Ma Zhao removed his rimless glasses from the bridge of his nose, and then pinched the weary sockets of his eyes, pondering the information in his mind. Suddenly, he swiveled his chair around to face Cao Ge.
"Mr. Cao, I don't understand, what's the point of these investigations?"
"Professor Ma, you've got me stumped, now I don't grasp what you mean?" Cao Ge said with a smile.
"Aren't these investigations or studies obvious? Every living being is made up of cells, then molecules, and molecules are made of atoms. Do we really need to go through such elaborate investigations to figure this out? Why would they waste their time and energy on something that is beyond dispute?"
"According to the worldview of your… 'game', combined with what I've seen so far, the technology of this world has clearly reached the level of an interstellar civilization. Are they seriously saying they can build spaceships, but they don't know that matter is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms? That's absurd," Ma Zhao asked, his face etched with confusion.
"Yes, why would they waste their time and energy on things that have been understood since the early stages of technological development?" Cao Ge mused to himself.
"Mr. Cao, I am the one asking you right now?" Ma Zhao questioned with a frown.
"Oh, my apologies, I got distracted," Cao Ge said apologetically.
"I have a rough understanding of the question Professor Ma raised, but I don't know much," Cao Ge continued.
"So, why are they doing this?"
Cao Ge glanced at Ma Zhao, then furrowed his brow. Instead of directly answering Ma Zhao's question, he began talking about something else.
"As far as I know, the humans on this planet seem to be divided into two factions. One mainly consists of the surviving humans in Elysium Space, their purpose being to establish a new human civilization on Danis Planet. The other faction is more mysterious. Officially, they are humans developed from the fertilized eggs in Elysium Space, but they seem to have their own agenda, and there appears to be a clear divide between this faction and the first one I mentioned. The researchers behind the documents you've just seen belong to this latter faction."
After Cao Ge finished speaking, Ma Zhao fell into deep thought. It was quite some time before he again asked, "Then, Mr. Cao, do you know what they are doing?"
"I have some idea."
Cao Ge said this and, without waiting for Ma Zhao to speak, he continued.
"Professor Ma, have you heard of the Farmer Hypothesis and the Shooter Hypothesis?"
Ma Zhao furrowed his brow, searched his mind, then shook his head.
Cao Ge nodded as if to say, if you had heard, it would have been a surprise.
"Before I tell you what they are doing, let me first explain what these two hypotheses are about."
"The first hypothesis, the Farmer Hypothesis, posits that there's a group of turkeys in a farm, and the farmer comes to feed them at 11 AM every day. One scientific turkey observed this phenomenon, and after nearly a year without exception, it also discovered a great cosmic law: food descends every morning at 11 AM. It announced this law to everyone on the morning of Thanksgiving, but instead of food descending at 11 AM that day, the farmer came in and slaughtered them all."
As Cao Ge spoke slowly, Ma Zhao listened quietly without interruption, but he still couldn't help frowning at some of the scientifically implausible parts.
"The second hypothesis, the Shooter Hypothesis, goes something like this: once there was a marksman who could always hit the bullseye with each shot, but one time, on a whim after hitting the bullseye with the first bullet, he didn't continue and instead moved around, creating a hole every 10cm across the target. Imagine if a two-dimensional intelligent species lived on this target, and its scientists, after observing their universe, concluded a great law: every 10cm interval on their world, there was bound to be a hole. They mistook the marksman's capricious act for an ironclad law of their universe."
After ten minutes, Cao Ge finished explaining the two hypotheses.
"Director Ma, now that the hypotheses have been presented, do you have anything to say about them?"
Ma Zhao frowned, paused for a moment, then looked up and said, "Mr. Cao, I have no interest in pseudoscience that cannot be proven or falsified."
"Mr. Cao, just say it directly."
With a slight smile, Cao Ge faced Ma Zhao's melancholic eyes.
"Then I'll just say it. They are like the turkeys on a farm, the two-dimensional creatures in the shooter hypothesis. They believe their world is fake and they want to prove it."
"What you mean to say, Mr. Cao, is that this group of digital beings believes they live in a created world, and so all they do is to prove this view."
"Roughly speaking, yes." Cao Ge nodded.
"Is there any meaning in that?"
"Let's set aside the fact that this world is created for now. Can characters in a game determine through their own judgment that they are in a game world, rather than the real world? What would their criteria for such a determination be?"
"That's like dividing by three, the problem will never be completely resolved."
"If they figure out this is not the real world, and that our world is the real one, who can guarantee that our world is the true reality and not something created by higher-dimensional beings?"
"This line of questioning will have no end; it will trap us in a logical loop without ever reaching clarity."
"Indeed, this is meaningless. For these digital beings, the game world is their reality," Cao Ge answered.
"Given the level of civilization in this world, they have no reason not to know Occam's razor principle, yet they still proceed like this. Why? Could it be that they have found some obvious evidence?"
"Mr. Cao, have you revealed the answer to them?" Ma Zhao suddenly thought of something, so he looked up at Cao Ge.
Cao Ge shook his head and said, "When setting up the game, I included a rule that any information about one's own world is not allowed to be disclosed."
"So, what made them fall into this logical loop?" Ma Zhao muttered to himself.
Cao Ge shook his head, indicating he didn't know.
"So, you're saying they constructed the particle collider also to look for evidence that this world might be fake?" Ma Zhao suddenly asked again.
Cao Ge didn't tell Ma Zhao the truth in response to this question.
Because they didn't build the particle collider to verify whether this world might be fake, but to ascertain to what extent this world could be real.
Through their investigations, the humans of Three-Body World had preliminarily concluded it was a world of incredibly high realism, with a terrifying level of restoration to the real world, nearly identical. This suggested that the world also contained various virtual particles, and they wanted to know if physical laws existed in the same way in the virtual world.