After getting the paper yesterday, Eddington did not rush back to Cambridge. Instead, he came to the Royal Society in London and asked the secretary of the society to arrange a room for him to stay for one night.
He wanted to see what Chen Muwu wrote in this paper on the theory of relativity, so that his old friend Einstein could praise it so much that he even sent a telegram to recommend it to him in the Far East.
If he thinks there is nothing wrong with this paper, Eddington will continue to send the paper to the editorial office of Proceedings of the Natural Sciences and ask them to help publish it, as he did before.
In fact, the content of Chen Muwu's second paper on general relativity is not very advanced.
He just solved the exact solution of this equation under several specific conditions based on the gravitational field equation proposed by Einstein in 1917.
Eddington's mathematical level allowed him to easily understand the derivation in Chen Muwu's paper, and he also fully recognized Chen Muwu's first solution and Chen's second solution to the field equations proposed in the paper. .
only……
This Chen Muwu, what exactly is the "Chen Universe" that he proposed in the last part of the paper!
Chen Universe’s derivation is as impeccable as the previous two solutions.
Eddington was afraid that he had read the wrong steps, so he wrote on the paper himself and calculated it, and the result was still correct.
However, the conclusion he reached after some extrapolation seemed very absurd in terms of common sense.
In this spinning universe, the past and the future are inextricably entangled.
As long as a person can make a long enough round trip with the help of the galactic train traveling at a speed close to the speed of light, he can go back to any point in time in his own past!
But Eddington always felt that this theory was extremely awkward.
Because according to the second law of thermodynamics he believes in, entropy, or randomness, will always increase, and time can only flow in one direction.
In other words, there is no way to restore a complete pig from several slices of bacon.
The time travel proposed by Chen Muwu in Chen Universe is to go from the current high-entropy state to the past low-entropy state. This is impossible to achieve!
Chen Yuzhou in the last part of the paper completely drove Eddington into madness.
On one side is the second law of thermodynamics that he has believed in since he was a child, and on the other side is the theory of relativity that he now firmly advocates.
However, these two theories are in conflict and irreconcilable in the universe proposed by Chen Muwu.
If he supports one, he has to give up the other.
Eddington didn't know what to do.
The night he stayed at the Royal Society, Eddington had a restless sleep. He didn't know whether it was because he couldn't sleep deeply in bed, or because Chen Muwu's paper gave him nightmares.
Early the next morning, he woke up from bed and took the train back to Cambridgeshire from King's Cross Station, regardless of his tired body.
Eddington felt that he could no longer understand whether the last part of this paper was wrong or right. He needed to return to Cambridge to recruit reinforcements.
Ralph Fowler, a lecturer in mathematics at Trinity College and the only theoretical physicist in the Cavendish Laboratory, is responsible for providing corresponding data calculations and theoretical support to experimental personnel.
Fowler was so beloved by Rutherford that two years ago he married Rutherford's only daughter, Irene Mary, and became the consort of the Cavendish Laboratory.
Fowler was Eddington's younger brother when he was studying at Trinity College, and he was also the smartest one in their class.
This guy has advanced mathematical abilities, so Eddington immediately thought of Fowler.
Hurrying into the Cavendish Laboratory, the first person he met was the bearded Rutherford.
Seeing that the visitor was Eddington, Rutherford smiled and said, "Arthur, why are you leaving in such a hurry? Why, are you sending us another paper by a Chinese genius?"
One looks up at the vastness of the universe, and the other looks down at the smallness of atoms. The two don't meet often.
The last time they met, it was Eddington who sent Chen Muwu's first paper to Rutherford.
That paper solved the problem of gamma ray scattering that had been bothering him since his days at McGill University, so Rutherford had a good impression of Chen Muwu, whom he had never met.
"Sir, it is indeed because of Chen Muwu that I came here this time. It's just that there are some things in his new paper that I don't understand, so I came to Fowler specifically to discuss it."
Hearing that Eddington was looking for his son-in-law, Rutherford couldn't hide the smile in his eyes: "Are you looking for Ralph? Then you came just in time. He just came to the laboratory, and he should be here now." It’s in the office upstairs.”
"Thank you Sir."
"It just so happens that I don't have anything to do right now. I'll go up with you to see what kind of masterpiece our genius has sent this time!"
The two people walked up the iron stairs to the second floor and entered Fowler's office.
Fowler looked a little surprised when he saw his father-in-law coming in with the seniors from Trinity College.
When he heard that the Chinese man from before had sent another paper, and Eddington wanted him to see if the comments in it were correct, Fowler felt a little disdainful.
He had read Chen Muwu's first paper, which was completely elementary physics formulas and derivation. He could only say that this person was very lucky and stumbled upon the correct answer by accident.
But when Fowler took the paper from Eddington and read it carefully from cover to cover, he was astonished.
It felt like, obviously, the last time we met, he was still a toddler, but now that we meet again, his speed is already "flying" faster than the non-stop express train from London to Edinburgh on the Great Northern Line. The Scotsman was much faster.
How can one person improve so much in a short period of time?
Unless he hides his stupidity!
After Fowler read this paper, he felt that there was no problem with the mathematical logic.
He was afraid that his thinking would be led into misunderstandings by the paper. Like Eddington, he checked the calculation from beginning to end on paper and it was still accurate.
This kind of mathematically error-free derivation can eventually lead to the result of human time travel. Fowler thinks this result is absurd, but it also has an indescribable beauty.
Seeing that Fowler had finished reading the paper, Eddington expressed his doubts.
In his opinion, Chen Universe's mathematical derivation was correct, but for some unknown reason, he derived such a result that violated the second law of thermodynamics.
After listening to Eddington's words, Fowler fell into deep thinking.
Could it be said that today, a wrong answer will be found between Einstein's gravitational field equation and the second law of thermodynamics?
At this time, Rutherford, who had been sitting on the sofa in the office, looking at the two people who were tortured by the papers, spoke: "Arthur, I think you are thinking too much, but you have ignored another point, that It is to use the second law of thermodynamics to deny that time travel is impossible. This view is actually incomplete.
Maybe the second law of thermodynamics does prevent people from going back to the past, but have you ever thought that it doesn't actually block our way to the future through time travel? "
