Abnormal crossing

Chapter 268 Rule Aggregate

Actually, a long time ago, or rather, from the moment I first learned about tower space.

A question lingered in Gu Wei's mind, like a cockroach tentatively probing its antennae beneath a cardboard box by the wall:

The world atop the tower.
What exactly is going on?
The 'termites' of the first civilization came from the upper levels of the tower, and the alien life forms were also products of the upper levels, not to mention the rulers who traveled along another timeline and would occasionally glare down at those below.
Therefore, it is not difficult to judge.

There must be a form of "civilization" existing in the upper levels of the tower, but
How many species do they number? And to which stage of civilization do they belong?
Is it independent of the civilization ranking system in this universe, or can it advance or even be replaced through development or other models?

before today.

Gu Wei had also searched for related terms on the Starry Sky Internet, but found almost no substantial information. The upper level of the tower was not a sensitive topic like the Tilanos Empire, the eighth-order civilization that had been evaporated. However, the search results were mixed, and there was hardly any reliable information.

Almost 99% of the content consists of various fabrications or amateurish conjectures.

Some even echoed the flat-earth theory proponents before Gu Wei's time travel, claiming that there was no upper space at all, and that the jump points were actually curtains hung in the universe by the Star Alliance, and so on.
The very few search results that mentioned Dominators and Descendants were largely the same as what Gu Wei already knew, offering no new insights.

Therefore, since the conversation had finally turned to higher civilizations, Gu Wei couldn't wait to voice this question.

“Oh, you’re asking about the upper levels of the tower?” Hearing Gu Wei’s question, Jin remained quite relaxed, yawning lazily. “Well, the upper space has always been a very cutting-edge research field, and the composition of alien civilizations is a core direction within it, even more important than the physical rules of the upper space.”

"However, exploring the upper space in this universe is not as easy as climbing stairs in reality. Over the years, countless scholars and exploration teams have ventured deep into the jump point, but let alone the results, very few have even returned safely."

"So far, much of the information about the upper levels of the tower is speculation or inference based on existing intelligence. To be honest, the accuracy may not be low, but there may be some degree of deviation—you should keep that in mind."

Gu Wei nodded in understanding.

The upper levels of the tower are a world where information can travel faster than the speed of light, and there are even two timelines. It would be extremely difficult for lower civilizations to explore them in depth.

“Of course,” Jin paused, then picked up Gu Wei’s potion bottle and took a big gulp: “Although many things on the upper levels of the tower remain mysterious, over the years, Xinghai has gained some information about the upper civilizations.”

"The alien race is the only known superior life form. Its racial structure alone is significantly different from that of technological civilizations—it is a conscious aggregate of rules."

Gu Wei was taken aback: "A collection of rules?"

What does this mean?
“Well, I’ll try to explain it in terms you can understand,” Jin looked at Gu Wei with the kind of care one would give a mentally challenged child, pondered for a moment, and said, “The upper level of the tower is a space completely different from this universe. In that space, information, energy, and matter are different aspects of the same thing.”

"Information exceeds the speed of light, energy exceeds the speed of light, and things themselves also exceed the speed of light—more importantly, that space is a conformal and anomalous high-dimensional structure."

Gu Wei's eyes widened immediately.

High dimension.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of various marketing accounts and some sci-fi novels, this term had become so ubiquitous before Gu Wei's time travel that it was now on par with quantum mechanics.

When in doubt, first explore higher dimensions, and then quantum mechanics will suffice.

When we talk about higher dimensions, it seems to be the perspective from which humans look at two-dimensional text or images.

But in reality, just as quantum mechanics is a very serious theory, the concept of higher dimensions is itself an extremely profound theoretical framework composed of mathematics and physics.

Many people are familiar with the first scientist to apply high-dimensional theory to physics—Edward Einstein is the one to whom most modern theories are inseparable from his work.

He successfully combined time and space, mass and energy using the Riemann metric tensor and established the connection between them.

Then, mathematician Kaluza boldly proposed the five-dimensional theory, combining relativity and electromagnetism. After continuous improvement by successors such as Klein, it eventually formed the Kaluza-Klein theory, a theoretical model of a high-dimensional space.

After the Standard Model of particles was proposed.

String theory emerged as a result and evolved into the 11-dimensional model of M-theory, a controversial model that is mathematically perfect but cannot be proven in theoretical physics.

The framework of the universe used by Liu Cixin in "The Three-Body Problem" is this thing, and as a result, many subsequent works only know what it is but not why it is.

Before Gu Wei traveled through time.

Edward Witten, the proposer of M-theory, also won the Fields Medal in 1990 and is considered by many in the physics community to be the most promising candidate theory of everything.

Whether this theory can ultimately be proven is another matter, but at least it is mathematically rigorous and complex, far more complex than the simple notion that "higher-dimensional beings see three dimensions as if they were looking at a comic book in three dimensions."

As for Jin's statement about the anomaly of the co-form.
Those who have read the obscure and poorly received novel "Walking into Unscientific" should know this.

In CFT, when quantizing the Witt algebra to obtain the Virasoro algebra, an additional constant term appears in the commutation relation.

Academically, this is called the central charge, or simply the conformal anomaly.

This is a problem involving infinity, and such an anomaly does not occur in classical mechanics.

The Bose string theory proposed by Alexander Polyakov and others was designed to avoid conformal anomalies, which resulted in a cosmological framework with as many as 26 dimensions—an exaggerated number that greatly reduced the credibility of the theory.

But according to Jin, while the upper space possesses high-dimensional characteristics, it actually allows conformal anomalies to exist?

It's no wonder this is a world so different from our own; even its physical framework is so uniquely distorted.
Huh, wait!

Conformal anomaly
Conformal anomaly?!
Suddenly.

A sudden thought struck Gu Wei, and he abruptly looked at Jin: "Holy crap, Jin, according to your logic, isn't the state vector of the upper space expanded at the identity element???"

“That’s right, you’re right.” Jin nodded, met Gu Wei’s gaze for a few seconds, then looked up at the ceiling, as if trying to see higher through the ship’s hull, her voice drawn out:

"For this reason, the mathematical basis of conservation laws and symmetries in the upper part of the tower is no longer a correspondence between Lie groups and Lie algebras. Generators are no longer related to physical observations, so many phenomena that are impossible or even unimaginable in this universe are everywhere in the upper part."

"For example, at some point in time that cannot be traced back, a powerful 'conceptual flow' [life] and [logic] collided in the upper space, ultimately resulting in a chance occurrence."

"A key mutation called self-awareness."

(End of this chapter)