“It’s already cooled off.”
“What?”
“The big moon. When I was little it was still hot. When it rose to the middle of the sky, I could see the red glow from the central plains. But now it’s cold…. Haven’t you heard about the great rip?”
“No. What’s that?”
Einstein sighed and shook his head. “Let’s not speak of it. Forget the past. My past, civilization’s past, the universe’s past—all of it too painful to recall.”
“How did you get to be like this?” Wang searched in his pocket and found some change. He bent over and dropped the money into the hat.
“Thank you, Mr. Copernicus. Let’s hope that God doesn’t abandon you, though I don’t have much faith in that. I feel that the model you and Newton and the others created in the East with the help of the human-formation computer was very close to being correct. But the little bit of error left was like an uncrossable chasm for Newton and the others.
“I’ve always believed that without me, others would have discovered special relativity eventually. But general relativity is different. The bit that Newton lacked was the effect on planetary orbit from the gravitationally induced curvature of space-time described by general relativity. Though the error caused by it was small, its impact on the results of the computation was fatal. Adding the correction factor for perturbation from space-time curvature to the classical equations would yield the right mathematical model. The amount of computational power required far exceeds what you accomplished in the East, but is easily provided by modern computers.”
“Have the results of the computation been confirmed by astronomical observations?”
“If that had occurred, do you think I’d be here? But from the perspective of aesthetics, I must be right and the universe must be wrong. God abandoned me, then others abandoned me as well. I’m wanted nowhere. Princeton dismissed me as a professor. UNESCO wouldn’t even have me as a science consultant. Before, even if they had begged on their knees, I wouldn’t have wanted the position. I even thought of going to Israel to be president, but they changed their minds and said I was nothing but a fraud….”
Einstein began playing again, picking up right where he had stopped. After listening to him for a while, Wang strode toward the UN building.
“There’s no one in there,” Einstein said, still playing. “All the members of the General Assembly session are behind the building attending the Pendulum Initiation Ceremony.”
Wang walked around the building and was greeted by a breathtaking sight: a colossal pendulum that seemed to stretch between the sky and the earth. In fact, Wang had seen it peeking out from behind the building, but he didn’t know what he was seeing.
The pendulum resembled those constructed by Fu Xi to hypnotize the sun god during the Warring States Period, back when Wang Miao first logged on to Three Body. But the pendulum before him had been completely modernized. The two pillars holding up the pendulum were made of metal, each as tall as the Eiffel Tower. The weight was also made of metal, streamlined, with a smooth, mirrorlike, electroplated surface. The pendulum line, made of some ultrastrong material, was so thin as to be almost invisible, and the weight seemed to float in the air between the two towers.
Below the pendulum was a crowd of people dressed in suits, probably the leaders of the various countries attending the General Assembly session. They gathered in small cliques and talked amongst themselves quietly, as though waiting for something.
“Ah, Copernicus, the man who crossed five eras!” someone shouted. The others welcomed him.
“You’re one of those who saw the pendulums of the Warring States Period with your own eyes!” A friendly man shook and held Wang’s hand. Someone introduced the man as the secretary general of the UN, from Africa.
“Yes, I did see them,” Wang said. “But why are we building another one now?”
“It’s a monument for Trisolaris, as well as a tombstone.” The secretary general looked up at the pendulum. From down here, it appeared as big as a submarine.
“A tombstone? For who?”
“For an aspiration, a striving that lasted through almost two hundred civilizations: the effort to solve the three-body problem, to find the pattern in the suns’ movements.”
“Is the effort over?”
“Yes. As of now, it’s completely over.”
Wang hesitated for a moment before taking out a stack of papers, Wei Cheng’s three-body mathematical model. “I… I came here for this. I brought a mathematical model that solves the three-body problem. I have reason to believe it will likely work.”
As soon as Wang said this, the crowd around him lost interest. They returned to their cliques to continue their conversations. He noticed that a few even shook their heads and laughed as they left him. The secretary general took the document and, without even glancing at it, handed it to a slender man wearing glasses standing next to him. “Out of respect for your famed reputation, I’ll have my science advisor take a look. Indeed, everyone here has shown you respect. If anyone else had said what you said, they’d be laughing at him.”
The science advisor flipped through the document. “Evolutionary algorithm? Copernicus, you’re a genius. Anyone who can come up with such an algorithm is a genius. This requires not only superior math skills, but also imagination.”
“You seem to be suggesting that someone has already created such a mathematical model?”
“Yes. There are dozens of other mathematical models. Of those, more than half are more advanced than yours. They’ve all been implemented and run on computers. During the past two centuries, such massive computation became the principal activity of this world. Everyone waited for the results as if waiting for Judgment Day.”
“And?”
“We have definitively proven that the three-body problem has no solution.”
Wang gazed up at the massive pendulum overhead. In the dawn light, it was crystal bright. Its deformed mirrorlike surface reflected everything around it like the eye of the world. In this place, in a distant age separated from the here and now by many civilizations, he and King Wen had passed through a forest of giant pendulums on their way to the palace of King Zhou. Just like that, history had made a long circuit and returned to its starting place.
The science advisor said, “It’s just like we guessed long ago: The three-body system is a chaotic system. Tiny perturbations can be endlessly amplified. Its patterns of movement essentially cannot be mathematically predicted.”
Wang felt his scientific knowledge and system of thought become a blur in a single moment. In their place was unprecedented confusion. “If even an extremely simple arrangement like the three-body system is unpredictable chaos, how can we have any faith in discovering the laws of the complicated universe?”
“God is a shameless old gambler. He has abandoned us!” The speaker was Einstein, waving his violin. Wang didn’t know when he had shown up.
The secretary general slowly nodded. “Yes, God is a gambler. The only hope for Trisolaran civilization is to gamble as well.”
By now, the giant moon was rising again from the dark side of the horizon. Its large, silvery image was reflected by the surface of the pendulum weight. The light wriggled strangely, as though the weight and the moon had developed a mysterious sympathy together.
“This civilization seems to have developed to a very advanced state,” Wang said.
“Yes. We’ve mastered the energy of the atom and reached the Information Age.” The secretary general didn’t seem to be too impressed by his own words.
“Then there is hope: Even if it’s impossible to know the pattern of the suns’ movements, civilization can continue to develop until it reaches a stage where it can survive the Chaotic Eras by protecting itself against the devastating catastrophes of those eras.”