Translator: Dreamscribe
Alex slowly leaned back in his chair.
"phistopheles.... ?"
He chewed over the words Theo had left behind for a long ti.
At first, he thought it was just a taphor. Theo's usual exaggeration, or perhaps one of his cynical jokes.
But the more he thought about it, the more persistently those words burrowed into his mind.
Alex recalled, one by one, the talents he had recruited.
Colleagues who had pulled all-nighters for days over a single equation, all of them had once been scholars devoted to mathematics.
Had any of them ever gone back to who they were after getting a taste of money?
Not one.
Not a single one.
If anything, it was the opposite.
The mont the market converted their research into numbers, they changed.
They ca to him holding proposals instead of papers, talking about revenue models instead of mathematical theory.
"Investors are going to love this theory."
"I did so research in the past, do you think there's any way to apply it to finance?"
A bitter smile spread across Alex's lips.
"I have no regrets."
He had never once thought of himself as having betrayed mathematics.
Proofs don't exist only on paper.
Between people and capital, mathematics still functions as the most powerful language there is.
Even after returning to his office, the rumination continued.
Rattle.
He stared at the pile of contracts inside the drawer.
Countless nas were written there.
People once called geniuses, had they already forgotten the unsolved problems they had clung to for so long?
"I never forced anyone."
Alex muttered quietly.
He stood by the window, looking down at the night view. Back when all he did was mathematics, he could never have imagined seeing a view like this from the city.
"Ah! phistopheles never took anything by force either."
The contracts had been fair.
All he had done was offer a choice.
And among those who signed, he had never seen a single person who regretted it.
But Alex knew better than anyone.
That the first signature on those contracts had been his own.
* * *
Sothing felt off.
Lunchti. Seo-ha, who had been eating takeout pizza in the lab, turned his head.
Flinch.
The mont his eyes t theirs, Sri and Su-jeong hastily looked away.
'Suspicious.'
Seo-ha paused, holding a slice of pizza, lost in thought for a mont.
Was it because the eting had run long?
Was the response to the paper not good?
Or was he missing sothing?
Su-jeong had been reading a paper, but her page hadn't turned for quite a while.
Sri was scrolling his laptop screen back and forth for no apparent reason.
They were definitely hiding sothing.
"Did sothing happen?"
At Seo-ha's words, the two reacted a beat too late.
"N-no, nothing!"
"Nothing at all! It's so peaceful it's almost a problem."
Suspicious by anyone's standards.
When Seo-ha stared Sri down, he finally raised his hands in surrender.
"...An email ca to the team account."
"From where?"
Sri hesitated for a mont before answering.
"From Science."
It was one of the most influential journals in the world, alongside Nature.
Su-jeong spoke as if making excuses.
"It was an email from the editor-in-chief, but he said it wasn't an official position, just a recomndation."
"What did it say?"
Sri opened the inbox.
"He said they want to publish our paper, but there were concerns that the language is too aggressive. The term 'Dead Solution' was flagged as unnecessarily provocative, and he said if we keep that definition as is, a significant number of established researchers would inevitably get defensive...."
Seo-ha's hand paused mid-motion.
"So he's asking us to revise it?"
Su-jeong waved her hands frantically in surprise.
"That's not it!
What I an is.... he said the direction is interesting, but it would be nice if we could soften the tone just a little. His point was, why make unnecessary enemies? He said if it goes out as is, it might be misunderstood as calling engineers idiots."
Seo-ha let out a short sigh.
"Show the email."
Sri turned his laptop screen toward Seo-ha.
Seo-ha was reading the email when he pulled out his phone and dialed the number the editor-in-chief had written at the bottom of the ssage.
Riiiing...
"Huh? Seo-ha!"
"A... a phone call?"
Both of their eyes went wide.
-Hello, Peter Reynolds speaking.
"This is Yu Seo-ha from MIT. I'm calling after reading your email."
-Oh! You've reached out sooner than I expected. Glad I left my number. I was actually wondering when I'd hear from you.
"Is this about the 'tone' issue you ntioned?"
-It was a very interesting paper.
Quite bold, but we believe it's well worth discussing. That much is certain. However, would you be willing to change just one term?
"You an Dead Solution."
-That's right. This is my personal opinion, but the term you used in the paper is deeply emotional.
Emotional?
A word he thought was the farthest thing from mathematics ca out of Peter's mouth.
Seo-ha tried to work out why Peter felt that way, but no clear answer ca to mind. In the end, he decided to speak honestly.
"It wasn't ant as an attack. It was ant as a distinction. That solution clearly appeared to be the cause of repeated failures."
-If the paper goes out as is, there's a real possibility that the discussion will center not on the proof of the theory but on a fruitless debate over word choice. That's what concerns .
"...."
Silence followed.
Perhaps sensing Seo-ha's stubbornness, Peter could be heard sighing on the other end.
-Very well. How about reinforcing the preface instead? To make the paper's intent clearer.
"That would be fine."
-One more thing!
There will be rebuttals. You may even receive a request for a public debate. Quite soon, in fact. I trust you're prepared for that?
"Of course."
Click.
He had barely ended the call and set down his phone.
Bang! Bang bang bang!
Soone was pounding roughly on the lab door.
"Yu Seo-ha! I know you're in there! Open up!"
Theo was out on personal business. Whoever it was knocked so hard it felt like the vibrations reached inside the lab.
Suddenly, the editor-in-chief's warning-like words flashed through Seo-ha's mind.
'This is way too fast.'
Whew...
Seo-ha took a short, deep breath.
Click. The mont he opened the door, a man barged into the lab with a clatter.
He wore a neatly pressed jacket but no tie.
Tousled blond hair, fierce eyes, and even though he wasn't smiling, there was a sneer hanging at the corner of his mouth.
Handso, but with an overall sharp, high-energy impression.
"Chris rcer!"
"Chris!"
Sri and Su-jeong called out his na simultaneously.
A superstar of the engineering world.
He was the man who had walked out of Caltech in the middle of his doctoral program, declaring he would build a spacecraft himself.
Everyone had laughed at his reckless attempt, but his company succeeded in putting the first privately developed, fully independent launch vehicle into orbit.
No governnt contracts, no help from specialized agencies like NASA. That single achievent alone had made Chris a legend in engineering.
And he was also a fiercely arrogant elitist.
"Ahem...."
As if he hadn't expected the door to open, he looked around awkwardly.
"What brings you here?"
Arms crossed defensively, with no intention of welcoming him, Seo-ha's voice dropped low.
"So this is the famous Team Apex lab? More modest than I expected."
Pretending not to hear Seo-ha, Chris strolled slowly around the lab.
Equations on the blackboard, pizza boxes on the floor, unorganized printouts. He wore the expression of soone who had just arrived at a fascinating playground.
"I spent quite a long ti in a place like this too. Ah! Those were good tis."
"Could you please just state your business?"
Chris narrowed his eyes and strode toward Seo-ha.
"You think you're the smartest person in the world, don't you?"
Seo-ha seed to think for a mont before shaking his head.
"Not yet, I don't think."
He hadn't yet achieved anything worthy of showing to Newton or Gauss.
Chris laughed as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"This."
Chris practically shoved a tablet toward Seo-ha, nearly throwing it.
"I ca because of this paper.
It's complete nonsense. The theory you're calling wrong? We used it to put a spacecraft into orbit. Not so simulation run in a lab like this, we actually built it and launched it. With my own hands!
And you have the nerve to call that a 'Dead Solution'?"
Even after hearing his tirade, Seo-ha's expression remained indifferent.
"How many attempts did it take you to succeed?"
"We barely made it on the fourth try."
"So you revised the equations three tis. Observing the errors firsthand and completing the conditions one by one."
It was neither sarcasm nor provocation.
Seo-ha walked toward the blackboard with a calm expression.
Scratch, scratch.
"You added the engine vibration term, adjusted the separation timing, changed the fuel mixture ratio.... and modified the fuselage design multiple tis too, right?"
Chris's face hardened.
"What's the problem with that?
You fail, you fix it, you launch again. In the end, I succeeded. That's engineering.
But what about you? You sit in your lab pushing a pen around, talking about right and wrong. You don't even care how any of it applies in the real world."
Su-jeong was listening quietly to the exchange between the two.
Chris was certainly overbearing and unreasonable, but Seo-ha's expression as he dealt with him was equally infuriating in its own way.
"Have you never failed again after your success?"
Chris let out a hearty laugh.
"Ha ha ha! This is why math guys just don't get it.
Of course I have. What it takes to push through that is the spirit of engineering. Frontier!"
As if he had expected that answer, Seo-ha nodded.
"Yes. I understand. You can head back now."
Was that not the reaction he had anticipated?
Chris's face turned red.
"Do I look like I'm joking right now?
Your paper was an insult to us engineers. We crash, we break, but we fix it and launch again. That process builds up and eventually becos success."
Seo-ha wore a pained expression.
But he and Chris understood the world through entirely different languages.
"That was never my intention. I simply called what isn't correct, not correct."
"That's exactly what I'm asking! Why isn't it correct? Just spit it out!"
"Sigh."
Seo-ha was boiling inside as well.
Chris was the type of person he found hardest to deal with. Soone who uses a handful of successes to dismiss every aningful question.
He would probably take the very act of being told he was wrong as a personal insult.
But having co this far, Seo-ha could no longer hold back.
"Chris, you can't even accurately explain the cause of your own success! Of course you can't perfectly reproduce it either. In mathematics, we call that failure.
Engineers like you, for whom results are everything, wouldn't understand that."
"What did you just say? Say that again."
He was as impulsive as he was genuine, and no one cared more deeply about engineering than he did. And he despised losing an argunt as much as he despised death itself.
"I said that in mathematics, results aren't everything. If you had actually read the paper properly, you wouldn't have co all the way...."
Seo-ha stopped mid-sentence with an 'oops' expression.
Chris wasn't a mathematician.
But it was already too late.
Chris's eyes changed in an instant.
"What were you about to say just now?"
When Seo-ha couldn't open his mouth, Chris stepped closer.
"You, right now."
He raised a finger and pointed at Seo-ha.
"You thought I wouldn't be able to understand your paper."
Chris's lips trembled.
'What kind of person is this?'
Seo-ha was thoroughly fed up with him. Perhaps that was why his words ca out less than gracefully.
"Is that so strange? I don't know much about engineering either."
"I've always hated the arrogant attitude of mathematicians. You people talk as if the formulas you create are the grand premise of all engineering.
Ah! Of course I know. I know that it's thanks to Newton and Euler that I can launch my vehicles. If not for them, who knows how much longer it would have taken humanity to reach space...."
He paused briefly, then continued.
"But!
Fourier, who could be called the father of engineering thought, didn't start by writing equations the way you people do.
He held a fla to a tal rod, observed the changes in temperature, and kept checking whether the calculated values matched. When Fourier completed his heat conduction equation that way, do you know what the greatest mathematicians of his era, Lagrange and Biot, said?"
It was a story Seo-ha knew well.
"That it wasn't mathematically rigorous. That just because an experint agrees with a hypothesis doesn't make it a theory."
Chris looked Seo-ha straight in the eye.
"And what was the conclusion? In the end, Fourier was right!"
Silence filled the lab.
It wasn't that Seo-ha had no rebuttal, but he didn't want to provoke Chris more than necessary.
Misreading that as victory, Chris assud a solemn expression.
"I don't care what you mathematicians define. Whether a solution is dead or alive, it's all just aningless bickering among yourselves."
Seo-ha had never been this angry while talking to soone.
"So you're saying you're Fourier?"
"And you're Lagrange, who couldn't accept him.
Admit it. Mathematics can't keep up with the pace of technological progress. Just because you can't explain sothing doesn't make it false. There's a limit to how arrogant you can be."
At those words, the patience Seo-ha had been clinging to finally snapped.
"I can't let that stand."
"And what are you going to do if you can't?"
Suddenly, Peter's words ca to mind.
"How about we have a public debate on this topic?"
Chris bared his teeth in a grin, like a guest about to sit down to a feast.
"You won't be able to show your face at school the next day, you know that?"
"You seem shaless enough that I don't need to worry about that on your behalf."
"Fine. Where?"
"Ask Peter, the editor-in-chief of Science."
"I won't go easy on you even if you cry, got it?"
"Read the paper properly before you co."
"Who do you think you're talking to? Three days is all I need."
Chris gave a nod, then strode out of the lab with a confident gait.
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