Chapter 171: A Destiny That Can Be Fitted

Chapter 171 -72: A Destiny That Can Be Fitted

Shao Yiyi also tried to piece it together.

“So, what you’re saying is… my mentor believes that physicists are like air conditioners? For every truth they discover, every formula they establish, every time they make the world a little more regular and ‘orderly,’ they incur a ‘chaos’ debt? And this great flood is nature coming to collect?”

“It does sound a bit like a conservation of information, or ‘conservation of complexity.'” Yu Xian vaguely felt something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He said thoughtfully,

“The more weight physicists add to one side of the scale—that is, the more deeply they analyze truth and the more information they generate—the greater the counter-reaction from the other side. The more violent nature’s backlash.”

“If that’s the case…” Shi Zuozhou said, ruffling his messy hair again.

“Then physics, especially high-energy physics that tries to touch the mysteries of the universe, really is the culprit that’s tipping the scales. It’s not consuming electricity or money, but… the ‘information entropy’ and ‘degree of chaos’ necessary to maintain the world’s stability?”

“So, is that why my mentor talked about ‘doing Subtraction’?” Shao Yiyi murmured to herself.

“Is he trying to stop this ‘entropy reduction’ by eliminating innovative theoretical research in physics, allowing the world’s chaos to return to equilibrium and thus quell nature’s wrath?”

Yu Xian understood Wen Xiao’s hypothesis.

She had taken the “law of increasing entropy” and extended it into a macroscopic, philosophical concept.

It seemed to build a barely passable bridge between the existing scientific framework and Su Mingyuan’s logic.

“But…” Yu Xian rubbed his temples, realizing what the problem was.

“There’s one part of this explanation that doesn’t add up.”

The other three looked at him.

“Thermodynamic entropy indeed never decreases, but information entropy… there’s no such universal law for that, is there?” Yu Xian said with a frown.

“If ‘understanding nature and establishing order’ is reducing information entropy and overdrawing from the world’s stability, are physicists the only ones doing it?”

“What do you mean?” Shao Yiyi blinked.

“Think about it. Biologists classify species, organizing chaotic life forms into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species. Chemists study the periodic table, breaking down countless substances into combinations of over one hundred elements. Even historians and sociologists summarize patterns and build models from the chaos of human activity.”

Yu Xian posed his question:

“Aren’t all these disciplines essentially extracting information, establishing order, and reducing ‘chaos’? If we follow this logic of information entropy conservation, then all of human civilization’s activities should be accelerating the world’s destruction. So why is it only targeting the field of physics?”

“Well…” Shi Zuozhou opened his mouth, seeming to want to argue, but after a long pause, he only managed to squeeze out one sentence:

“Could it be that, while they’re all ‘reducing entropy,’ the orders of magnitude are different?”

He looked at the others, gesturing with his hands.

“Look, the foundation of biology is chemistry, and the foundation of chemistry is physics. Physics studies the most fundamental logic of all things—matter, energy, spacetime, the most basic components of reality.”

Shao Yiyi looked as if she only half-understood.

“So it’s like… other disciplines are assembling building blocks, constructing houses under existing rules. But physics is studying how to ‘create the building blocks’ themselves?”

“There’s still a problem. Even if it touches upon fundamental logic, it’s still just ‘cognition,’ not ‘alteration,'” Yu Xian said, shaking his head.

“Newton discovered universal gravitation; he didn’t ‘create’ gravity. He just wrote a formula to describe it. How could mere ‘cognition’ and ‘description’ provoke a reckoning from nature?”

At this, the other three seemed stumped.

“Let’s stop guessing at the underlying logic for now. We have too little information to make an accurate deduction,” Yu Xian said, looking at Shao Yiyi.

“Yiyi, what your mentor said helped us cross-reference that ‘great flood’ trigram. But that just makes me even more confused about something else—something I’ve been wrestling with for the past two days and just can’t wrap my head around.”

“Wh-what is it?” Shao Yiyi felt a little unnerved by Yu Xian’s serious gaze.

“It’s that AI fortune-telling model you developed.” Yu Xian pointed to the laptop Wen Xiao had placed on the table.

“In the breakroom the other day, Wen Xiao explained its principles to me. The core logic of your model is to predict the course of events—to predict the future—by ‘fitting a curve,’ right?”

“Right. The process of fortune-telling is to take known discrete points—past events—and draw a best-fit curve to extrapolate future coordinates,” Wen Xiao said with a nod.

“Do you find that process hard to understand?”

“No, it’s easy enough to understand.”

Yu Xian shook his head. As a science student, he certainly understood what a best-fit curve was. In experiments, when you have enough data points, you can indeed draw a curve to describe their trend. The focus of his question wasn’t the process itself.

“But have you ever thought about the prerequisite for this logic to even work?”

The three exchanged glances and shook their heads.

“The prerequisite for fitting a curve is that, although the discrete points may seem chaotic, they are fundamentally bound by some sort of rule—an objective law, a mathematical logic, or some kind of describable generative mechanism,” Yu Xian said, pausing before adding:

“Regardless of whether you fully understand what that rule is.”

Seeing their still-confused expressions, he gave an example:

“For example, when I throw a ball, its trajectory can be fitted to a curve because it’s constrained by the function of the gravitational formula, h = 1/2gt2. Therefore, its general path is determined.”

“Yes… you’re right. What’s the problem with that?” Wen Xiao didn’t grasp Yu Xian’s point and looked puzzled.

Yu Xian stared intently at Wen Xiao and asked in return:

“But what about a person’s fate? Life is full of randomness, chaos, and accidents. Whether I leave the house today, whether I buy a lottery ticket when I pass by a shop—it all depends on a whim. So…”

He threw out the question that had been bothering him for two days:

“Why should the trajectory of a life—everything created by free will and subjective choices—be able to fit so seamlessly onto a mathematical curve?”

In this chaotic real world, there’s no rule dictating that events must follow a specific geometric path.

Tripping and falling yesterday, winning the lottery today, possibly getting into a car accident tomorrow—these discrete, independent events, these key moments in a life, are all determined by individual thoughts and choices. So…

Fate shouldn’t be something that can be fitted, calculated, and predicted.

“Furthermore, could fortune-telling and prediction lead to a ‘self-defeating prophecy’? Meaning, when people know the prediction, might they deliberately do the opposite? Using the prediction to fight the prediction itself?” Yu Xian continued, digging deeper.

“Or, what if ‘reflexivity’ itself is also part of the prediction? Then…”

Yu Xian took a deep breath and said slowly:

“Does free will… even exist?”

A dead silence fell over the breakroom. Clearly, even Wen Xiao hadn’t considered the question to this depth.

“So… if all those seemingly random, chaotic, and unrelated fragments of a life are ‘strung together’ by a mathematical curve, does that mean…” Shi Zuozhou swallowed hard and cautiously ventured:

“Does it mean that beneath the skin of this seemingly free reality, there’s actually a strict, cold, and inviolable…”

Shi Zuozhou’s words caught in his throat. His face turned extremely pale.

“A set of mathematical rules,” Yu Xian finished his sentence for him.

He thought of his parents’ esoteric paper: *A Study on the Mapping and Storage Mechanism of Discrete Personality Vectorization Based on High-Dimensional Topological Manifolds*.

He had puzzled over this question countless times during sleepless nights:

Why can a person be broken down into vectors? Why can a personality be calculated like a set of coordinates?

Before, he’d thought these were just “models” and “metaphors” his parents had created for the convenience of their research.

But now, a thought, like a cold snake, slithered slowly up his spine, chilling him to the bone.

‘What if… this isn’t just a model?’