Silent Ark

Chapter 3: The Death of "God"

Liu Pan glanced at Yao Chong.

"I felt great after closing it."

"……very good?"

"Yes. Very calm. Very clear-headed. Very... yes. Just 'yes.' Like I'd been out of tune for the past few decades, and only in that moment did I finally get it right." He paused. "So I didn't report it. Because I didn't think it was unusual."

"So what do you think it is?"

"I don't know. But if there's anything that can make your heartbeat go from 'almost' to 'precise'—you wouldn't want it to stop."

Yao Chong turned his chair around and continued to face the screen.

"There's a logical problem with your statement," he said. "'Feeling right' doesn't mean 'right.' When tuning a string instrument, you listen to how closely it matches the standard pitch. What do you use as the standard pitch? Your own heartbeat? That's not tuning, that's—"

"I know what you're trying to say," Liu Pan interrupted him. "You're trying to say that's called positive feedback. The heartbeat follows the external rhythm, and the external rhythm follows the heartbeat, locking in with each other until they finally lock onto a single frequency. In physics, that's called coupled oscillation."

"right."

"Yes. But coupled oscillations can't explain one thing."

"What?"

"After I left the fourth arc," Liu Pan said, "the rhythm didn't stop."

Yao Chong did not speak again.

"It's still there."

Liu Pan extended his right hand and grasped Yao Chong's wrist—two fingers resting on the radial artery.

"You should try this too."

Yao Chong could feel Liu Pan's pulse.

Stable, powerful, and evenly spaced.

Like a metronome.

"How accurate is it?" Yao Chong asked.

Go get the stopwatch.

Yao Chong didn't go to get the stopwatch.

He glanced at the clock in the upper right corner of his screen and silently counted Liu Pan's pulse fifteen times in his mind.

Interval error: zero.

It's not "almost zero".

It is zero.

The human heart simply cannot do that.

The electrical signal emission of the sinoatrial node exhibits inherent random fluctuations, which is a basic physiological fact.

Even the most well-trained athletes experience heart rate fluctuations in milliseconds.

Liu Pan's heartbeat remained unchanged.

The time difference between each jump and the next jump was accurate to the smallest resolution that Yao Chong could measure—while the smallest resolution of his portable detection equipment in the laboratory was 0.001 seconds.

"When did you start?" Yao Chong released his wrist.

"Arc number four. When I received the jacket."

"Half an hour ago."

"right."

"Your heart rate interval is zero every half hour. You should go to the emergency room, not chat with me here."

"I don't feel uncomfortable."

"That's not important—"

"Zichong." Liu Pan's way of calling his name suddenly changed. Unlike the drawn-out, emphasized pronunciation he used in college, it was now two clear, evenly spaced syllables, as if demonstrating something. "Have you ever thought about this?"

"Brother Pan, what's the problem?"

Why are the laws of physics like this?

Yao Chong felt that the question was like a nut that had fallen from the ceiling—not that it couldn't be answered, but that it shouldn't have come out of this person's mouth at this time.

"You rushed to the control room at 2 a.m. just to ask me this?"

"When I went to get my coat at 1:30, I heard something tapping in my ear, and then my heartbeat was calibrated. I feel I have the right to ask this question at 2 a.m.

Yao Chong turned around and looked at him.

Liu Pan's expression was strange.

It's not fear. If it were fear, Yao Chong would feel at ease—it's normal for ordinary people to feel fear when they encounter such things. Fear means that the cognitive framework is still functioning. As long as there are no abnormalities after a physical examination at the hospital, you can see a psychologist to gradually adjust.

But there was no fear on Liu Pan's face; instead, there was a look of certainty—a word Yao Chong had to think of for a long time to find: certainty.

It's like the quiet that comes with finally finding the answer.

"Why is the speed of light 300,000 kilometers per second? Why is Planck's constant that number? Why is the fine structure constant 1/137?" Liu Pan said, "Have you ever thought about this—these numbers weren't 'discovered,' but rather 'defined'?"

"Who made that rule?"

"That's the problem."

"What exactly are you trying to say?" Liu Pan stood up and walked to the huge monitoring screen in front of the main control room.

The screen displays a top-down view of the LHC Circular Accelerator—a circle with a circumference of 27 kilometers, resembling a closed eye.

"I want to say something that might seem absurd. Just listen and don't respond." He had his back to Yao Chong, and his voice sounded thinner than usual in the empty control room.

"explain."

Do you know how the four fundamental forces in the Big Bang theory came about?

"Symmetry breaking. Grand unification breaking, electroweak breaking. These are all things from textbooks."

"What does the textbook say?"

"Initially, the four forces were unified, then the temperature dropped, the symmetry was spontaneously broken, and the forces separated in sequence—first the strong nuclear force, then the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force, and then gravity began to operate."

Liu Pan repeated the word "spontaneous".

"Yes, spontaneous symmetry breaking."

Liu Pan emphasized the word "spontaneous" again: "Have you ever thought about this—a perfectly symmetrical system could have remained symmetrical forever. It has no reason to 'must be broken'. Water freezes below 0°C because the energy state of molecules is more stable in the crystal lattice than in the liquid state at that temperature—there is a thermodynamic driving force. But where is the driving force for the breaking of grand unified symmetry—at 10³² Kelvin, where all particles are in the same energy state?"

"Quantum fluctuations".

"Atomic fluctuations are random. Random fluctuations do not choose a direction. If you draw a random line on a piece of white paper, the ink will not fall into a map of a city. But symmetry breaking precisely produces specific coupling constants such as the strong nuclear force and specific interaction modes such as electromagnetic force—this is no longer about forming a map, but about drawing a precise world map with a random stroke on paper."

Yao Chong did not respond.

"The word 'spontaneous,'" Liu Pan said, "is what physics uses to fill the gap of 'I don't know why, but things did happen.' It's not an explanation. It's a fig leaf."

"What are you trying to say?"

Liu Pan turned around.

"I want to say: Genesis is not a myth. Genesis is the history of physics."

"..."

"'God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.' This statement doesn't describe magic. It describes electroweak breaking. A unified, unstructured symmetric state is given an instruction by something—'Let there be light'—and then the electromagnetic force separates from the chaos. The fine-structure constant is set to 1/137. The speed of light is set to 299792458 m/s. It didn't happen 'spontaneously.' It was spoken."

"Your metaphor—"

"Let there be a vault between the waters, to separate the waters from the waters"—the Grand Unification is broken. The strong nuclear force separates from the unifying force. The "vault" is the coupling boundary of the strong nuclear force—it "separates" the quarks, confining them inside protons and neutrons, just as the vault separates the waters from the waters.

"'The earth will produce grass and seed-bearing vegetables'—this isn't about plants. It's about chemistry. After the electromagnetic force separates, electrons can orbit the atomic nucleus, chemical bonds become possible, and molecules can assemble—'grass and vegetables' is a metaphor for molecules. Complex structures emerge from simple rules."

"Liu Pan—"

“‘God saw that it was good.’” Liu Pan paused. He spoke this sentence slowly, with distinct pauses between each word, as if reading a verdict. “After each force separation, Genesis repeated this sentence. ‘God saw that it was good.’ — What does this mean? This is verification. After each symmetry breaking, the system is checked — are the parameters within the allowable range? Are the coupling constants correct? Can the universe continue to exist? — Check passed. ‘Okay.’ Proceed to the next step.”

"You're using the Bible to explain physics—"

"No." Liu Pan raised his voice for the first time.

It wasn't a shout, but rather the sudden snap of a compressed spring. "I'm interpreting the Bible using physics. Or rather—I'm saying they describe the same thing. The ancients and we saw the same physical processes. The ancients didn't have such advanced mathematics, so they used stories. We have mathematics, so we use equations. But equations and stories point to the same thing."

"What is it?"

Liu Pan walked back to Yao Chong's side.

His footsteps echoed faintly in the empty control room—normally there wouldn't be an echo because the control room's sound-absorbing materials were good enough.

But it exists now.

It's like some acoustic parameter has been fine-tuned.