Chapter 136: The Two Clouds

Spring in the capital arrived with even more clamor than in previous years.

Ever since that thesis on electromagnetism was published, the air throughout the entire magical community seemed permeated with the scent of scorching ink and the crackle of static electricity.

In a mere two months.

The printing houses surrounding the Tower of Truth had earned more profit than they had in the past decade.

Countless messenger pigeons and communication owls wove a net that obscured the sky, carrying the name “Maxwell” to every corner of the continent.

Lia sat in a corner of the conference room on the top floor of the tower, holding a cup of red tea that had already gone cold.

She watched the window out of sheer boredom, observing a gray pigeon clumsily collide with the glass barrier, leaving behind a single feather before fluttering away.

In the center of the conference room, a debate destined to be recorded in history was taking place.

“Absurd! This is utter nonsense!”

An old man wearing red mage robes slammed the table, his spit flying onto the face of the person opposite him.

“Merge the systems of Fields, Thermodynamics, and Optics into one? What are you trying to do? Start a rebellion?”

“This isn’t a rebellion; it is a synthesis!”

The one sitting opposite him was none other than Laplace.

This usually jovial master was currently acting like a lion protecting its food, refusing to yield a single inch.

“Ever since Maxwell’s Equations unified electricity and magnetism, can you still not see it? The world is interconnected!

Heat is the movement of molecules, light is the oscillation of electromagnetic waves, and force is the effect of a field! Essentially, they are all laws governing the movement of matter!”

“Even so, you can’t call it ‘Physics’!”

The red-robed elder’s beard trembled with rage.

“Listen to that word—the ‘Principles of All Things’!? What arrogance! This is a desecration of the mysteries of magic!”

“Then what should we call it? A ‘mishmash’?”

Horace, sitting in the primary seat, interjected languidly.

He twirled a quill in his hand, his gaze sweeping over the quarreling crowd before finally landing on Lia in the corner.

“Your Excellency Lia, as the founder of all this, don’t you have an opinion to offer?”

Every gaze in the room focused on the corner instantly.

Lia set down her teacup.

She wore a simple deep blue long dress today, devoid of any badges representing rank, yet none of the Seventh or Eighth-Circle Archmages present dared to look down on this young girl.

“A name is merely a designation.”

Lia stood up, smoothing the wrinkles on her skirt.

“‘Physics’ is proposed because we need a vessel to hold the increasingly clear skeleton of this world.”

She walked to the long table, her fingers tracing lightly across the surface.

“Once, we believed lightning was the wrath of a god, until we captured the charge. We believed heat was a fluid, until we discovered the agitation of molecules.

Now, electricity and magnetism have been unified. The remaining pieces of the puzzle will be fitted together sooner or later.”

Lia’s voice wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly to every corner.

“We need a new discipline to govern the laws of energy, space, and time. It belongs to no specific school, nor to any single deity. It is the underlying logic of the world’s operation.”

“As for desecration…”

Lia smiled slightly.

“If God truly exists, then He must be a mathematician. We are merely solving the problems He left behind.”

Lia sat back down.

Laplace cast a smug look at the red-robed elder.

Half an hour later, the voting concluded.

The largest restructuring plan in the history of the Tower of Truth was passed.

Multiple fragmented disciplines, including Force Fields, Elements (partially), Optics, Acoustics, and Thermodynamics, were formally integrated.

A new name was carved at the entrance of the Tower of Truth—Physics.

With the establishment of the concept of “Physics,” mages from various schools who had previously kept to themselves suddenly discovered they shared a common language—or rather, a common point of contention.

One day, as Lia stepped out of the academy’s meeting room, she saw a crowd gathered in the corridor ahead.

“Light is a particle! This is self-evident!”

A young mage held up a black baffle, pointing loudly at the shadow behind it.

“If it were a wave, it should bend around it instead of leaving such a clear shadow! Rectilinear propagation is ironclad proof of particles!”

“Superficial! Ignorant!”

A middle-aged mage wearing thick-lensed glasses opposite him sneered repeatedly.

He held two narrow glass plates with an extremely thin layer of air sandwiched between them.

“Then how do you explain Lia’s Rings? How do you explain interference fringes? If they were particles, two beams of light colliding should bounce off each other, rather than turning dark in one spot and bright in another!”

“That… that is the collision and cancellation between particles!”

The young mage’s face turned red as he forced an explanation.

“Haha! Collision and cancellation? Energy vanishing into thin air? Did you feed your knowledge of energy conservation to the dogs?” The middle-aged mage mocked him mercilessly.

The spectating crowd split into two factions, one shouting “Long live the particle” and the other “Waves are eternal.”

Some even began to secretly weave hand seals, prepared to use physical force to prove their theories.

Lia stood outside the crowd, watching the scene and shaking her head involuntarily.

“Quite lively.” Klein appeared behind her.

He held a book, his gaze falling on the middle-aged mage with the glass plates.

“That experiment is quite interesting,” Klein commented.

“Light interference. The evidence for the wave theory is quite solid.”

“But the existence of shadows is also a fact,” Lia said.

Klein turned his head to look at her.

“Which side do you support?”

“Me?” Lia smiled, her gaze somewhat meaningful.

“I support the truth. However, current truth hasn’t learned the art of bilocation yet.”

The word ‘Quantum’ circled in Lia’s mind before she swallowed it back down.

One bite of food at a time, one argument at a time.

Only through conflict would old concepts shatter and new foundations be solidified.

“Let’s go.” Lia turned away.

***

At three in the afternoon, the grand auditorium of the Tower of Truth was packed to capacity.

Even the aisles were crowded with apprentices and mages clutching notebooks. The air was thick with a pilgrimage-like fervor.

Today was the first public lecture since the establishment of the Department of Physics.

The speaker was Sir Thomson, a Ninth-Circle Archmage.

He was a titan among the previous generation of mages and one of the founders of the spell system for the Thermodynamic school.

Though nearly ninety, he remained energetic and sharp.

Lia and Klein sat in a private box on the second floor, which offered an overhead view of the entire auditorium.

When the white-haired elder stepped onto the podium, the room erupted in thunderous applause.

Sir Thomson pressed his hands down, signaling for silence.

His voice was aged but full of vigor, echoing beneath the massive dome via an amplification array.

“Children, colleagues.”

“Standing here and looking at your young faces, my heart is filled with envy, yet also with relief.”

“Envy because you were born in the best of times. Relief because this era was paved by my generation through countless days and nights of calculations and experiments.”

The old man paced on the podium, his staff tapping the ground with a crisp sound.

“Look at our world as it stands now.”

“Dynamics has matured; the laws of stellar motion tell us how celestial bodies operate. The laws of thermodynamics tell us how energy is converted. And recently, those brilliant Maxwell’s Equations have perfectly unified electricity and magnetism.”

At this point, he offered a slight bow toward Lia’s direction on the second floor.

The gaze of the entire audience followed, filled with reverence.

Lia politely bowed back.

Sir Thomson continued, his tone growing impassioned.

“This grand edifice named ‘Physics’ is essentially complete! Its foundation is indestructible, and its pillars are flawless.

The world before our eyes is like a precision clock; the engagement of every gear is clearly visible, and every oscillation is within our grasp.”

“Whether it be the stars in the heavens or the dust on the ground, all follow the formulas we have written.”

“Future physicists, your task will no longer be to find new laws, for there are no more new laws to be found.

What you must do is merely measure the data behind the decimal point with greater precision—even if it is to the sixth or seventh decimal place…”

A burst of knowing laughter erupted in the auditorium.

It was the laughter of confidence, the laughter of victors.

Everyone was immersed in this illusion of omniscience and omnipotence, as if the truths of the universe had already been tucked into their pockets, leaving only minor chores of patching and mending.

However, the old man on the podium changed his tone.

“But.”

The moment those words were uttered, the air in the auditorium froze.

Sir Thomson’s expression became serious, even somewhat puzzled. He extended two fingers, gesturing in the empty air.

“In the sky above this magnificent, bright, and nearly perfect edifice, there are still two small clouds obscuring our vision.”

“Two tiny, unremarkable clouds.”

Lia’s fingers instinctively gripped the armrest.

This moment was exactly like that other moment in her past life.

“The first cloud,” Sir Thomson said, “concerns the null result of the Aether drift experiment.

No matter how we measure it, the speed of light seems constant in any direction.

This contradicts our classical velocity addition formula. Does the Aether—this medium for light propagation—truly exist?”

The mages below whispered among themselves.

Indeed, this was a headache-inducing problem, but most believed it was merely due to the insufficient precision of the measuring instruments.

“The second cloud,” the old man’s voice dropped slightly lower,

“concerns the energy distribution of blackbody radiation. When we apply the laws of thermodynamics to high-frequency radiation, the theoretically calculated energy is actually infinite. This is clearly absurd. We call it—the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.”

The auditorium grew even quieter.

These two problems were like two cracks on a perfect marble floor.

Though small, they truly existed, leaving one feeling unsettled.

“However,” Sir Thomson quickly regained his optimistic smile,

“I believe these are merely temporary troubles. Perhaps we need to revise the elasticity coefficient of the Aether, or add a correction term to the thermal radiation formula.

These clouds will eventually be dispersed, and the blue sky of Physics will remain forever clear.”

Thunderous applause broke out again, even more enthusiastic than before.

People cheered, celebrating this Golden Age of reason.

Lia looked at the old man smiling amidst the flowers and applause.

She knew what was hidden within those two clouds.

Inside the first cloud lay Relativity.

It would shatter absolute time and space, telling the world that spacetime can be warped.

Inside the second cloud lay Quantum Mechanics.

It would shatter the certainty of causality, telling the world that if God exists, then He truly does play dice.

This “Edifice of Physics” that Sir Thomson took such pride in was about to be leveled in the near future by the storm triggered by these two clouds.

Then, upon the ruins, a new world—even more magnificent and inconceivable—would be built.