Chapter 144: The Quantum Demon

Beneath the dome of the grand auditorium, dust still swirled within the pillars of light.

There were only the muffled sounds of a few young apprentices suppressing their dry coughs in the distance.

Augustus sat in the judges’ stand, a quill in his hand snapped into two pieces.

On the stage, Lia was wiping the blackboard.

“Is it over? Does anyone else have questions?” Lia tossed aside the board eraser and patted her hands.

Augustus stood up, his kneecaps emitting a crisp popping sound.

“It is over.” The principal’s voice sounded ten years older.

The crowd began to disperse.

No one dared to shout, and no one dared to discuss the images they had just witnessed at this moment.

They walked in a hurry, as if some invisible monster were chasing them from behind.

Klein walked up to Lia’s side and handed her a handkerchief.

“Wipe yourself off.”

Lia took the handkerchief and wiped away a bit of chalk dust from her cheek.

“I’m a bit hungry,” she said.

“Let’s go back to eat.”

The three of them stepped out of the auditorium.

The sunlight outside was blinding, and it had not grown dim simply because the foundation of physics had cracked.

Adèle followed behind, still clutching the parchment filled with stick figures, her gait somewhat unsteady.

“Mentor…” Adèle spoke in a low voice, “That sphere just now…”

“Was it really all serrated?”

“Don’t think about it,” Klein interrupted her.

“But…”

“If you think about it, you’ll vomit too.” Klein’s pace did not slow. “If you don’t want to be carried into St. Mungo’s Hospital like those three old men, forget the images you just saw.”

Adèle shut her mouth and shuddered.

***

That night.

The largest printing houses in the capital were brightly lit.

The roar of machinery echoed throughout the entire night.

The next morning, countless owls obscured the sky.

They clutched urgently printed supplements of Arcane and The Truth Daily, delivering this spiritual poison to the windowsills of every Mage Tower.

[Debate of Truth: The End of Continuity]

[The Mental Breakdown of Three Eighth-Circle Masters: The Quantum Demon Bares Its Fangs for the First Time]

[Lia Farrien: The World Exists in Portions]

Lia sat at the dining table, holding a newspaper that still smelled of fresh ink.

“They write quite exaggeratedly.” Lia took a bite of her fried egg. “What do they mean by ‘Demon’? Am I a demon?”

Klein sat opposite her, drinking coffee.

“To them, yes.”

“I am merely revealing the truth.”

“Facts are sometimes scarier than demons.” Klein set down his cup. “Augustus just sent a message; Pairo has woken up.”

“Oh? So soon?”

“He’s awake, but he’s gone mad.”

Klein’s tone was flat. “He screams now whenever he sees anything round, and he won’t stop until he uses a file to grind edges and corners onto it.”

Adèle sat nearby, holding a fork, staring blankly at the sausage on her plate.

She made a cut.

The sausage broke apart.

“It’s broken…” Adèle muttered to herself. “It’s in portions…”

Lia tapped Adèle’s plate with her fork with a clink.

“Eat,” Lia said. “Sausages are macroscopic objects; don’t try to apply this theory to them.”

Adèle snapped out of it and stuffed a piece of sausage into her mouth with a bitter face.

“Lia, things are a mess outside right now.”

Adèle chewed her sausage.

“Over at the Alchemy Association, several old men can’t calculate the ratios for their extraction agents anymore because they can’t accept the setting that matter transmission is discontinuous.

They feel that if time is discontinuous, how can a reaction process possibly proceed smoothly?”

“Then tell them not to think about the process.” Lia took a sip of milk. “Only look at the result.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since they can’t accept the fragmentation of the process, tell them to act as if they can’t see it.”

Lia pointed out the window. “As long as the formula works and can calculate the result, who cares how it jumps in the middle.”

***

In the following days, the development of the situation was exactly as Lia had predicted.

After the panic came numbness.

Or rather, a kind of collective self-hypnosis.

The mages discovered that the damned Planck’s formula was indeed useful.

Using it to calculate the energy thresholds for high-level fire magic, the precision was three times higher than before.

Using it to derive the mana consumption of spells, the error was almost zero.

As long as one did not delve into the energy division represented by that constant h, everything was fine.

Consequently, a strange atmosphere spread through the academic world.

Everyone began to use the quantum formulas frantically, but when discussing the principles, everyone would fall silent or talk about something else.

“Did you calculate it?”

“I did, using that formula.”

“That formula… what was the principle again?”

“Don’t worry about it; it works, so don’t ask.”

This phenomenon reminded Lia of a paradox from her middle school days.

The Tower of Truth even issued an unwritten rule: in classes for apprentices below the Third Circle, teaching “Energy Discontinuity” was prohibited; only how to plug numbers into the formula was to be taught.

***

A week later.

The afternoon sunlight was somewhat lazy.

Lia was in the study debugging a communicator.

The doorbell downstairs rang.

“I’ll go see.” Adèle set down her test tube and ran downstairs.

She ran back up clutching a thick journal.

Introduction to Magic.

“This issue is so thick?” Lia glanced at it.

“Naturally. Everyone has been doing experiments frantically lately, trying to find a hole in your theory,” Adèle said, panting as she tossed it on the table. “But it seems no one has succeeded.”

Lia wiped her hands and flipped open the cover.

The first page of the table of contents was packed with follow-up studies on blackbody radiation.

She scanned them quickly.

Her finger stopped on a title in the middle.

Experimental Records on the Influence of Ultraviolet Light on Ionization Discharge.

Author: Hertz.

Lia’s finger paused.

“What is it?” Klein noticed her movement and walked over.

“I see something interesting.” Lia flipped to that page.

The article was long, and the illustrations were detailed.

Hertz described an unexpected discovery he made while playing with spark gap experiments:

When he used ultraviolet light to illuminate the metal electrodes of the receiver, the electric sparks became much easier to jump out.

In other words, light “knocked” the electricity out.

“What’s so strange about that?” Adèle leaned in. “Light has energy; it heats the metal, making the electrons active, so they naturally jump out easier. Thermodynamics can explain that.”

“If it were thermodynamics,” Lia pointed to a set of data in the article, “then the stronger the light, the more electrons should jump out, and the energy should be greater, right?”

“Of course,” Adèle nodded. “Like boiling water; the bigger the fire, the faster the water boils.”

“Then look at this.”

Lia pointed to a line of small text Hertz had recorded.

“When using red light, no matter how much the intensity is increased—even if the metal is heated to a red glow—no enhancement of the electric sparks was observed.”

“But as long as it is replaced with weak violet light, even if the intensity is extremely low, the sparks will jump out immediately.

Furthermore, the energy of the electrons has nothing to do with the intensity of the light; it only relates to the light’s frequency.”

Lia looked at Adèle.

“This conflicts with your model, doesn’t it?”

Adèle fell silent.

Hertz concluded his theory in the article as: the energy of light is determined by its frequency.

Hertz could not explain why this was the case; he simply recorded the phenomenon.

“Photons,” Lia said suddenly.

Adèle blinked, then looked at her. “Photons? Didn’t you say the propagation of energy is quantized and indivisible? Like ‘Energy Quanta’?”

Lia stared at Adèle.

“Because of the frequency,” Klein spoke up.

He looked at the experimental record, a spark of light flashing in his blue eyes.

“Red light has a low frequency; violet light has a high frequency.”

“Correct.” Lia picked up a quill and wrote the formula in the margin of the journal.

“If energy were a continuous wave, it would be like sea waves hitting a bank.”

Lia drew a wavy line. “As long as the waves are big enough, they can always wash stones down. If the red light intensity is high enough, it should be able to knock out electrons.”

“But right now, red light can’t knock them out.”

“Only violet light can.”

Beside the wavy line, Lia drew a bullet.

“Unless, light isn’t a wave.”

“Light is a bullet.”

Adèle’s mouth hung open.

“Bu… bullets?”

“A red light bullet has energy equal to h multiplied by a low frequency. This energy is too small to move the ‘stone’ that is an electron. Even if you fire ten thousand or a hundred million of them, you are only tickling the stone.”

Lia made a heavy dot on the paper.

“A violet light bullet has energy equal to h multiplied by a high frequency. This energy is high enough that a single one can blast an electron away.

This explains why it has nothing to do with light intensity and only relates to frequency. Because this is a one-on-one collision. One photon knocks away one electron.”

Silence fell over the study.

Only the flames in the fireplace occasionally crackled.

Adèle looked at the simple stick-figure diagram, feeling her worldview crack once again.

When Lia said energy was in portions before, she could barely understand it as “paying with coins.”

Now, light had also become individual bullets?

Then what about the Wave Theory?

What about the interference fringes?

“Then what about interference?” Adèle couldn’t help but ask. “If light is bullets, the bullets would either pass through or bounce off; how could they produce alternating light and dark fringes on a wall?”

“Good question. I don’t know either.” Lia closed the journal.

‘It’s not time yet.’

The scythe that was Wave-Particle Duality was being brought out a bit too quickly; it was liable to cut off one’s neck.

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