Volume 1 Chaos Comes Chapter 19 There is a temple on the mountain
I had trouble sleeping in the days following the discussion in the classroom and I had some very strange dreams.
In my dream, I slowly walked down the stairs, passed through a dark steel forest, and arrived at a town made of cold ruins. I was always awakened by a sharp howl. The sound did not sound like it was made by a person, but more like the friction and collision of metal. The sound was just a slight disturbance at first, and gradually became louder after I walked onto the streets of the town, approaching me from all directions.
I always woke up suddenly the moment it reached behind me, and it was difficult to fall asleep again. That time was usually very early, at most around 5 or 6 in the morning. After waking up, I would usually struggle in bed for a while, then tiptoe down to put on my clothes for going out, open the dormitory door and walk into the dispersing night.
Even when you are in a deep sleep, dawn will not let you go, so you might as well take the initiative to embrace it.
So one morning I put on my sweatshirt and went out as usual. The air in the northern spring night was still cold, and the faint and cool morning light brought my thoughts back to a year ago, when I was still in the school football team, and was woken up by the alarm clock every day to go for a morning run.
I walked around the campus twice. The roads leading to the teaching buildings and the library were not empty. Students were walking hurriedly in thick clothes of different colors. Some of them were holding soy milk or buns in their hands.
I have always admired the self-control of my classmates. Many of them work much harder than they did in high school. Although hard work in such a place may not necessarily translate into good results, after all, there will always be someone working harder than you.
There are a bunch of half-abandoned old courtyards in the south of the campus, most of which are ancient buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is very far from the student apartments, so it is very secluded. Since I discovered this hidden area in my freshman year, it has become my first choice for daydreaming.
When I arrived at the old houses, the sky was already blue. The sun's rays allowed me to clearly see a large locust tree in the weed-covered yard, its dense branches already covered with soft white flowers.
There was a familiar figure under the flowers. She seemed to be concentrating on doing something and didn't notice me.
"Good morning. Are you... reciting English?"
"Ah, hello, senior!"
Liu Yishi was sitting on a bench outside the yard, muttering to herself on her phone. When she saw me, she greeted me, took off her headphones, and stood up, holding on to the chair.
"Ah , I'm doing morning reading. Don't we also do morning reading in high school?"
Those who keep this habit until college will surely achieve great success in the future.
"Yeah, I thought morning reading was painful at that time, but I didn't expect you are still persisting now."
"I think it's okay... maybe it's because my dad made me wake up so early since I was a child, so I'm used to it. Senior, do you want to come and study with me? I feel a little embarrassed to be talking to myself here."
Her father was a retired navy officer. She said he had visited many countries on warships.
"I... I won't read it anymore. I just woke up too early and couldn't sleep, so I came here to sit for a while..."
What a strange thing to say. In her eyes, I might really be a little neurotic.
"Do you come to the same place every morning to study?"
"Yeah, isn't there a big locust tree on the high school campus? The yard is a bit shabby just like here. We were all attracted by it. This seems to be called the suggestion effect."
Our older generation thinks that locust trees are not auspicious, but this does not prevent them from becoming widely distributed landscape trees across the country.
"I like all kinds of trees. I think it's beautiful to see their branches stretching up to the sky. It's like... they keep branching out and poking deeper and deeper?"
"Yes, strictly speaking, this is called a fractal pattern. It is indeed very beautiful..."
"Hmm...what pattern?"
I felt a little smug that I had successfully aroused her interest.
"It is... a figure whose part is similar to the whole."
I walked under the tree canopy, picked up a twig from the scattered flowers on the ground, and placed it between the big tree and our eyes.
"If we enlarge the branch of the same tree, its shape is almost exactly the same as the main branch of the tree. Of course, if we shrink the latter, it is also the same. This is called a fractal pattern in geometry; we define it as a self-similarity in spatial scale."
She looked at me and nodded slightly, the same movement as when I listened to Ai Bishui speaking.
"Or let me tell you a story: Once upon a time there was a mountain, on the mountain there was a temple, in the temple there was an old monk who told a story to a young monk. It's about a long time ago there was a mountain, on the mountain there was a temple, in the temple there was an old monk who told a story to a young monk..."
"Yeah, I know this, and then?"
"That story has temporal self-similarity: if you cut off the story at any point and move it forward or backward in time, you will get the same story as before. The fractal pattern has spatial self- similarity . We can select any scale of the tree, such as the trunk or branches, and then enlarge or reduce it, and we will get the previous pattern."
I showed Fang Xue before that an attractor is a typical fractal pattern, but her little head certainly couldn't understand it, so I didn't tell her.
"Hmm... I kind of understand, but trees in reality can't be infinitely enlarged or reduced."
"Yes, so almost all objects in nature are pseudo-fractals, but programs can generate graphics that are very close to true fractals..."
She unconsciously glanced at her phone a few times, and I realized it would be bad to disturb her reading again.
"Why don't I go back first...it wouldn't be nice to interrupt you..."
"Oh, it's okay, it's okay. Someone just contacted me... Bye then, let's have morning reading together when we have time, senior!"
"Good morning, Fang Cheng. You did very well on the test. It seems you have mastered everything I taught you."
During the last Q&A session before the Labor Day holiday, I was called to the office by Teacher Jie to get my test paper. It is said that he has been doing this since the day he started teaching students, answering each person's questions individually after the exam.
This may be an attempt to shock everyone with the results so that we don't play too hard during the holidays.
Although it was only one day off, there was also an adjustment day off.
As soon as I walked in, I saw him grading the midterm exam papers at his desk himself, without even asking his graduate students to help.
"Hello teacher...can I see the test paper?"
"You answered almost all the questions correctly," he said as he handed me the answer sheet. "Is there anything else you don't understand?"
"Actually, she and I were thinking about a question... I just wanted to ask the teacher."
I took the test paper and sat on the sofa at his gesture.
"Have you seen the article she wrote? I personally helped her revise some parts. She should try to submit it to Nature or Science." The old man said with shining eyes, "She is really smart. She can change the microscopic dynamics just by etching the magnetic material. This was unimaginable before."
It suddenly occurred to me that we no longer needed to mention her name when we talked about her.
"Well... we are now planning to study a new problem... which is to use some solid materials to simulate the dynamic state of the brain and see what kind of behavior will emerge."
I saw Teacher Xie stop what he was doing and look up at me.
"This idea... is very interesting, but how do you plan to realize it?"
"What I envision is to use the local synchronous magnetization of the ferromagnetic system to simulate the local synchronous discharge of the nervous system, and then observe the behavior of the two separately..."
This is just what I thought of, not what she was going to do, and I don't know how she would design the experiment.
"Well... if it's a phenomenological level... it's a good exercise..."
Teacher Xie seemed to let out a sigh of relief and picked up the red pen again.
"Work hard, Fang Cheng. The world is yours, and ours, but ultimately it is yours. The future of this discipline will ultimately rest on your shoulders."
In fact, one day the entire past and future of mankind rested on my shoulders.
