Leonard’s words sent ripples through the hall.
“Right now?”
Seoha asked.
Leonard looked at his watch, then nodded.
“An experiment is scheduled. It will begin in thirty minutes.”
Whitman shot to his feet.
“This is a mathematics forum. It is not a place to drag students off to a laboratory and put on a show!”
Leonard shrugged.
“It is not a show, but education. If someone is curious, that is reason enough to show them.
And if there are students interested besides Yu Seoha, they may come along as well. We should be able to accommodate about twenty.”
Leonard looked around at the forum participants. At that, several interested students raised their hands and came forward.
Once the situation became irreversible, Whitman let out a sigh.
“In that case, I shall accompany you as well.”
“Of course, I have no objection. Seoha?”
Seoha nodded toward Leonard, who was waiting for his answer.
He did not know when an opportunity like this would come again. He had to go.
As those around him had feared, Seoha was becoming absorbed in the zeta function.
There was a bewitching power there.
Every night, he thought about the Riemann zeta function.
Seoha’s outstanding mind pursued the endless procession of numbers. As he chased the sequence, he tested countless possibilities, but his conclusion always returned to the same place.
‘Is it a mirage?’
After scanning thousands, tens of thousands of numbers, at some point the sequence vanished and only a wave remained. An afterimage rotating ever so faintly in the dark.
It was too spitefully elusive to call a rule, and too coincidental to dismiss as chance.
He had tried to find papers on it, but nothing came up. If so, then it had to be a trace of the sequence that only he could see.
A group of people followed the indoor connecting route and joined the passage the students called the Infinite Corridor.
Leonard glanced at his watch and slowed his steps.
They passed through a glass door and soon reached Building Section 10. Through the window on the right, the dome and Killian Court came into view.
Seoha wanted to know. What that afterimage of the sequence meant.
So he could not let this chance opportunity slip away.
Looking ahead, he saw Leonard waiting for him.
“In 1973, the mathematician Hugh Montgomery showed Dyson the distances between the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.”
Walking alongside Seoha, he continued.
“Dyson, who was a physicist, recognized on the spot that it was the spacing statistics of our Gaussian Unitary Ensemble, the GUE.”
Seoha’s eyes gleamed. This behind-the-scenes story, absent from the papers, was fascinating.
“And in 1984,
Bohigas, Giannoni, and Schmit drove the nail in. They said quantum spectra follow the statistics of random matrices.
It was no different from declaring that the zeros of the zeta function were connected to quantum systems.”
“You mean the BGS conjecture.”
Leonard nodded.
“A conjecture, exactly. Though a highly plausible one.
But since then, this research has not advanced even a single step in decades.”
Perhaps feeling troubled, Leonard dragged a hand down his face.
“It is so shameful I can hardly hold my head up.
Better equipment, faster computers, more refined algorithms… We threw in everything necessary, but fundamentally nothing has changed from back then.”
Leonard smiled bitterly.
“Why? Because we have always asked the same question. Where is the next point?”
“You were trying to identify the self-adjoint operator, the Hermitian operator.”
Whitman came up beside them and asked.
Leonard nodded.
Perhaps they had always been close; before long, the two of them were speaking comfortably.
“The one key that could solve the Riemann Hypothesis and quantum chaos at once, a special key that fits every single door—the zeros—in the house called the zeta function. That is what we tried to find.”
Looking back now, it had been a reckless attempt. The physicists had tried to reach the conclusion far too hastily, without an intermediate process.
A look of regret passed over Leonard’s face.
“After failing for decades, we have finally come to admit that we need a different perspective. So the truth is, my showing you today’s experiment is not kindness or anything of the sort.”
He looked at Seoha.
“We are simply just as desperate as the mathematicians. Whether that damned Riemann zeta function truly has something to do with quanta—if we can solve that…”
Leonard paused for a beat.
His voice was mixed with pent-up anger.
“Physics may leap to the next stage in a single bound. Chaos will no longer be an obstacle, but a resource.”
The floor of the Infinite Corridor gleamed at regular intervals. The arrows on the signs turned once, then again. And then a space appeared, clearly distinct from the rest.
There was a bleak smell of metal and ozone.
“We are here.”
The number 56 was written on the floor along the yellow guide line.
Leonard pulled out the card hanging from his neck and swiped it over the machine.
Beep—
With the sound of the door opening, cold air rushed out.
A space evenly lit by white lights. White gowns, gloves, and earplugs hung neatly on the wall, and safety goggles were lined up on a shelf to one side.
The constant whirring of machinery could be heard.
It was a space filled with glass walls. Beyond the transparent wall, a massive resonator—a device that produces vibration at a specific frequency—could be seen.
“Put on the protective clothing. And do not touch anything without permission.”
Seoha and the students nodded quietly and picked up the gowns one by one.
Click, click!
Leonard flipped the switches in sequence.
The lights of the analyzer came alive one by one. When Leonard nodded to a researcher, an engineer checked the edge of the resonator and connected a connector.
“Anything at all is fine. If there is something you see or feel today, share it with us as well.”
In the old scholar’s eyes, Seoha could sense the desperation of a man grasping at straws.
“Of course.”
After the click of a relay, the sweep began.
Seoha watched with his breath held.
The engineer applied a microwave sweep to the resonator.
When a short pulse entered, the cavity—a space where waves are trapped and reflected—rang once, then gradually settled. Then the boundary conditions changed rapidly, and the wave trembled.
“It’s starting.”
Someone muttered to himself.
Breath entered the empty cavity in the dark.
At first, points scattered like dust gathered into a single thread.
The thread brushed the metal wall and bounced away, then curled back in again to form another shape.
But only for a moment. The line broke apart, oxidized into particles, and seeped into the floor. Then it revived in the same form from another place.
A different light entered Seoha’s eyes.
As if determined not to miss a thing, he stared at the monitor without even blinking.
The movement of quantum chaos resembled the pulse of living life.
It swelled, sank, seemed to stop, then soon vanished. The lines never returned to the same coordinates, but they always repeated creation and extinction in the same rhythm.
Maria, who had been watching this intently, asked Leonard a question.
“Is that the quantum disappearing?”
“What disappears is not the quantum, only its form. Energy briefly sits there, then disperses. It is not zero, but something that looks like zero.”
Seoha did not hear their conversation.
His vision shook as though there had been an earthquake.
Every time the quanta scattered inside the resonator, a familiar shape appeared.
Points vanished and reappeared. And in the instant just before the wave converged to zero.
Thump.
He saw the afterimage he had encountered every night while tracing the sequence of the zeta function.
It was disguised as various imaginary numbers, but he felt certain that if he looked closely, traces would inevitably appear.
For the first time, something that had existed between chance and rule revealed its tail to him.
His breathing grew rough.
Seoha’s heart began to beat rapidly.
At that moment, the wave on the monitor distorted and, for an exceedingly brief time, overlapped completely with the afterimage in Seoha’s mind.
As if a current had pierced through him, Seoha felt a tingling sensation. It was as though electric charge had flowed directly beneath his skin.
The breath of chaos shared the same period as the afterimage he had been unable to explain even after thousands of calculations.
Time slowed.
The boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness blurred.
All noise sank away, and a sensation washed over him, as if he alone were standing in another dimension.
Before he knew it, Seoha had picked up the marker beside him.
If he did not write this down now, it felt as though everything would scatter and vanish.
“Huh? Student! You can’t touch things at random.”
A researcher approached, trying to stop him.
But Seoha was faster.
The marker’s black ink slid across the cold glass.
“Seoha?”
Leonard called him, but Seoha did not hear.
“The change in phase, just before the zero, the scattering of quanta…”
Seoha’s voice trembled.
And he spoke back and forth, as if conversing with someone.
“It wasn’t disappearing. It was rotating.”
The equation that began on one wall moved to the next panel. Before long, the laboratory walls began to be covered in numbers and graphs.
“There is a point of connection.”
Perhaps the marker’s ink had run out, because the pen stopped writing. When Seoha hesitated, Leonard approached.
“Here.”
Seoha took the marker he offered and began to complete the theory.
A new equation was written in the center of the glass wall.
A limit expression revealing the difference between the argument of the zeta function and the quantum phase.
And a question mark.
Seoha stopped his hand and stared at the equation for a long while.
Five minutes, ten minutes…
Before they knew it, the laboratory had grown so quiet that even breathing could be heard.
Everyone had set aside what they were doing and was watching Seoha.
Leonard quietly brought his index finger to his lips, as if telling them not to disturb him.
Seoha’s hand moved again.
This time, it was faster and more intense.
Horror appeared on Whitman’s face.
“Is this a geometric phase…?”
Seoha, who had come back to himself, answered.
“It is similar, but different. This is instantaneous and discontinuous.”
Seoha drew circles around the equation.
One, two, three.
“The moment the quantum hides itself within chaos, the topology—the essential form and structure of space—changes in phase space.”
Seoha drew an arrow beside the circles.
A twisted arrow,
a trajectory distorted like a Möbius strip.
“As if dimensions were touching.”
Leonard let out a hollow laugh.
“Impossible.”
His face was full of disbelief.
“No matter how beautiful a theory is, if it contradicts experiment, it is wrong.”
Seoha nodded.
“Richard Feynman’s words.
I, too, am reluctant to bring in higher dimensions when they cannot be proven in reality. But I saw evidence.”
“What?”
Seoha strode to the monitor.
“There.”
He pointed to a spot on the screen.
“That place, this part just before the wave vanishes.”
Whitman narrowed his eyes.
“What do you see?”
“Rotation.”
Seoha continued quietly.
“Very faintly, there is a motion curling inward, like a vortex. Before it disappears completely, before it becomes zero, there is a place where it briefly remains.”
Leonard furrowed his brow.
“We know that as well. But that is merely noise produced when the boundary changes.”
“No!”
Seoha cut him off.
“This trace of quantum extinction matches exactly with the hidden wave within the Riemann zeta function.”
Seoha expressed the two waves as equations and drew them.
And when he overlapped them, parts that matched perfectly were revealed.
“I do not yet know what this means.
But one thing is certain. Between the Riemann zeta function and quantum chaos, there exists a point where they meet beyond the distribution of zeros.
And this is not theory, but a clearly observable physical phenomenon.”
A gleam flashed in Leonard’s eyes. Then he roared at the researchers like a lion.
“Bring me every piece of measurement data we have, right now!”
If it was true, it would be the greatest event since 1973.
Seoha had finally succeeded in tracing back the universe’s random numbers.