Chapter 415 - 330: Old Man, You Have No Manners

Chapter 415: Chapter 330: Old Man, You Have No Manners

After that phone call with G?ttingen, Li Dong’s paper had been on arXiv for five full days.

The view count had surpassed forty thousand.

But the comment section below the paper was completely empty.

Because no one dared to be the first to speak up.

[Peak Arrival Window: T? + 14.0 months]

[Peak Magnitude: Carrington Level]

[Posterior Confidence: Phase-zero-crossing event, no confidence interval provided]

No confidence interval provided.

In the entire field of space weather forecasting, this was simply absurd.

Before this, if anyone had dared to link a Carrington Level warning to a specific month, the immediate reaction would have been to curse them out and block them, and that would be the end of it.

But the problem was... with this paper, from its abstract to its methodology, its supplementary materials, and its five independent baselines for phase reconstruction, they couldn’t find a single flaw.

So they remained silent.

But the silence of the academic world gave others an opening.

The first to move were the overseas short-form video channels.

They didn’t care about Phase Locking, Rossby waves, or what a Carrington Level event was.

They saw only one thing: disaster in 14 months.

And so, all the ghouls and goblins came crawling out of the woodwork.

[Will the World End in 14 Months?]

[A Huaxian Mathematician Predicts: Earth Will Plunge into Eternal Night in 14 Months]

[Solar Doomsday Is Coming—Why Governments Are Hiding This Paper]

The thumbnails were always the same, too.

Half the image showed the Earth engulfed in flames, the other half showed the exterior of an observatory like the one in G?ttingen, and right in the middle was that number, stamped in a bold, red font.

Within twenty-four hours, the view counts shot into the millions.

The comment sections were just as wild.

[It’s over, it’s over, and I haven’t even paid off my mortgage.]

[Guess I’ll max out my credit cards first (jk).]

[Happy Doomsday in advance, everyone!]

[Just watched this and went to the supermarket to hoard twenty bags of rice.]

[I don’t believe it. This is definitely some kind of publicity stunt from Huaxia (angry).]

[To the poster above: stop commenting and go stock up on salt.]

The videos were quickly reposted back to Huaxia.

On all the major short-form video platforms, videos featuring phrases like "14 months," "doomsday," and "eternal night" popped up overnight. The platforms’ moderation teams couldn’t keep up with the speed at which they were being shared.

By the next morning, these videos were gradually being taken down.

But the news had already spread.

On Weibo’s hot search list, a new topic suddenly appeared in eighth place.

#LiDongsPrediction#

[Who’s Li Dong?]

[The mathematician who proved a bunch of bizarre conjectures. He’s a PhD student at Yan University right now.]

[Why is a mathematician meddling in this? He doesn’t study the sun.]

[Why aren’t the authorities saying anything? It’s either true or it’s not.]

Strange pictures started appearing on Weibo.

The shelves in the rice and noodle aisle of a supermarket were picked clean.

Cars were lined up for a kilometer at a gas station.

A married couple took out all their gold bars, arranged them on a table, and filmed a video.

The video captions were all more or less the same.

[Better safe than sorry.]

These videos were also quickly taken down.

But the name Li Dong had been plastered all over the internet for a full day.

At dusk on the sixth day.

G?ttingen was the first to speak out.

On the official website of the Max Planck Institute, a public memorandum was posted, written in both German and English.

It was signed by Heinrich Richter.

In the memorandum, the old professor, with a hint of impatience, laid out three points for the public.

The first point was that, from a methodological standpoint, this so-called warning paper was...

Richter used a rather un-German turn of phrase.

"Elegant."

He wrote.

[The Rossby Phase Locking framework established by the author is impeccable in its mathematical rigor.]

[The cross-validation using five independent baselines also meets the standard required for peer review.]

[If this were submitted purely as a methodological contribution, I would personally recommend it for publication in Nature.]

Reading this part gave most people a major scare.

’So, it looks like this isn’t just fearmongering after all.’

But as they read on, the tone began to shift.

The second point Richter made was that an elegant method does not guarantee a correct conclusion.

[In my forty-plus years of work in solar physics, I have seen far too many predictions that were mathematically self-consistent but were ultimately not borne out by nature.]

He gave two examples.

One was the catastrophic prophecy from the 1970s regarding the solar neutrino deficit; the other was the "deterministic" extrapolation of the Cycle 23 peak in the early 1990s.

Both were made using the most advanced mathematical frameworks of their time, yet neither came to pass.

[The essence of science is not the elegance of its methods, but the falsifiability of its results.]

[Until the peak actually arrives, any assertion regarding a specific date can only be considered a testable hypothesis, not a promise about the future.]

This passage carried particular weight.

For his third point, he criticized Li Dong quite bluntly.

[Dr. Li Dong’s achievements in mathematics are beyond doubt.]

[However, to my knowledge, he has yet to publish any empirical research within the field of space physics at the level required to support a prediction of this nature.]

[He is an exceptionally brilliant mathematician, but he is not a solar physicist.]

[To attach his name to a specific disaster date, one without any error bars, is, in my view, irresponsible to himself and to the global public.]

For the final part, he wrote one sentence in German.

[Bleiben Sie ruhig.]

Stay calm.

Within two hours of its posting, the memorandum had been translated into seven languages.

Following this, several other heavyweights in the field began to weigh in.

A senior director from the space weather department of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, retweeted Richter’s memorandum on Twitter, adding only a single comment: "I completely agree."

A senior researcher from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center wrote a short commentary in the Nature Briefing section, with a simple one-line title: *Elegant Mathematics, Cautious Policy*.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Solar Physics Division went so far as to post the original text of Richter’s memorandum on its own official account.

Now the short-form video creators around the world had found their rallying cry.

The tide of public opinion turned faster than the flip of a page.

[BREAKING: World’s Top Solar Physicists Publicly Question "Doomsday Prophecy"]

[The Truth Is Out: Huaxian Mathematician Knows Nothing About Solar Physics]

[Stay Calm: 70-Year-Old Max Planck Director Personally Shuts Down the Hype]

[This Young Huaxian: Genius or Clout-Chaser?]

On Weibo, under the #LiDongsPrediction# hashtag, the tone of the conversation flipped completely.

[The big shot in Germany said to stay calm, what’s everyone panicking about?]

[A mathematician dabbling in prophecy was always a bit sketchy.]

[Phew, false alarm. Now what am I supposed to do with these twenty bags of rice?]

[To the poster above: enjoy eating it. Slowly.]

The entire court of public opinion had swung from yesterday’s "better safe than sorry" to today’s "false alarm" in less than eight hours.

And so, Li Dong went from being an overnight prophet to just another young man being told by a senior professor "not to speak recklessly outside his own field."

And that 14-month timeframe, which had been hanging over everyone’s heads, began to fade into obscurity.