Chapter 115: The Road Ahead is Long and Winding

Since Hua Feng handed over the magnetic Eu stone to Lin Chong, they had parted ways. Zhang Sanfeng and Yi Chenzi returned to Wudang Mountain. Dan Qiusheng went back to Longhu Mountain to visit Master Zhang and oversee the daily affairs of the Chinese Taoist Practitioners Association and the One Qi Taoist Alliance.

Other members of the Flying Dragon Camp who came to provide support, along with Li Long, Wang Yue, and Shuang Ning, returned to Mount Lu to carry out new missions. Meanwhile, Bai Feng, Yun Meng, and Hua Feng remained in Nanjing as a three-person team on standby.

Three days had passed since their last parting. At this moment, Jinling City was as peaceful as ever. Hua Feng spent his days accompanying his parents and diligently cultivating the martial arts he had learned, leading a fulfilling and tranquil life.

At the Chinese Academy of Sciences, astronomers and physicists were reviewing material from over a century ago concerning Stephen William Hawking:

Stephen William Hawking was one of the most internationally renowned figures of this century, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, and one of the foremost contemporary experts in general relativity and cosmology. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, the most prestigious academic position in the history of natural sciences, following in the footsteps of Newton and Dirac.

In the 1970s, Hawking, along with Roger Penrose, proved the famous singularity theorem, for which they jointly received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1988. He was hailed as the world’s most famous scientific thinker and outstanding theoretical physicist since Einstein. His slim volume, "A Brief History of Time," captivated over 30 million readers worldwide. His black hole theory perfectly unified quantum theory and thermodynamics through "Hawking radiation," and his 1980s proposal of the no-boundary quantum cosmology addressed the centuries-old problem of the "prime mover" in scientific thought.

Hawking’s research laid the foundation for our modern understanding of black holes and the origins of the universe. Yet, as he himself noted, his appearances on the animated series "The Simpsons" and the sci-fi show "Star Trek: The Next Generation" were equally memorable.

In "The Grand Design," Hawking emphasized that the universe does not require a creator or "God," beginning with the assertion that "philosophy is dead," suggesting humanity should free itself from the bondage of ignorance. He rejected the idea that pure philosophy or religion could truly explain nature, positing that major religions are ancient spiritual systems exploring the unknown and seeking immortality and liberation rather than objective truths. As civilization advances, humanity must strive to keep pace; this explains why generations of visionaries have pursued the meaning of existence, life, and the universe. These questions were traditionally the domain of philosophers, but the rapid progress of science has outpaced philosophy’s ability to keep up. This is the essence of Hawking’s declaration that "philosophy is dead."

Hawking sought to unravel the mystery of the universe’s birth. In the 1970s, he applied quantum mechanics to explain black hole phenomena, but over the following three decades, explaining the entire universe with quantum mechanics became increasingly challenging. He aimed to find a theory that could perfectly describe the universe from its birth 13.7 billion years ago to the present, yet despite coming infinitely close, he never reached a definitive conclusion. According to his quantum mechanical theory, the universe originated from a Big Bang — an explosion of an infinitely compressed, ultra-dense matter with immense gravity. However, quantum mechanics cannot explain how this process unfolded or why it occurred. Hawking stated, "There must be a theory that describes gravity on a small scale."

The latest scientific breakthrough came from Hawking’s colleague Michael Green at Queen Mary University of London, who helped develop superstring theory, or "string theory." This theory describes all particles and natural forces as tiny vibrating strings, resolving the gravity problem Hawking had long sought to address. The theory requires the universe to have nine, ten, or even more than eleven dimensions, with the three-dimensional world humans inhabit possibly being just one membrane within the greater cosmos.

Countless scientists worldwide are conducting experiments in space and on Earth to prove string theory and thus support Hawking’s black hole and quantum theories. On January 24, 2014, the renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking once again shocked the physics community with a paper related to black holes, declaring "black holes do not exist," but "grey holes" do. In his paper titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," Hawking argued that since the boundaries of black holes cannot be found, black holes do not truly exist. This new theory was devised to resolve the "firewall" paradox by asserting the nonexistence of black holes, though not denying their physical reality.

The boundary of a black hole, known as the event horizon, is traditionally understood as a surface through which matter and radiation can enter but never escape. Hawking’s new "grey hole" theory suggests that matter and energy trapped within a black hole for a period are eventually released back into the universe. He admitted that his initial understanding of the event horizon was flawed, as light can indeed pass through it. When escaping from the black hole’s core, light behaves like someone running on a treadmill, slowly radiating outward and contracting. "Classical black hole theory states that no matter or radiation can escape a black hole, but quantum mechanics shows that energy and information can escape." Hawking emphasized that explaining this escape requires a theory that successfully unifies gravity with other fundamental forces — a challenge no physicist has tackled in nearly a century.

Hawking’s "grey hole" theory has garnered both support and skepticism. Theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in the United States pointed out that, according to Einstein’s theory of gravity, the boundary of a black hole does exist, though its distinction from the rest of the universe is subtle. In fact, Hawking made similar remarks as early as 2004. On July 21 of that year, at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, he stated that black holes do not "completely swallow" everything around them as previously thought; some information about matter drawn into black holes might eventually be released.

Yet, substantive progress on understanding space, black holes, and grey holes remains elusive. There is still much work ahead for humanity in these profound mysteries.