Transmigrator Alliance

Chapter 318: Speculations on the Secrets of the Universe

The space-time gate observation base is fifty kilometers outside the new Qinling Lenghu Town in the Spring and Autumn World of the Second World.

Several hares that were grazing on fresh grass suddenly pricked up their ears as they felt the unusual vibrations coming from the ground.

The silver-white arch-shaped building in front cracked open. This facility, called the "Big Arch" by the locals, was now spewing out strange blue arcs of electricity.

"Cut off the entanglement field immediately!"

In the experimental control room, researcher Wang Liming shouted into the communicator.

In the surveillance footage, the three-meter-diameter ring-shaped device was vibrating at a high frequency, and sparks were bursting from the pipes connecting the superconducting magnets.

One hundred kilometers away, thirty meters underground in the People's Alliance National High Energy Physics Laboratory, is the command center of the Space-Time Gate Project.

Data monitor Lin Xue suddenly slammed the table: "The field strength reading over at Lenghu has exceeded the threshold!"

The project leader, Professor Chen Zhihan, walked quickly to the main screen. The three-dimensional holographic projection showed the complex Lorentz curve, and the originally stable Klein bottle topological structure was distorted.

"It's quantum decoherence caused by the difference in the speed of time flow!" He immediately recognized this phenomenon that had only appeared in theory.

"How long can the backup power supply last?" Professor Chen turned to the energy group. The engineer in the white coat was sweating: "The output power of the thermal power plant is decreasing. It can only last for two minutes at most."

Suddenly, all the screens flashed red at the same time. Amid the piercing alarm, Lin Xue called up the latest data: "The time velocity ratio at both ends of the space-time gate has reached 1:86400! A macroscopic quantum state appeared at the Lenghu site!"

"Initiate emergency shutdown protocol." Professor Chen said calmly, "Notify all members of the Lenghu team to evacuate to the bunker five kilometers away."

At this moment, Wang Liming and his team are making their final efforts in the base.

Through the radiation-proof glass, they saw a strange scene in the experimental cabin: the suspended beacon slab was rotating in slow motion, while the pieces of paper falling beside it were as fast as bullets.

This scene, which goes against common sense of physics, is a direct proof of the different time flow rates on both sides of the space-time gate.

"Atomic clock synchronization failed!" The assistant researcher's voice trembled, "The passage of time at end A is 86,400 times slower than that at end B, which is equivalent to 24 hours per second inside and outside the door."

Suddenly the whole building shook violently, and the ring-shaped device burst out with a dazzling blue light.

As everyone staggered out of the laboratory, a thunderous roar was heard behind them.

Looking back, the experimental cabin was shrouded in a strange spherical light curtain. The moment the snow touched the light curtain, half of it remained solid, while the other half vaporized into white mist.

At the accident analysis meeting three days later, Professor Chen showed the data of the last moment: "Although the experiment was forced to stop, we observed the time velocity difference on a macroscopic scale for the first time. This energy runaway actually verified the special solution of Einstein's field equations under strong gravitational fields."

Outside the window, the night sky was lit up by a strange aurora that continued to illuminate the night.

A young researcher excitedly raised his camera, but Wang Liming pressed the lens: "Remember, we are not photographers. This place is full of dangers. The next experiment must solve the problem of quantum decoherence. Otherwise, when the time flow rate difference exceeds 100,000 times, any matter passing through the space-time gate will undergo nuclear transmutation."

In the duty room late at night, Lin Xue was sorting out the experimental log. When she turned to a page of abnormal data, she was suddenly stunned - 0.3 seconds before the space-time gate closed, the monitoring system had recorded that 27 grams of unknown mass appeared and disappeared out of thin air. This value is exactly equivalent to the weight of a sparrow.

Lin Xue wrote six words on the notebook with a pen: "This is a fast universe!"

In other words, the flow of time in the second world is much faster than that in the first universe, and the current convergence is only because the two worlds are connected.

The nth trial.

Above the snow line, in the quantum laboratory of the Lenghu Dark Matter Observatory, thirty-six cesium atomic clocks are sounding buzzing alarms.

Professor Chen's finger hovered three centimeters above the emergency brake button. The red numbers jumping on the LCD screen showed that the time flow rate ratio of the two universes dropped sharply from 1:100 to 1:87.

"Keep the power of the Type II channel stable!" His voice penetrated the radiation-proof glass, and aroused the sound of busy footsteps in the experimental cabin. Through the observation window, one could see the space-time gate generator suspended in the center of the vacuum chamber glowing with a faint blue light - it was a micro wormhole surrounded by superconducting coils, with a diameter of only 0.3 microns, but it connected two completely different time dimensions.

Data monitor Lin Xue suddenly pointed at the holographic projection and exclaimed: "Professor, the carbon 14 decay rate in Universe B is accelerating!"

In the three-dimensional map, the golden bands representing the two cosmic time streams are like two mating pythons, slowly entwining in the coordinate grid of the absolute reference system.

In the main control room 100 meters underground, sparks suddenly burst out from the computer group. Major Li pulled off the burnt wire head, turned around and shouted into the communicator: "The gravitational wave detector detected the oscillation of space-time curvature, and the intensity has exceeded the theoretical value by 20 orders of magnitude!"

Professor Chen's temple was throbbing and the helium circulation system in the laboratory made a slight hum.

He unconsciously stroked the cuffs of his white coat, and his throat tightened when he recalled the scene of the debate. Three months ago, at the shore of Lake Bourget, the opposition representative pointed a laser pen at the tip of his nose and said, "You are creating a Chernobyl in the time dimension! The Third World Qinling Mountains are a lesson for us!"

People in the first and second worlds have never known what happened in the third world. The only news they know is that the space-time channel, which has always been connected on time, no longer connects on the day the scientific research ship sent by the third world to the fourth world.

No one knows what happened.

此刻全息屏上的数据正印证着最危险的预言：【A宇宙（基准流速）：1.000标准年】【B宇宙（连接态）：47.326→39.774→33.591】【趋同系数：e^(-t/τ)，τ=2.718小时】

The moment the red emergency button was pressed, ripples suddenly appeared on the beryllium copper alloy floor of the laboratory.

The gamma-ray burst gushing out from the space-time gate generator instantly fogged the protective glass, and the neodymium magnetic pointer of the quantum fluctuation monitor drew a Koch curve on the dial - this is a characteristic signal of space-time curvature distortion.

The experiment continues.

The only chance for the former Third World researchers stranded in the First and Second Worlds to return home is to continue their scientific experiments using the only remaining stone beacon, which is a black box.

This is actually very common in scientific research in the modern world. For example, in electronic circuits, some complex chips or modules are black boxes to users.

Users only need to know what kind of electrical signal is input to the chip to get what kind of output result, without having to deeply understand how billions of transistors inside the chip are interconnected and work. The same is true for the beacon slate.

It is impossible to directly understand the detailed mechanisms and processes within the beacon slate. We can only study its functions, characteristics and laws as a whole by observing, measuring and analyzing its inputs and outputs.

This is how the current experiment came about.

At this moment, the data waterfall on the holographic screen is verifying this conjecture - when Universe A (1x speed) and Universe B (100x speed) are connected through a Type II channel, the speed of time flow between the two is approaching at an exponential rate.

"Start the decoherence isolation procedure!" The moment he pressed the red button, the anti-magnetic floor of the laboratory vibrated violently.

The space-time gate generator burst out with a dazzling white light, and the dial pointer of the quantum fluctuation monitor swung wildly, as if an invisible giant hand was tearing the space-time structure apart.

This reminded Professor Chen of a watchmaker he had seen in his childhood: the master always said that if two inaccurate pendulum clocks were hung on the same wall, their swings would eventually become synchronized. At this moment, the entangled AB universes were like pendulums connected in series by invisible springs, and they were pouring quantum lubricant into the gear set.

In the monitoring room isolated by lead glass, Liu Ze recalled the multiverse model speculated by scientists: the universe is like a boiling ocean of quantum foam, and the mother universe (with a lifespan of 138 billion years) carries countless sub-universe bubbles.

Each bubble is moving in Brownian motion in the dark matter flow, like a bowling ball sinking and floating in a pool of honey - the Milky Way is moving towards the Great Attractor at a speed of 600 kilometers per second, and the Virgo Supercluster itself is drifting in the large-scale filament structure of the universe.

The difference in the speed of time flow in these bubbles far exceeds the effect of special relativity. According to calculations based on general relativity, to achieve this time dilation effect, one needs to approach the gravitational field of a black hole's event horizon - but the monitored values ​​of space-time curvature in those bubble universes are completely normal.

In other words, each bubble universe is also running wildly, and because the time reference frame of each bubble is different, the time experienced by the humans or other things inside it is also different.

Just like a spaceship flying at the speed of light, 287 light years is an extremely long journey, but within the reference frame of the spaceship, the flight time is only 52 hours.

Taking the departure point as the reference system, the spacecraft has been flying for 287 years.

The reference frame is different, and everything changes the moment you enter the small bubble.

If the clock of the mother bubble is set to absolute time, but the reference system inside each small bubble is different, that is, the speed of time flow is different: for example, 1 year in small bubble A = 1 year in the mother bubble, 100 years in small bubble B = 1 year in the mother bubble, and the other small bubbles CDE each have different time speeds.

The slate beacon is like a connecting space-time gate, if we ignore the principles and only consider the experimental results.

●When two small bubbles are connected by a "space-time gate": their internal time will gradually synchronize (for example, the original difference is 100 times, and slowly becomes 50 times → 30 times.)

●Once disconnected, each will return to its original time flow

●It is like forcing two gears with different speeds to mesh together. When they are released, the speeds of the gears return to their original state.
There are two ways to connect to the Slate Beacon:
●Temporary channel: It is like using a needle tip to poke a tiny hole in bubble A, and the distance traveled by 0.000001 seconds of light, which is approximately equal to the microcosmic information with a radius of 299.792458 meters, is instantly sent to bubble B. Although there is information exchange between the two bubbles, the time synchronization effect is weak and will be restored quickly after disconnection.

●Stable channel: Input stable electricity between bubbles AB to set up a two-way door. The time synchronization effect is strong, and the recovery speed after disconnection is also slow.

This stone beacon only serves as a sending beacon. There is no clue as to how the information is sent out or how it is "grown". The only thing that is certain is that it must have consumed unimaginable energy in another universe.

This is why Liu Ze discovered that the time of his first time travel had hardly changed after his second time travel, and why the time synchronization of the two bubble universes would become faster and faster with multiple two-way travels.

After many experiments, scientists speculated that the travelers who traveled through the beacon slabs were very much like being "scanned and printed": when traveling for the first time, the time-space gate would completely scan the data of all the materials that traveled through, and then if the same material traveled again in a short period of time, it would be "3D printed" again according to this archive, so each time it traveled through would return to the age and state of the first time (wounds/aging would be reset). There is no exact data on how short this short period is, and no one knows where it is stored.

When Liu Ze, who was participating in the seventh time-travel experiment, walked out of the teleportation cabin, the wedding ring on his left ring finger had a deviation of 0.3 microns - this was a positioning error caused by the quantum tunneling effect.

Even if the slate beacon can achieve 99.9999% atomic-level replication accuracy, according to Shannon information theory, each transmission of consciousness will result in the loss of approximately 3.2×10^5 quantum bits of neural activity data.

Just like compressing a symphony with MP3, the seemingly complete melody has lost the subtle resonance of the overtone series.

"It's not a perfect copy," said Professor Chen.

Assuming that one memory bit is lost each time consciousness is transmitted, after twenty replications, the Shannon entropy of the original personality will decay by 37.4%. This explains why Liu Ze suddenly forgot the pronunciation of his daughter's nickname after the thirteenth time traveling.

The real matter is not transferred, and the other end is equivalent to a "perfect copy" of the original owner every time. How perfect is this perfection? If the error is only 0.01 each time, then after 100 copies, relative to the initial sample of 1, the absolute error is as high as 1.7048. This exponential mathematical law is the most terrifying.

The above may just be speculation.

Who knows?

What if it is a perfect copy? Is it really perfect?

The new replica is conscious, just like an analytical scanner that burns consciousness data. With a data template of consciousness, how can it be perfect?

It's a very simple reasoning. If consciousness data can be copied to a new replica, then can it be copied to a new new replica?

The answer is cruel, yes.

If it is possible to copy, then it can be copying one person, or it can be copying 100 million, 1 billion, 10 billion, or 100 billion copies. The theoretical upper limit is even infinite.

The reproducibility of intelligent life strips off its sacred cloak and returns it to its pure material attributes.

This raises countless ethical questions. If Liu Ze and Liu Zeyi killed each other, would the crime of murder still apply?
If a person copies himself in a murder case, can the self-copy be used to take the blame? If twelve identical defendants appear in court at the same time, and each of them insists that he is the original, how will they be judged?
When all the planks are replaced, is it still the same ship?
What if the copy of Liu Ze killed the original version of Liu Ze? Or if they were swapped, how would the sentence be?
Of course, the above is just speculation.

As one speculation says, the reason why Liu Ze is important is because he may be the replicated sample. As a pioneer in exploring the unknown bubble universe, his footprints can be found in every bubble universe.

The only difference is that some survived, such as Liu Ze and Liu Zeyi, and some did not survive and disappeared somewhere in the third world, the fourth world, or other worlds.

It was precisely because of the above reasons that Liu Ze abandoned his opposition and supported the research on the beacon slate. Thinking that he could cross time and space, reach the edge of the universe in space, and reach the end of the universe in time, those things that had only remained at the philosophical level before suddenly became very real and concrete.

Especially this involves an intelligent being from another universe.

(End of this chapter)