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Join the ServerLia’s fingers gently touched the ice-blue gem at her neck. Its cool touch calmed her chaotic heartbeat somewhat.
“With this, you can find me?”
“Mmm.”
Klein hugged her from behind, his chin resting on the top of her head.
“However, I won’t give you the chance to go far.”
His voice was low, close to her ear, carrying an unquestionable certainty.
Lia didn’t speak, but simply surrendered her weight to him, leaning against his embrace.
The evening wind on the terrace was exceptionally cool, but she felt very warm.
The river of stars in the night sky was a simulation created by Klein with magic, so magnificent it was surreal.
She looked at the slowly flowing band of light and suddenly felt that whether in her past life or this one, being able to see such a sight was a kind of fortune.
“Klein.”
“I’m here.”
“Thank you. Thank you for not asking about my origins, thank you for tolerating all my secrets, and thank you for being willing to see the truth of this world with me.”
Klein tightened his arms.
“Me too.”
***
A few days later, in the top-floor study of the mage tower, the magic crystal stones in the fireplace burned quietly.
Lia was lying on the carpet, a huge piece of parchment spread out before her. On it was a partial structural diagram of the circular track of the particle accelerator.
She held a charcoal pencil, occasionally making corrections and calculations on it.
Klein sat on the sofa not far away, flipping through the latest issue of “On Magic.”
The room was very quiet, with only the soft scratching of the charcoal pencil on the paper.
“Lia.”
Klein’s voice broke the silence.
Lia didn’t look up, continuing to adjust the angle of a rune node.
“There’s a paper in here.”
Klein put down the journal, his brow slightly furrowed.
“From the Southern Sky Observatory, written by a mage named Hermann. It’s an observation report on a binary star system.”
Lia’s pencil stopped, and she looked up.
“A binary star system?”
“Yes,” Klein explained. “Two stars orbiting each other at a very high velocity. He calculated their speeds by observing the spectral changes when one star was eclipsed by the other.”
“Is there a problem?” Lia quickly sat up and dusted her hands.
She was a little expectant, wondering if someone had discovered the anomaly.
“The problem is with the light.” Klein picked up the journal, walked over to her and sat down, pointing to a set of data. “Hermann mentions a phenomenon in his paper that he can’t understand.”
“When one of the stars is moving towards us at high speed, the speed of light he measured is exactly the same as the speed of light he measured when that star was moving away from us at high speed.”
Lia looked at the data and said nothing.
“This is contrary to common sense,” Klein’s voice was filled with confusion.
“Speeds should be additive. Like throwing a ball forward on a speeding carriage, the ball’s speed relative to the ground should be the speed of the carriage plus the speed at which the person throws the ball. Why is light an exception?”
“Perhaps there was an error in the observation?” Lia suggested a possibility.
“Hermann ruled out that possibility in his paper. He repeated the measurement three times using different methods, and the results were the same.
He thinks it might be some unknown property of the ‘aether’ that is affecting the propagation of light.”
Klein shook his head. “But we both know that the aether doesn’t exist.”
The study fell silent again.
This was a dead end. An observation that could not be explained by existing theories.
“What if…”
Lia began, her voice a little hesitant, as if she were organizing an immature idea. “What if Hermann’s observation is not wrong, and our understanding of velocity addition is also not wrong?”
“Then where is the problem?”
“Could it be that a foundation we take for granted, something we’ve never doubted, is itself wrong?” Lia looked into Klein’s eyes.
Klein’s gaze became focused.
“For example?”
“For example, time,” Lia said the word.
Klein was stunned.
“Time?”
“We have always assumed that time is absolute, that it flows uniformly, and that for any corner of the universe, for any person, the length of a second is exactly the same,” Lia said slowly. “But what if this premise is wrong?”
“What if the rate at which time flows is itself variable?”
Klein didn’t immediately refute it. He stood up and paced back and forth in the room. Lia’s words were like a stone that had cast violent ripples on the calm lake of his cognition.
“Absurd.”
He finally said the word, but his tone was not as firm as he had imagined. “How can time be variable? My clock and your clock, as long as they are calibrated, should run at the same speed.”
“When at rest, yes,” Lia said. “But what if you are in high-speed motion?”
She stood up and walked in front of him.
“Let’s go back to Hermann’s observation. Let’s assume there is a more fundamental law, and that is, the speed of light is constant.
Whether you are standing on the ground or sitting on a maglev train traveling at several hundred kilometers per hour, the speed of light you measure will always be the same value.”
“If the constancy of the speed of light is the absolute truth…” Klein’s steps halted. He looked at Lia, a storm gathering in his blue eyes. “Then in order to maintain this constancy, something else must change.”
“Speed equals distance divided by time,” he muttered to himself, as if deriving a crazy formula. “If two observers at different speeds measure the same speed of light, but the distance the light travels appears different to them, then…”
He shot his head up, his eyes full of shock.
“The time they experience must also be different.”
“The faster a person moves, the slower their time will pass relative to a person at rest.”
This conclusion made his own heart tremble.
This wasn’t physics; this was almost mythology.
“It’s just a conjecture,” Lia said softly. “A crazy idea born to explain Hermann’s paradox, with no evidence whatsoever.”
“But it is logically self-consistent,” Klein continued, his breathing a little rapid, not from fear, but from excitement.
“If this is true…”
He looked at Lia. “This will be a more thorough subversion than the ‘collapse.’ It means that the entire edifice of classical physics is skewed from its very foundation.”
“But how do we prove it?” Klein fell into deep thought again. “This effect is too weak at everyday speeds to be observed at all.”
A faint smile appeared on Lia’s face.
She pointed to the huge drawing on the carpet, which was covered with complex runes.
“Everyday speeds won’t work.”
“But what if we could accelerate a particle to near the speed of light?”
Klein’s gaze followed her finger and landed on the blueprint of the accelerator, which represented the future and infinite possibilities.
He looked at the drawing, then looked up at Lia.
At that moment, he suddenly felt that the “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics” he was holding in his arms was perhaps just the first page of her vast ocean of knowledge.
You’ve got to see this next! I Was Summoned As a Vampire By The Magician will keep you on the edge of your seat. Start reading today!
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