I found a pattern in the numbers
It’s been a few months since I lost my job as a chemical engineer due to a disagreement with management. I called out a guy for lying and trying to blame me for why a recent drug launch didn’t go as planned. I guess truth matters more to me than consequences.
Since that happened, I felt done with people, done with corporate America. Done with liars. Done with people who get promotions by never disagreeing with anyone and by nepotism. So I fell into math.
There’s a purity to numbers and to mathematical proofs. Numbers never lie; they never suck up; they never stab you in the back. A proof is correct or incorrect. If you say someone’s proof is wrong, and it is wrong, then you’re not the bad guy.
Flipping through some old notebooks, I found one in which I had been writing my findings related to a famous, unsolved math problem—the so-called “3x+1” problem, AKA the “Collatz conjecture.”
The premise of the Collatz conjecture is simple. Pick a whole number greater than zero and less than infinity. If it’s even, divide it by two to get the next number. If it’s odd, multiply by three and add one to get the next number. Once you have the next number, keep repeating this process with each subsequent number. Eventually, one of the next numbers will be one, if the conjecture is true.
The sequence of numbers you get by performing this process, starting with some number x and stopping when you reach one, is called the “Collatz orbit” of x. For example, the orbit of 28 is [28, 14, 7, 22, 11, 34, 17, 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1]. If you make a circular tree graph of all the orbits, it looks like a Hillis diagram (evolutionary relations graph of life on earth).
Intrigued by this similarity, I started digging deeper into the Collatz problem. I discovered that when the conjecture first appeared on university campuses in 1937, it garnered little notice. After the war, the conjecture went viral in American universities. So many people invested so much time in failing to prove the conjecture that some began to suspect it might be a Soviet conspiracy aimed to slow down Western mathematical progress.
Most people seemed to assume that was meant as a joke, but being from Soviet Union myself and having heard the stories from those who experienced the gulag, this conspiracy seemed not like a joke at all, but very much like something the starving mathemeticians would have contrived in a sharashka for a piece of lice bread. The West has no idea, no concept whatsoever, of the insane lengths the communists went to, in order to undermine America. Anything you could dream of, worse than your worst nightmare.
Then I learned Collatz had also influenced the development of chemical graph theory, a somewhat controversial side-branch of my discipline, mathematical chemistry. We know that Soviet mathemeticians were far ahead of the West in the development of graph theory, and proper attention has never been given to those musty old Soviet papers written by prisoners.
So I decided to look into those old papers, to see if in fact there was something to this hypothesis about a conspiracy. However, I was not prepared for what I would find. I discovered that their goal was not to undermine the West by tying everyone up in researching an unsolveable problem, but to literally create monsters.
The communists did research that would make the German concentration camp experiments look like amateur hour. Their goal was to boil down the control of the human mind to science, to subjugate the will of mankind to the iron fist. And if they could not control it, then to make sure no one could. We have all heard of their infamous sleep experiment, but this is worse, because it was not forced on anyone. People chose it.
You, of course, understand that the human brain is made of chemicals, which are clusters of protons and neutrons surrounded by shells of electrons. The amount of electrons in each shell and the number of protons gives each element its charge, which determines how atoms bond and interact via the electrical force interaction. This is what gives rise to DNA, which codes for the molecules like proteins that are the building blocks of life.
The Soviets wanted to discover how to use thought patterns to control the chemicals being formed in the brain. Once you create these chemicals, then they mix together to form yet more chemicals. What do you think school is, if not a lab to manipulate your brain chemistry to cause the build up of reactions we call “knowledge” and “skills”? But the Soviets discovered other things that can arise from those chemical reactions.
Solving an unsolveable problem causes the brain to keep trying different combinations of chemicals. Eventually it walks farther back into the recesses of the DNA library and starts decoding ancient, long-dormant strands that modern science has no clue about. Then it begins.
It unlocks the primordial chemistry of a lost age when our distant ancestors survived a global cataclysm by living in caves. A weird thing happens in a flood: every type of living creature huddles together, but they don’t attack. You’ll see a huge wolf spider next to lady bugs and ants. They are all in an unwanted position, just hoping to be ignored. Ignored by what?
After all, what do you think happened to the other living things—the ones that were extra after Noah had collected a male and female of each kind into his ark? What happened to the millions of others? The Soviets unlocked what happened to them. It is us.
I am sitting now in a room filled with bloody bones and entrails in my cabin. There is nothing alive for 10 miles in any direction. I think perhaps I might be close to a proof.
