Chapter 59
Chapter 59
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 59
Chapter Title: The Tail of Chaos
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Leonard’s words sent ripples through the chairman.
“Right now?”
Seo-ha asked.
Leonard glanced at his watch and nodded.
“There’s an experiment scheduled. It’ll start in thirty minutes.”
Whitman shot to his feet.
“This is a math forum, not a place to drag students to a lab for some spectacle!”
Leonard shrugged.
“It’s not a show—it’s education. If someone’s curious, there’s plenty of reason to show them. Not just Yoo Seo-ha, but any interested students can come along. We can handle about twenty.”
Leonard scanned the forum participants. A few intrigued students raised their hands and stepped forward.
As the situation became irreversible, Whitman let out a sigh.
“Then I’ll come along too.”
“Of course, no problem. Seo-ha?”
Seo-ha nodded toward Leonard, who was waiting for his response. He couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this—one that might never come again.
True to everyone’s concerns, Seo-ha had become utterly absorbed in the zeta function. There was something mesmerizing about it, a magnetic pull on the human mind.
Every night, he pondered the Riemann zeta function. His brilliant brain chased an endless matrix of numbers, probing countless possibilities along the way. Yet no matter what path he took, it always led back to the same conclusion.
Is it a mirage?
After sifting through thousands, tens of thousands of digits, the matrix would suddenly vanish, leaving only a faint wave. In the darkness, a subtle afterimage twisted ever so slightly. It was too capricious to call a pattern, too precise to dismiss as coincidence.
He’d searched for papers on it, but found nothing. That meant it was a trace visible only to him—a remnant of the matrix meant for his eyes alone.
The group followed the indoor passageway, merging into what the students called the Infinite Corridor.
Leonard checked his watch and slowed his pace.
Passing through glass doors, they reached section 10 of the building. The dome and Killian Court were visible through the right-side windows.
Seo-ha wanted answers. He needed to know what that afterimage in the matrix meant. He couldn’t let this chance slip away.
Ahead, Leonard was waiting for him.
“In 1973, mathematician Hugh Montgomery showed Freeman Dyson the spacing between the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.”
He continued as he walked alongside Seo-ha.
“Dyson, a physicist, immediately recognized it as the spacing statistics of our Gaussian Unitary Ensemble—GUE.”
Seo-ha’s eyes lit up. This was a fascinating anecdote not found in any papers.
“And in 1984, Bohigas, Giannoni, and Schmidt nailed it down. They declared that quantum spectra follow random matrix statistics. It was tantamount to proclaiming a link between the zeta zeros and quantum systems.”
“The BGS conjecture.”
Leonard nodded.
“Just a conjecture, mind you—one with very high plausibility. But this research hasn’t advanced a single step in decades since then.”
Frustrated, Leonard rubbed his face.
“It’s embarrassing. We can’t even show our faces. Better equipment, faster computers, more sophisticated algorithms... We’ve thrown everything at it, but fundamentally, nothing’s changed since back then.”
Leonard gave a bitter smile.
“Why? Because we’ve always asked the same question: Where’s the next zero?”
“You were trying to find the Hermitian operator.”
Whitman had caught up beside them and chimed in. Leonard nodded. The two were apparently close, as their conversation had already turned casual.
“The one key that could solve both the Riemann Hypothesis and quantum chaos at once—the special key that fits every door (zero) in the house of zeta without fail. That’s what we were after.”
Looking back, it had been a reckless endeavor. The physicists had rushed to conclusions, skipping vital intermediate steps. Regret flickered across Leonard’s face.
“After decades of failure, even we admit we need a new perspective. So showing you this experiment today isn’t some favor—it’s desperation.”
He looked at Seo-ha.
“We’re as desperate as the mathematicians. If that damned Riemann zeta really connects to quantum mechanics, solving it would...”
Leonard paused for a beat. Fury laced his voice.
“...propel physics to the next level in one leap. Chaos would cease to be an obstacle and become a resource.”
The Infinite Corridor’s floor gleamed rhythmically. Signage arrows turned once, twice. Then a distinctly separated space appeared.
A chill of metal and ozone hung in the air.
“We’re here.”
The number 56 was marked on the yellow guideline floor. Leonard pulled his ID card from around his neck and swiped it on the reader.
Beep—
The door slid open with a hiss, unleashing a rush of cold air. Even white lighting illuminated the space uniformly. White lab coats, gloves, and earplugs hung neatly on the walls, while safety goggles lined a shelf.
A constant whirr— hummed from the machinery.
The room was lined with glass walls. Beyond the transparent barriers loomed a massive resonator—a device that vibrated at specific frequencies.
“Suit up. And don’t touch anything without permission.”
Seo-ha and the students nodded quietly, taking lab coats one by one.
Click, click!
Leonard flipped switches in sequence. Lights flickered to life on the analyzers. He nodded to a researcher, who checked the resonator’s edges and connected the connectors.
“Anything at all. If you see or feel something today, share it with us.”
Seo-ha could sense the old scholar’s desperation in his eyes—like a drowning man grasping at straws.
“Of course.”
With a sharp clack of the relay, the sweep began.
Seo-ha held his breath, watching intently.
The engineer applied a microwave sweep to the resonator. A short pulse entered, the cavity rang once, then slowly settled. Boundary conditions shifted abruptly, agitating the waves.
“It’s starting.”
Someone muttered to themselves.
Breath entered the empty cavity in the darkness. Points scattered like dust at first gathered into a single thread.
The thread grazed the metal walls, bounced, coiled back, and formed new shapes. But it was fleeting—the line shattered into grains, seeped into the floor, only to revive elsewhere in the same form.
A new light entered Seo-ha’s eyes. Unblinking, determined not to miss a thing, he stared at the monitor.
The motion of quantum chaos resembled the stirring of living breath. It swelled and subsided, seemed to halt only to vanish moments later. The threads never returned to the same coordinates, yet they pulsed in an eternal rhythm of creation and annihilation.
Maria, watching closely, posed a question to Leonard.
“Is that the quantum particles disappearing?”
“Not the particles—it’s just the form. Energy lingers there briefly, then disperses. It’s zero, but looks like zero.”
Seo-ha didn’t hear them.
His vision shook like an earthquake. Each time the quantum waves scattered in the resonator, a familiar shape emerged.
Points vanished and reappeared. Just before the waves converged to zero...
Thump.
There it was—the afterimage he encountered nightly while tracing the zeta matrix. Disguised among complex imaginaries, but upon closer inspection, traces were sure to emerge.
Something between coincidence and pattern had finally shown its tail to him.
His breathing grew ragged. Seo-ha’s heart raced.
In that instant, the waves on the monitor warped, overlapping perfectly with the afterimage in his mind for a split second. A jolt like electricity coursed through him, as if charges were flowing directly into his skin.
The breath of chaos shared the same period as the afterimage that thousands of calculations couldn’t explain.
Time slowed. The boundary between consciousness and subconscious blurred.
All noise faded, leaving the sensation of standing alone in another dimension.
Without realizing, Seo-ha grabbed a marker from beside him. If he didn’t write it down now, it would all scatter away.
“Hey? Student! Don’t touch anything!”
A researcher moved to stop him. But Seo-ha was faster.
The marker’s black ink slid across the cold glass.
“Seo-ha?”
Leonard called, unheard.
“Topological shift... right before the zero... quantum dispersion...”
Seo-ha’s voice trembled. He spoke as if conversing with someone.
“It’s not disappearing—it’s rotating.”
The equations started on one wall and migrated to the next. Soon, numbers and graphs blanketed the lab walls.
“There’s a connection point.”
The marker ran dry. Seo-ha paused, and Leonard approached.
“Here.”
Seo-ha took the offered marker and completed the theory.
A new equation appeared in the center of the glass wall—an extremal formula revealing the phase difference between the zeta function’s argument and quantum phase.
And a question mark.
Seo-ha stopped, staring at the equation for a long while.
Five minutes, ten...
The lab had fallen utterly silent, breaths held. Everyone had set aside their work to watch Seo-ha.
Leonard silently raised a finger to his lips, signaling no interruptions.
Seo-ha’s hand moved again. Faster, more fiercely this time.
Astonishment dawned on Whitman’s face.
“Geometric topology...?”
Seo-ha, now fully returned to his senses, replied.
“Similar, but different. This is instantaneous and discontinuous.”
He circled parts of the equation.
One, two, three.
“The moment the quantum hides in chaos, the topology in phase space changes.”
Seo-ha drew arrows beside the circles.
Twisted arrows, trajectories warped like Möbius strips.
“As if dimensions are touching.”
Leonard let out a hollow chuckle.
“Impossible.”
Disbelief filled his face.
“No matter how beautiful the theory, if it contradicts experiment, it’s wrong.”
Seo-ha nodded.
“Richard Feynman’s words. I don’t like invoking higher dimensions without empirical proof either. But I saw the evidence.”
“What?”
Seo-ha strode to the monitor.
“There.”
He pointed to a spot on the screen.
“That point, just before the wave vanishes.”
Whitman narrowed his eyes.
“What do you see?”
“Rotation.”
Seo-ha continued softly.
“Very subtle, like a vortex spiraling inward. There’s a spot where it lingers briefly before becoming zero.”
Leonard furrowed his brow.
“We know that. It’s just noise from shifting boundaries.”
“No!”
Seo-ha cut him off.
“This trace of quantum annihilation matches the hidden waves within the Riemann zeta function precisely.”
He drew two waves as equations and overlaid them. Perfect alignments emerged.
“What it means, I don’t know yet. But one thing’s clear: Beyond the distribution of zeros, the Riemann zeta function and quantum chaos share meeting points. And this isn’t theory—it’s an observable physical phenomenon.”
Excitement flashed in Leonard’s eyes. He roared at the researchers.
“Bring all our measurement data—now!”
If true, this was the biggest breakthrough since 1973. Seo-ha had finally reverse-tracked the universe’s random numbers.