegar and oil paint, applied directly onto the wall of a Milanese church.
12:20It was an unsuccessful experiment.
12:23The materials he used weren't up to the job, and began to flake away from the wall as soon as the painting was completed.
12:29So the problem is that today we are looking at the shadow of the original painting of Leonardo that was gone forever because of destroying and because of the repainting.
12:42The film asks us to believe that The Last Supper contains letters hidden in plain sight.
12:48An M, referring to Mary Magdalene, and a V, the symbol of a chalice, typically known as the Holy Grail, or as the Da Vinci Code would have us believe, a V, for the shape of a womb.
13:05According to the experts, if you look hard enough, all paintings contain shapes that look like letters.
13:12So, unless new evidence emerges that confirms whether or not The Last Supper does contain the letters M and V, the debate will never be resolved.
13:25Leonardo da Vinci may not be revealing the truth about Mary Magdalene and Jesus' relationship in his painting.
13:31But he is sending a message. One that five centuries ago was just as controversial as the Da Vinci Code.
13:43What is missing from the picture is the halos.
13:48Before Leonardo da Vinci, other versions of The Last Supper depicted Jesus and his disciples as saints, each with a halo.
13:56But Da Vinci ignored this convention and angered the church by painting them without halos.
14:07I believe that Leonardo never put in halos because he thinks that dead people are common people.
14:14And this is the true secret of Leonardo.
14:17Leonardo da Vinci is communicating a subtle message with his Last Supper.
14:22He is telling us that Jesus was a mortal, a man.
14:27A theme echoed in the Da Vinci Code.
14:31But could he have left other clues for us to decipher?
14:35In the Da Vinci Code, Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks plays Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon, who's drawn into the hunt for the Holy Grail.
14:52Remarkably, his character is based on a real-life expert in symbols, John Langdon, a graphic designer from Pennsylvania.
15:00When people started asking me, is Robert Langdon like you?
15:05At first I would say, no, not very much.
15:09And then after people started asking me more frequently, I started thinking, yeah, now that you've mentioned it.
15:16In the Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon is an expert at deciphering the meaning behind symbols.
15:21The real Langdon specializes in creating them.
15:27The thing that I like the best about Robert Langdon is his interest in symbols.
15:34That's my life, that's his life, that's where we really overlap a great deal.
15:41John's passion is designing ambigrams, a word or phrase that's symmetrical, so it reads the same upside down or back to front.
15:53And it was this speciality that first brought him into contact with Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, long before he first put pen to paper.
16:02Not many people know about Dan's music career. He was a pop music singer-songwriter and Dick Brown called me one day and said that his son was about to start work on a new CD that was going to be called Angels and Demons and would I be interested or willing to design an ambigram for the CD cover.
16:29After that CD, Dan decided he was no longer interested in the music business and so he became a novelist at that point.
16:40Five years later, Dan Brown wrote his first Robert Langdon novel, also called Angels and Demons, and used John's illustrations in the book.
16:50Brown's next Langdon novel was The Da Vinci Code and when it became a film, John was contacted again.
16:57This is the logo that I designed for the Depository Bank of Zurich that was used in the film with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tattoo.
17:09The Depository Bank logo was visible for maybe two or three seconds in the film and it was a nice, very brief view of it.
17:21Like John, the film's leading man specializes in symbols and they have the same last name.
17:33In the film, John's namesake gets caught up in a life or death race through some of Europe's most famous medieval locations to discover the final resting place of the Holy Grail.
17:44The symbologist has to decipher a series of cryptic clues supposedly created by Leonardo da Vinci.
17:54By Leonardo da Vinci.
17:55We need a mirror.
17:56Backwards.
17:57In the style of Leonardo himself.
17:59Almost everything Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his journals is back to front and the letters inverted.
18:14He didn't create ambigrams like John Langdon.
18:15Instead, Da Vinci used what's called mirror writing.
18:21So was this, as the film claims, a deliberate form of code?
18:29I think the more likely reality was that he discovered that that was something he did with ease.
18:41Professor Marianne Wolfe is a reading and language specialist at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
18:48She doesn't believe Da Vinci being left-handed is the only reason he mirror wrote.
18:55The journals, the luminous that they are, contain so many spelling errors, omissions, deletions and grammatical errors.
19:04You see in computation him making some of the simplest retrieval errors.
19:09Leonardo is often regarded as a genius, an accomplished designer and inventor, but it turns out spelling wasn't one of his gifts.
19:22To neurologists and language experts like Professor Wolfe, Da Vinci's left-handedness and his poor spelling are signs his brain worked differently to most people's.
19:33As a researcher, over two decades, working with hundreds of children and adults with dyslexia, I'm convinced that Leonardo Da Vinci was dyslexic.
19:50Dyslexia is an inherited learning disability, which impairs people's reading and writing skills.
19:56Its cause or causes are not fully understood, but the condition affecting between five and ten percent of people is brain-based.
20:08The human brain is made up of two hemispheres, the right and the left.
20:13Each is a highly specialized region that controls different functions.
20:18The left hemisphere governs our ability to recognize sequences of words and letters.
20:23That's why 95 percent of right-handed people use this hemisphere to communicate.
20:30The right hemisphere is used to analyze space and geometrical shapes and forms.
20:36But some left-handed people and dyslexics also use this hemisphere to communicate.
20:42Which could explain why Da Vinci was so brilliant at creating geometric shapes, but struggled with spelling.
20:49Professor Wolfe believes Leonardo Da Vinci mirror-wrote because his brain was wired to do so.
20:58And she's keen to test her theory.
21:03Cosmere writing is one of the things that people speculate about.
21:07We wanted to see, well, is it easier for dyslexics? Is it easier for left-handed?
21:11And can we, in this very rude approximation of those four categories, can we make some kinds of interesting observations?
21:21She's going to conduct a simple experiment with four people.
21:26There are two left-handers, including John Langdon, and two right-handers.
21:31In each category, one of them is dyslexic.
21:34They're being asked to transcribe mirror-written sentences.
21:41By timing the volunteers, Professor Wolfe will see who's fastest.
21:47And, in theory, who's better mapped neurologically to mirror-right?
21:52Left-handers, like John Langdon, should be able to read the sentences without difficulty.
21:58But the right-handers should struggle.
22:04In both tasks, the dyslexics are quicker than the others.
22:09And the left-handers are faster than the right-handers.
22:13Mine is 57 seconds.
22:16And mine was 1 minute 30 seconds.
22:20The sample size is too small to confirm Marianne's theory.
22:23But it does indicate that left-handed dyslexics are more naturally able to mirror-write.
22:32It also suggests that da Vinci, the most prolific mirror-writer in history,
22:37might have been dyslexic.
22:39And that his mirror-writing was the result of a natural neurological process
22:44which has nothing to do with codes at all.
22:47Whether or not da Vinci was dyslexic can never be proved.
22:53But there's no doubt he was one of the world's most creative and productive designers.
22:59So did he, as the film claims, really create the ultimate safe box to protect secrets.
23:07In the da Vinci code, the climax of the film depends on Tom Hanks' character opening a strange device.
23:22A cryptex.
23:24That I use to keep secrets.
23:27It's da Vinci's design.
23:29Inside is the secret location of the Holy Grail.
23:34Only the right code will open the cryptex.
23:37If it's forced or broken, the secret will be destroyed forever.
23:42The cryptex of the Dan Brown movie looks like a da Vinci invention because it's very fascinating.
23:48In the movie they say that this is a safe, a safe box, you can open it and find some secrets inside.
23:55I was very fascinated with these tools because it's fascinating, it's a nice tool.
24:01And I tried to find it in the da Vinci code, the reality codes.
24:06This is a copy of one of da Vinci's notebooks.
24:10It's called Folio B.
24:12On page 33 there's a series of schematics that some claim are blueprints of the cryptex that's featured in the film.
24:19If you focus on this picture you can see something like a ring with mechanism around that looks like exactly the cryptex.
24:30Mario Todai makes his living creating the inventions designed by Leonardo.
24:36For the past year he's been building the design thought to be da Vinci's cryptex with surprising results.
24:44So the real project of Leonardo in the page where they see the cryptex that is not true is this machine.
24:53It is two meters weight and two meters and a half height.
24:57Rather than being a coded safe as in the film, in reality da Vinci's design is for a machine that harnesses gravity.
25:08It's one of the earliest known attempts to create perpetual motion, a mechanism that once started will never stop.
25:16Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed by these machines, these perpetual motion machines.
25:20He designed hundreds of different machines like this.
25:25But Leonardo knows very well that this machine cannot work because of the friction.
25:30So da Vinci's design on page 33 of his Folio B notebook isn't the cryptex used in the film.
25:38In fact, the cryptex is a clever figment of author Dan Brown's imagination, visualized on screen by the film's art department.
25:46In the film, clues to the location of this clever device are hidden in the Louvre in Paris.
25:55But filming night scenes in the famous gallery was never going to be easy.
26:01Suddenly the idea of bringing lighting into the Louvre made them very, very uneasy.
26:05So what we wound up doing was building huge portions of the Louvre on stage, on the James Bond stage actually, at Pinewood.
26:17And we then had to recreate all those paintings in phenomenal detail.
26:23They're key scenes in the film because it's here that Robert Langdon learns that the curator of the Louvre, Jacques Saunier, played by Jean-Pierre Marielle, heads a shadowy organization called the Priory of Zion.
26:39In the Da Vinci Code, the Priory of Zion is a secret society that protects the bloodline of Jesus and Mary.
26:50It's pure fiction, but in creating it, Dan Brown touched on a real story, one that any Hollywood scriptwriter would be proud of.
27:03In 1891, a priest named Berenier Saunier was renovating a church in a small village in southwest France, when he discovered some ancient parchments.
27:19These parchments are encoded, and they indicate the existence of a colossal treasure in the vicinity.
27:30That's according to the legend.
27:36The documents are written in Latin, and at the bottom of one of the pages appear two initials, a P and an S.
27:45But despite this tantalizing clue, no treasure was ever found.
27:53Then, almost 90 years later, in the late 1970s, authors researching the story discovered a secret dossier that revealed what those initials meant.
28:05They stood for the Priory of Zion, an organization created in 1099 to protect a secret bloodline.
28:12Of the French royal family.
28:18The dossier traced the royal bloodline all the way to the modern era, to reveal a man named Pierre Plantard living in southeast France.
28:29The story was a national sensation, especially when it emerged that this so-called French royal was a middle-aged caretaker.
28:40But then it took an astonishing twist when the authors of a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail published their theory.
28:49That this long-lost French king was also the last living descendant of Jesus.
28:59This is a sensation.
29:00They tell us that Jesus got married to Mary Magdalene, and they had children, and that gave rise to a dynasty.
29:14Not just any dynasty, but the Merovingians, the last of which is Pierre Plantard.
29:23So, he's a descendant of Jesus.
29:27The book's claim in 1982 was too much for Plantard.
29:33He admitted that the secret dossier and the Priory of Zion were fabricated.
29:37In the 1960s, together with two friends, Plantard manufactured his claim to the French throne by creating the secret dossier.
29:50He named the organization after a mountain near his hometown.
29:57The hoax was set in motion by planting the documents into French archives.
30:03But the publication of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail book blew the whole thing way out of proportion.
30:12Claiming to be a descendant of Jesus was too much, even for a master hoaxer like Plantard.
30:23The plot of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was written 20 years after the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
30:29But his portrayal of the Priory of Zion and the idea that Jesus' living descendant exists is identical.
30:40In the film, the last surviving blood relative of Jesus is discovered not in France, but in Scotland.
30:47In Scotland.
30:50Rosslyn Chapel.
30:53So this is it.
30:55The gift at the end.
30:57The Holy Grail neath ancient Rosslyn waits.
31:01Just a few miles south of Edinburgh, Rosslyn Chapel is one of the most ornately carved medieval buildings in all of Europe.
31:11It's the location for the film's climactic scene, but filming it presented a challenge.
31:16When we arrived at Rosslyn Chapel the first time, it had a massive corrugated roof over the entire structure.
31:26Because over the many years, it had begun leaking so badly that they had initially put up what they were considering a temporary roof to protect the chapel.
31:39And this was due to lack of funds, this temporary roof had been up there for, good Lord, I don't know, 20 years at least.
31:50Bringing a major Hollywood production to Rosslyn had a huge impact on the chapel.
31:55But after we made the film, the attendance at Rosslyn Chapel grew so exponentially that they were actually able to take off the corrugated metal roof and install a proper roof and do a complete restoration of Rosslyn.
32:12And, I don't know, that was sort of something to feel really good about, you know, it's a real sort of plus side to this whole thing.
32:18The film claims Rosslyn was built by the Knights Templar, a Christian military order who, according to legend, discovered the secret of the Holy Grail in the 11th century.
32:30At first glance, the chapel's intricate stonework seems to confirm the connection with the Templars.
32:37You know, one of the main attractions of Rosslyn Chapel is that it's absolutely stacked with carved detail.
32:44I mean, it's charged, every surface is featuring exquisite three-dimensional carved detail.
32:51For example, the two figures on horseback, you know, that's got real significance in terms of Knights Templar.
33:01The truth is the chapel was built 200 years after the Knights Templar were disbanded.
33:07Nevertheless, its carvings have attracted Grail hunters.
33:11Rosslyn Chapel's stone roses, which some say symbolize Mary Magdalene, have led people to believe it must be the hiding place of the Grail.
33:23So was the Da Vinci Code right all along?
33:28Is Rosslyn Chapel really hiding a secret?
33:31The climactic scene of the 2006 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code reveals that Scotland's Rosslyn Chapel contains a hidden chamber.
33:44The tomb of Mary Magdalene.
33:47For centuries, the chapel has been a target for real-life Grail hunters.
33:51So could the film be right?
33:56Does Rosslyn really have secret voids hidden within its walls?
34:01Nick Boyes is in charge of restoration of the chapel stonework.
34:06The carved detail of Rosslyn Chapel is absolutely lyrical and the more you look the more you see.
34:11So for example, we can see a flower carved into the side elevation of this pinnacle.
34:18And if you look very carefully, there's a hole right in the centre of that flower.
34:23Each of Rosslyn's 20 pinnacles conceals a hidden chamber.
34:28They're a design feature of the building, created for a specific purpose, but not a religious one.
34:35So when we opened this void, we found it jammed absolutely full of aged honeycombs, which clearly suggests that it had been used as a colony for bees.
34:49The poetry of this building is that that flower and that access hole was the route that the bees were designed to take in order to access the void.
34:59But the purpose of some of Rosslyn's other carvings has proved harder to solve.
35:07In particular, this sequence of 215 carved boxes on the ribs of the arches.
35:18This is the most famous part of Rosslyn Chapel, simply because it's the most intricately carved and holds the most amazing mystery of all.
35:27Stuart Mitchell is a composer.
35:32He thinks these carved boxes are a code, concealing a secret that's very different than anything posed in the Da Vinci Code.
35:44Stuart Mitchell thinks that this sequence of 215 stone blocks on the ceiling of Rosslyn Chapel contains a coded message,
35:52built into the fabric of the building 500 years ago.
35:56And for him, the key to understanding the mystery are the carved musicians found at the top of each of the chapel's pillars.
36:07This is 13 of them, and they're all brilliantly carved.
36:14Loot players, cornet players, bagpipes, a real variety of an orchestra.
36:20And everybody is playing in performance position.
36:24Stuart's convinced that Rosslyn's code is a musical one.
36:29But the trick was identifying what the symbols on the boxes meant.
36:35The eureka moment came when we'd finally watched some videos on cymatics,
36:41and watched a run-through of two octaves,
36:45and saw the patterns of Rosslyn appearing one after another, after another, after another.
36:51The markings on Rosslyn's boxes appear to be what's called cymatics.
36:58Cymatics is the study of visible sound.
37:03John Reed is recognized as being one of the world's foremost researchers in the field.
37:10Sound lies at the very heart of all matter.
37:15Everything in the universe vibrates.
37:17So if we can actually make that visible, we can understand the universe in a way that we could never have understood it before.
37:26Although sound is invisible to the eye,
37:29when applied to a metal plate or a thin membrane covered in a fine dust,
37:33pitch and vibration create a pattern unique to that frequency and note.
37:39If we then use special techniques, such as the medieval technique of literally sprinkling on sand,
37:45then we will reveal the imprint that the sound has made.
37:53Rosslyn's boxes are a musical score, carved in stone cymatic patterns.
37:59And, by using an internet database, Stuart Mitchell identified the notes depicted on the boxes.
38:05This first pattern here, that looks like a Maltese cross a little bit, is produced by a C natural note, and that's this note.
38:15The next note here is an A note.
38:26And, pushing it along here, we have a B note.
38:30This is a pattern produced by a B natural.
38:33To check the accuracy of Stuart's research, John Reed will reverse engineer the cymatic patterns, and compare his findings against Stuart's.
38:49The process of identifying the Roslyn patterns is essentially trial and error to begin with.
38:54You know, we're using an electromechanical plate that we are driving to create the patterns.
39:02So, to find the pattern, it's literally necessary to sweep through all the different natural frequencies of the plate, and see which patterns pop out.
39:12One by one, John identifies the note, pitch, and frequency of the first three cymatic patterns marked on Roslyn's boxes.
39:24Playing them together, John's notes match Stuart's.
39:28Tests have shown that Stuart's cymatic theory works.
39:43But what does the music sound like?
39:45We were a bit afraid it's either going to sound totally right, or it's going to sound totally wrong.
40:04But, we were really surprised to find it had such a charm and musical structure about it, and musical direction.
40:11To our ears, it was an intended piece of music.
40:19But Roslyn's head of restoration, Nick Boyes, isn't convinced.
40:24Well, my problem with using these carved images, the boxes on the ends of the cusps here, as some code to decipher a hidden message,
40:37is some of these cusps were knocked off as part of the repair works, and replaced.
40:47Roslyn's leaking roof has always been a problem for the chapel.
40:52Over centuries, water leaking into the building has eroded the soft sandstone, destroying details on some of the carved boxes.
40:59In the 19th century, the decision was taken to replace the worst affected masonry.
41:09And today, it's possible to spot which of the chapel's boxes are original, and which aren't.
41:15We can look at the lowest cusp, and it looks very sharp.
41:23It's not aged.
41:25It has all the appearance of a three-dimensional form that was modelled, and modelled not so long ago.
41:32However, if you were to look up one, two, three, four, five, then you are certainly looking at aged carved detail.
41:46Today, Roslyn's boxes are a mix of original 15th century blocks and 19th century replacements.
41:54Whoever modelled these cusps may not have taken great care, or in fact may not have had the original information in order to make an exact replica of the original cusp.
42:07Question marks over the accuracy of Roslyn's restored boxes means no one can be certain that the music Stuart has deciphered is what was encoded into the chapel 500 years ago.
42:20In reality, unlike in the film, Roslyn's secrets can never be proved.
42:31As entertainment, The Da Vinci Code was a phenomenal success.
42:37As history, it's little more than a series of conspiracy theories, all unproven and most implausible.
42:44And while the discovery of the Gospel of Jesus' wife has brought new attention to Dan Brown's provocative theme of a married Jesus and Mary, it does not prove his case.
42:58Because it too could be a work of fiction, written by an ancient Dan Brown, who knew that truth often gets in the way of a good story.
43:08A very first story.
43:10How?
43:11How?
43:12How?
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43:16How?
43:17You.
43:18What?
43:19How?
43:21How?
43:23How?
43:24How?
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43:27How?
43:28How?
43:31Where?
43:33How?
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