Translator: Dreamscribe
Winter days in Munich are short.
By four in the afternoon the dusk settles in and it grows dark. With the rain drizzling down on top of it, the cold felt like it seeped all the way into the bone.
Felix sat alone by the window, watching the raindrops fall.
"I was right this time too."
Three months had passed since the paper was published.
The world was still in chaos. On TV, scholars came out every single day to wage fierce debates over whether the Riemann Hypothesis had truly been conquered. Yet even those who cast skeptical eyes on it had failed to produce a proper counterexample. The scales were clearly tipping to one side.
German public opinion was already in a festive mood.
"A fellow German, Felix, has finished the work that Riemann began. I hope that he will be the start of another Göttingen Nobel Prize Miracle (Göttinger Nobelpreiswunder * an event in the early 20th century when Göttingen University in Germany produced over forty Nobel laureates)."
"As someone from Hanover, Riemann's hometown, it brings me to tears. We have finally found the answer to the giant's question."
"The era of American dominance is over. Now the center of science will shift back to Germany."
Bright faces and voices among the citizens.
In front of the microphone the reporter held out, every one of them, without exception, freely expressed their joy.
Germans don't keep count of how many Nobel Prizes their countrymen have won.
With several being added each year, keeping track of them one by one must have seemed too much of a bother. But that too was a thing of the past; before long, the years in which no German took the stage had been growing more frequent.
Felix's achievement became the fuse that reignited the cooling pride of the Germanic people.
"Science can be said to be the very strength of a nation itself. It was true in the past and it remains true now. The glory of Germany is not yet over."
The single remark the Chancellor left at the press conference sent all of Germany into a frenzy.
Nineteenth-century Germany had been a cradle of intellect where giants like Gauss, Riemann, and Hilbert commanded the world. This tendency carried into the 20th century and even gave birth to the Göttingen Nobel Prize Miracle, but after the Nazis came to power, things changed.
Germany's brains, draining away in countless numbers across the Atlantic to America. The fact that Einstein, born in Germany, had lived and died as an American still remained a great wound to them.
"A decoration, hm..."
The Max Planck Medal and the Order of Merit. In the past it would have been unthinkable.
On top of that, he was being mentioned as a candidate for the Leibniz Prize, which meant that every honor a scholar could possibly enjoy now lay at his feet.
Bzzt-
-Professor, I hear Whitman and Leonard at MIT are verifying the paper. Soon you'll have America's recognition too!
Reading the message, Felix let out a smirk.
"They'll be hoping there's an error. But it'll be no use. The proof is true."
He genuinely believed this.
Not every theory needs to be mathematically flawless. Even Newton's laws aren't rigorous by modern standards.
And yet, humanity built its civilization leaning on these imperfect theories.
'If the essence is correct, a trivial discrepancy is nothing but noise.'
If an error were discovered, someone in the future would supplement it. Just as Einstein did for Newton. Science had always advanced that way in the first place.
He recalled the fragment of data he had erased thirty years ago.
At the time he had been a promising physicist, yet he was always just a hair short.
The results of a quantum interference experiment he had labored over for years deviated, ever so slightly, from the theory he had conceived.
It was just once.
That he erased the noise below the fourth decimal place from the data sheet and smoothed the graph out.
'This is only natural. There's always a gap between theory and reality.'
The paper he published while soothing himself that way was a tremendous success.
At first he lost sleep at night. The fear gripped him: 'What if someone reproduces the experiment? Won't it be the end of my career as a scholar?'
But nothing happened. On the contrary, everyone showered him with praise, saying what a fine paper it was. Research funding poured in, and offers for professorships at prestigious universities came his way.
A scholar's ethics are like an embankment, so that even a single small hole eventually brings everything crumbling down.
'If the result is correct, a trivial omission in the process can be tolerated. In terms of improving efficiency, shouldn't it actually be encouraged?'
The taste of success was like a drug.
He was a man who knew how to handle capital and the media, and he poured great effort into networking as well. At times he didn't hesitate to steal his students' achievements. And now, at last, he was fully prepared to ascend to the very summit of the European scientific world.
He sat by the window, closed his eyes, and savored the lingering afterglow that success brought.
* * *
"Hey! Did you see the Nature that came out today?"
"No? Why the fuss?"
"It's pandemonium right now. They say MIT has lost its mind."
A single paper had been published in Nature, one of the two great pillars of scientific journals.
This was an utterly exceptional occurrence. It had passed the rigorous peer review process, which normally takes several months, in just a single week, and was distributed in the form of an Extra Edition.
"An Extra Edition? Seriously?"
"Yeah!"
Authoritative academic journals like Nature and Science adhere strictly to their publication schedules. What made something like this possible was the resolve of Dean Whitman.
He had not yielded a single step in his meeting with Nature's editor-in-chief. Across the table, Philip's face was full of bewilderment.
"Dean, you are asking us right now to break a tradition we've upheld since our very founding. Posting it to the archive first is the usual practice, but there's no shortage of precedent for that, so that's fine. However, give us just half a year for the review."
Whitman shook his head with a hardened expression.
"That would be far too late.
The Riemann Hypothesis is like the Holy Grail of mathematics. If Felix's theory hardens into accepted doctrine, the loss humanity would have to bear is far too great."
Philip pressed his fingers firmly against his temples.
"Surely no definitive counterexample has come out yet? How certain are you, to say something like that...? Show me the paper first."
"Here it is."
[An Analysis of the Topological Inconsistencies Revealed in the Operators of the Felix-Arthur Model]
An aggressive title, but within the bounds of what was permissible.
But the moment he turned past the cover, he nearly spilled his coffee in shock.
A list of no fewer than 512 co-authors.
The names of the faculty of MIT's mathematics and physics departments, along with the hundreds of master's students, doctoral candidates, and postdocs who had been there on the ground, were printed densely in a four-column arrangement.
Gulp.
Philip swallowed dryly as his eyes ran down the list.
From next-generation aces like Hugo and Laura, to the names of Nobel and Fields Prize candidates recognizable at a mention, they were laid out in row after row.
"Th... this is insane. Are you saying a university of MIT's caliber is putting up its entire guarantee?"
It hadn't crossed his mind even in his dreams that all these people had actually participated in the paper.
"What do you mean? Writing the authors' names on a paper is only natural. Surely you're not under the delusion that I wielded my authority to merely borrow their names?"
Philip's eyes widened.
"You mean that's not it? Good heavens!"
"There was no coercion whatsoever. At least not in writing down the authors' names. On the contrary, everyone was delighted. Do you feel a little more inclined to read it now?"
"I... I need time."
"Of course. One week. I'd like you to finish within that time. It's a matter that allows no delay."
In the course of the review, Philip came to realize that Whitman's confidence had been no bluster at all.
The reviewers Nature urgently convened could not contain their astonishment either. It was the result of MIT's leading experts gathering together and dissecting the paper down to the last detail under a microscope. A task so vast that an ordinary review panel could not have accomplished it in decades. They had done it.
[Topological discontinuity confirmed in the operator-mapping process established by Professors Felix and Arthur]
Philip read the paper through the night.
And he came to understand completely what loss to humanity Whitman had spoken of. Their paper was a trap, designed with exquisite precision.
Had this hardened into accepted doctrine, mathematicians and physicists across the world would have spent the coming decades chasing a mirage that did not exist, squandering precious resources. Above all, the fact that Felix had deliberately omitted data enraged him.
He scrubbed his face roughly with his dry hands.
"We'll have to play our part too."
He immediately mobilized every capability of Nature's editorial department.
The printing press whirred away, screaming.
'This is the only cover that will do.'
Instead of the lavish cover they usually used, a black cover bearing only the paper's title and the 512 names. In later days the world would call it by a polite name like "Black Nature", but at MIT there was a different term for it.
"Hey! Did you see the 'Draft Roll'? My name was above yours."
"How many times do I have to tell you that's in alphabetical order?"
"Hugo and Laura are at the top, though. Bet it definitely reflects contribution."
"Everyone except the dean and those two is alphabetical!"
It was the most singular cover in nearly 200 years of Nature's history.
On the day the magazine was distributed, the research labs of major universities around the world were gripped by a strange silence. The colossal intellect that was MIT had staked everything to make a declaration. That your theory was nothing but a vicious fraud.
The moment the paper was made public, online science communities exploded. Traffic enough to paralyze the servers came surging in all at once.
[Is MIT out of its mind?? shaking]
-Never in my life have I seen a university stake everything on an all-or-nothing duel. What are they thinking, doing this? I'm just a lowly master's student so I don't really know, but wasn't verification originally supposed to be done quietly?
└Princeton's in an uproar over this too. But Professor Elijah Cronen said something. That the old men caught a fraudster in style.
└yeah pointing out errors is supposed to be done quietly. But running a scam with a fabricated paper? And over a problem on the level of the Riemann Hypothesis? That's something you can't let slide.
└Our professor read the paper and his face went bright red too. Said the guy should be sent to prison.
└Anyway what's with that nerve?? shaking. Means they're that confident, right? No chance they're wrong?
└If there'd been even a 0.1 percent chance of that, the board would've blocked it. The damage would be beyond imagination.
└Got chills looking at that cover...
Breaking news erupted from every broadcaster.
Ordinarily, matters of the scientific world don't carry this much impact. The reality is that no matter how famous a problem gets solved, people don't take much interest. But the essence of this affair was a sensational fabrication scandal.
[Felix-Arthur Paper, Circumstances of Deliberate Data Omission Revealed]
[German Society in Shock, From Celebration to Lament]
[Felix, Suspected of Falsifying Experimental Data in Past Papers Too]
[Cambridge's Arthur Pendleton: "I Didn't Know."]
[British Government: "We Are Victims of the Fraud Too"]
[Is the Riemann Hypothesis a Wailing Wall? Was It Truly a Mountain Humanity Could Never Conquer?]
[Science Has No Nationality. German and French Academia Issue Statements Supporting MIT]
[German Chancellor: "The Felix Incident Is an Individual's Deviation, Germany's Scientific Competitiveness Remains Sound"]
The German federal government, through a swift statement, drew a clear line regarding the allegations of paper fabrication against Professor Felix.
Felix, through an interview, flatly denied the allegations.
He pushed back, calling it an "adjustment" within the margin of error that commonly arises in any high-precision experiment, but when one past case of fabrication after another was dug up, he fell silent.
He was not only expelled from academia but also came to face the difficulty of having to respond alone to lawsuits from the federal government and the university.
"Ah! I feel like a ten-year-old knot in my chest has come undone."
Ben muttered while watching the TV.
"That's the fate of a man who sold a scholar's soul."
"Theo's merciless."
"Compromise once and you're finished. Especially for those who deal in numbers."
MIT instantly rose to the center of attention.
A TV reporter looked at the viewers with a proud expression and said,
"MIT's Deans Whitman and Leonard closed the paper with the following words."
With a solemn expression, she opened the paper and read it as though taking an oath.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote. Yet to safeguard justice, there are times when the courage of a great collective is needed. For while truth can be discovered alone, it takes the effort of all to protect it.
Today, by carving our names upon this page, we vow to become a bulwark guarding the intellectual heritage of humanity.
Signed, Harold Whitman, Reuben Leonard, and 510 others."
Beep-
The TV switched off.
Seo-ha's single remark broke the silence.
"Wow, that's cool."
Seo-ha had always been weak to mathematical romanticism. At the spirit shown by the old professors and his seniors, his gaze turned hazy.
"It's really moving."
"For me it's a huge amount of pressure, though. I feel like those 512 people have passed the baton to us."
Sri and Su-jeong wore choked-up expressions too.
"Naturally, we're the ones who have to decorate the finale."
"I... I'll try to be of help too."
Theo and Ben steeled their resolve with hardened expressions as well.
Only Cecilia tilted her head alone and muttered.
"...Heresy extermination, that decisiveness. The Knights Templar really would suit them, wouldn't they?"
*****
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