Translator: Dreamscribe
Leonard's words sent ripples through the hall.
"Right now?"
Yu Seo-ha asked.
Leonard checked his watch and nodded.
"There's an experint scheduled. It will start in 30 minutes."
Whitman suddenly stood up.
"This is a mathematics forum. It's not a place to drag students into a lab and put on a show!"
Leonard shrugged his shoulders.
"It's not a show, it's education. There is soone who's curious, and that's reason enough to show it.
Not just Yu Seo-ha. If there are any other interested students, they may co along as well. Up to about 20 should be possible."
Leonard looked around at the forum participants. Then, a few students who showed interest raised their hands and stepped forward.
As the situation beca irreversible, Whitman let out a sigh.
"In that case, I will accompany you."
"Of course, no problem. Seo-ha?"
Seo-ha nodded to Leonard, who was waiting for his answer.
There was no telling when a chance like this would co again. He had to go.
As those around him feared, Seo-ha was becoming imrsed in the zeta function.
There was a kind of bewitching power in it.
Every night, he thought about the Riemann zeta function.
His brilliant mind traced the endless rows of numbers. Chasing the matrix, he explored countless possibilities, but the conclusion always returned to the sa place.
‘Is it a mirage?’
When sifting through thousands, tens of thousands of numbers, at so point the matrix would vanish, and only the waves remained. A lingering trace spinning ever so slightly in the darkness.
It was too consistent to be coincidence, yet too spiteful to be called a rule.
He had tried looking up papers on it, but nothing ca up. If so, then it must be a trace of the matrix that only he could see.
A group of people followed the indoor pathway and joined the corridor that the students called the Infinite Corridor.
Leonard glanced at his watch, then slowed his pace.
They passed through a glass door and soon reached building 10. Through the window on the right, they could see the do and Killian Court.
Seo-ha wanted to know what that trace of the matrix ant.
He couldn’t let this opportunity, which had co by chance, slip away.
Looking ahead, he saw Leonard waiting for him.
"In 1973, a mathematician nad Hugh Montgory showed the spacing between the zeros of the Riemann zeta function to Dyson."
He continued speaking as he walked with Seo-ha.
"Dyson, who was a physicist, imdiately recognized it as the spacing statistics of our Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE)."
Seo-ha's eyes sparkled. These behind-the-scenes stories not found in papers were fascinating.
"And in 1984,
Bohigas, Giannoni, and Schmit confird it. They said that quantum spectra follow the statistics of random matrices.
It was essentially a declaration that the zeros of the zeta function are connected to quantum systems."
"You an the BGS conjecture."
Leonard nodded.
"Literally just a conjecture. A very likely one.
But that research hasn't advanced a single step in the decades since."
Leonard ran a hand over his face, as if troubled.
"It's co to the point where I can't even raise my head out of sha.
Better equipnt, faster computers, more sophisticated algorithms... We threw everything we had at it, but essentially, nothing has changed since then."
Leonard gave a bitter smile.
"You know why? We've always asked the sa question. Where is the next zero?"
"You were trying to find the Hermitian operator."
Whitman joined beside them and asked.
Leonard nodded.
Perhaps they were close acquaintances, as the two were already speaking casually to each other.
"A single key that could solve both the Riemann Hypothesis and quantum chaos in one go. A special key that fits every single door (zero) of the house that is the zeta function. That’s what we were trying to find."
In hindsight, it had been a reckless attempt. The physicists tried to leap to the conclusion too hastily without going through the process.
Regret crossed Leonard’s face.
"After decades of failure, we finally ca to admit that we need a different perspective. So, showing you today's experint isn't so favor or anything like that."
He looked at Seo-ha.
"We are just as desperate as the mathematicians. Whether that damn Riemann zeta function is really related to quantum... if we can solve that..."
Leonard paused for a beat.
His voice carried frustration.
"Physics could instantly leap to the next level. Chaos would no longer be an obstacle but a resource."
The floor of the Infinite Corridor shimred rhythmically. The arrows on the signs turned once, then again. And then, a space clearly distinct from the rest appeared.
A chilly scent of tal and ozone filled the air.
"We're here."
The number 56 was written on the yellow guide line on the floor.
Leonard removed the card hanging around his neck and swiped it over the machine.
Beep-
With the sound of the door opening, a burst of cold air rushed out.
The space lit evenly by white lights, with white lab coats, gloves, and earmuffs neatly hung on the wall, and protective goggles lined up on a shelf to one side.
The constant sound of a machine whirring echoed.
A space filled with glass walls. Beyond the transparent walls, a massive resonator (a device that creates vibrations at specific frequencies) could be seen.
"Put on the gear. And don’t touch anything without permission."
Seo-ha and the students quietly nodded and each picked up a coat in turn.
Clack, clack!
Leonard flipped a series of switches.
One by one, the analyzer lights ca on. Leonard nodded toward a researcher, and the engineer checked the corner of the resonator and connected the connector.
"Anything is fine. If you see or feel sothing today, share it with us."
Seo-ha could feel the desperate hope in the old scholar’s eyes, like a man grasping at straws.
"Of course."
After a clicking sound of the relay, the sweep began.
Seo-ha watched it without even breathing.
The engineer initiated a microwave sweep into the resonator.
When a short pulse entered, the cavity (an enclosed space where waves reflect) rang once and gradually subsided. Then, as the boundary conditions abruptly changed, the wave began to shake.
"It’s starting."
Soone muttered to themselves.
Breath filled the dark, empty cavity.
At first, the dots scattered like dust began to gather into a single thread.
The thread brushed against the tallic wall and bounced, then curled inward again to form another shape.
But it was only for a mont; the line shattered and dissipated into particles, seeping into the floor. Then, the sa form revived elsewhere.
A different light ca into Seo-ha’s eyes.
He stared at the monitor without blinking, as if he wouldn’t miss a single thing.
The movent of quantum chaos resembled the stirrings of a living organism.
It swelled, subsided, seed to pause, then vanished again. The lines never returned to the sa coordinates, but they always repeated creation and extinction in the sa rhythm.
Maria, watching this intently, asked Leonard a question.
"Is that the quantum disappearing?"
"It’s not the quantum that disappears, just the form. The energy briefly rests there and disperses. It's not zero, it only appears to be zero."
Seo-ha didn’t hear their conversation.
His vision shook, as if an earthquake had struck.
Each ti the quantum particles scattered within the resonator, he saw a familiar shape.
The dots disappeared and reappeared. And in the instant just before the wave converged at zero.
Thump.
He saw the afterimage he encountered every night while tracing the matrix of the zeta function.
Though disguised under multiple imaginary numbers, he felt certain that if he looked closely, there would definitely be a trace.
Sothing that lay between coincidence and pattern was revealing its tail to him for the first ti.
His breath grew ragged.
Seo-ha's heart began to beat faster.
In that mont, the wave on the monitor distorted and, for a very brief ti, perfectly overlapped with the afterimage in Seo-ha’s mind.
As if an electric current had surged through him, Seo-ha felt a jolt. It was as if a charge had flowed directly into his skin.
The breath of chaos shared the sa cycle as the afterimage that no amount of calculation had ever been able to explain.
Ti slowed down.
The boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness blurred.
All noise faded, and a sensation ca over him as if he alone were standing in a different dinsion.
Unconsciously, Seo-ha reached for a marker beside him.
If he didn’t write it down right now, it felt like everything would scatter and vanish.
"Ah? Student! You’re not allowed to touch anything."
A researcher approached, trying to stop him.
But Seo-ha was faster.
The black ink of the marker slid across the cold glass.
"Seo-ha?"
Leonard called to him, but Seo-ha didn’t hear it.
"Change in phase... just before the zero... scattering of the quantum..."
Seo-ha’s voice trembled.
Then, as if in conversation with soone, he began to exchange words.
"It didn’t disappear. It was rotating."
The equations that started on one side of the wall moved to the next panel. And before long, the walls of the lab began to be covered with numbers and graphs.
“There’s a connection point.”
The marker stopped working, seemingly out of ink. As Seo-ha hesitated, Leonard stepped closer.
“Here.”
Seo-ha took the marker Leonard handed him and began completing the theory.
A new equation was written at the center of the glass wall.
A limit expression revealing the difference between the argunt of the zeta function and the quantum phase.
And a question mark.
Seo-ha stopped his hand and stared at the equation for a long while.
Five minutes, ten minutes...
The lab had beco so quiet that even the sound of breathing could be heard.
Everyone had stopped what they were doing and was now watching Seo-ha.
Leonard silently raised his index finger to his lips, signaling not to interrupt.
Seo-ha’s hand moved again.
This ti, faster and more intensely.
A look of shock appeared on Whitman’s face.
“Is this geotric phase...?”
Seo-ha, now returned to his senses, responded.
“Similar, but different. This is instantaneous and discontinuous.”
Seo-ha circled around the equation.
One, two, three circles.
“When quantum particles hide within chaos, the topology of the phase space changes.”
Seo-ha drew an arrow beside the circles.
A twisted arrow,
A path contorted like a Möbius strip.
“As if dinsions were intersecting.”
Leonard let out a hollow laugh.
“That’s absurd.”
His face was filled with disbelief.
“No matter how beautiful a theory is, if it disagrees with experint, it’s wrong.”
Seo-ha nodded.
“Richard Feynman’s words.
I, too, hesitate to invoke higher dinsions because they can’t be proven in reality. But I’ve seen the evidence.”
“What?”
Seo-ha stepped briskly toward the monitor.
“Here.”
He pointed at a specific spot on the screen.
“This part, right before the wave vanishes.”
Whitman narrowed his eyes.
“What do you see?”
“Rotation.”
Seo-ha continued in a quiet voice.
“Very slight, as if spiraling inward like a vortex. There’s a mont where it briefly lingers, right before reaching zero, before it completely disappears.”
Leonard furrowed his brow.
“We’ve seen that too. But that’s just noise caused by the boundary conditions shifting.”
“It’s not!”
Seo-ha cut him off.
“This trace of quantum disappearance exactly matches the hidden wave within the Riemann zeta function.”
Seo-ha drew the two waves as equations.
And when he overlaid them, sections that matched perfectly were revealed.
“I don’t know yet what this ans.
But one thing is certain. Between the Riemann zeta function and quantum chaos, there is a eting point beyond just the distribution of the zeros.
And this is not a theory, it is a clearly observable physical phenonon.”
A flash of light glead in Leonard’s eyes. Then he roared at the researchers.
“Bring all the asurent data we have right now!”
If true, this would be a major event since 1973.
Seo-ha had finally succeeded in backtracking the universe’s random numbers.
*****
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