The Redemption of Time (The Three-Body Problem Series Book 4)

by Baoshu

empyrean.

empyrean /emˈpirēən ˌempəˈrēən / empyreal I. adjective belonging to or deriving from heaven. II. noun — (the empyrean) 1. heaven, in particular the highest part of heaven. 2. ‹literary› the visible heavens; the sky. – origin late Middle English (as an adjective): via medieval Latin from Greek empurios, from en- ‘in’ + pur ‘fire.’ The noun dates from the mid 17th cent.

susurrating

susurrate /ˈso͞osəˌrāt/ I. verb — [no obj.] 1. ‹literary› (of leaves, wind, etc.) make a whispering or rustling sound • the grass susurrated underfoot. – origin early 17th cent.: from Latin susurrat- ‘murmured,’ from the verb susurrare, from susurrus ‘whisper.’

elided

elide /ēˈlīd/ I. verb —[with obj.] 1. omit (a sound or syllable) when speaking (as adj. elided) •the indication of elided consonants or vowels. 2. join together; merge •whole periods of time are elided into a few seconds of screen time •[no obj.] the two things elided in his mind. – origin mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘annul, do away with,’chiefly as a Scots legal term): from Latin elidere ‘crush out,’from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’+ laedere ‘to dash.’/ usage: The standard meaning of the verb elide is ‘omit,’most frequently used as a term to describe the way that some sounds or syllables are dropped in speech, e.g., in contractions such as I'll or he's. The result of such omission (or elision) is that the two surrounding syllables are merged; this fact has given rise to a new sense, with the meaning ‘join together, merge,’as in the two things elided in his mind. This new sense is now common in general use.

psychomachia,

The Psychomachia (Battle of Spirits or Soul War) is a poem by the Late Antique Latin poet Prudentius, from the early fifth century AD. It has been considered to be the first and most influential "pure" medieval allegory, the first in a long tradition of works as diverse as the Romance of the Rose, Everyman and Piers Plowman; however, a manuscript discovered in 1931 of a speech by the second-century academic skeptic philosopher Favorinus employs psychomachia, suggesting that he may have invented the technique. In slightly less than a thousand lines, the poem describes the conflict of vices and virtues as a battle in the style of Virgil's Aeneid. Christian faith is attacked by and defeats pagan idolatry to be cheered by a thousand Christian martyrs. The work was extremely popular, and survives in many medieval manuscripts, 20 of them illustrated. It may be the subject of wall paintings in the churches at Claverley, Shropshire, and at Pyrford, Surrey, both in England. In the early twelfth century it was a common theme for sculptural programmes on façades of churches in western France, such as Aulnay, Charente-Maritime. The word may be used more generally for the common theme of the "battle between good and evil", for example in sculpture. The duality portrayed in the book was the first of its kind to depict the different moral realms humans are battling within themselves. It was the first time one got to read how all are participating in the war of the soul, because Vice and Virtue both live within them and their decisions and actions determine the outcome of the conflict.

Bianliang of Along the River During the Qingming Festival,

Zhang Zeduan Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Qingming Shanghe Tu) is a handscroll painting by the Song dynasty painter Zhang Zeduan (1085–1145) and copied many times in the following centuries. It captures the daily life of people and the landscape of the capital, Bianjing (present-day Kaifeng) during the Northern Song. The theme is often said to celebrate the festive spirit and worldly commotion at the Qingming Festival, rather than the holiday's ceremonial aspects, such as tomb sweeping and prayers. Read right to left, as a viewer unrolled it, successive scenes reveal the lifestyle of all levels of the society from rich to poor as well as economic activities in rural areas and the city, and offer glimpses of period clothing and architecture. The painting is considered to be the most renowned work among all Chinese paintings, and it has been called "China's Mona Lisa." As an artistic creation, the painting has been revered and artists of subsequent dynasties made hundreds of replicas, copies of copies, and even forgeries of well-regarded copies, each following the overall composition and the theme of the original but differing in detail and technique. Over the centuries, the Song original was kept by private collectors before it eventually returned to public ownership. The painting was a particular favorite of Puyi, China's Last Emperor, who took it with him when he was forced to leave the Forbidden City in 1924. It was recovered in 1945 and kept at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City. The Song's original and later versions are regarded as national treasures and are exhibited only for brief periods every few years. The Song original The original painting is celebrated as the most famed work of art from the Song dynasty. However, little was directly known about its painter, who is generally presumed to be Zhang Zeduan, since records were destroyed when the Jin dynasty overthrew the Northern Song dynasty. There is continued debate and research over its creator, the date and location of where it was painted, and the intended meaning of the work. The earliest attribution to Zhang Zeduan is an inscription dated 1186, which was added on the basis of an earlier catalogue by the Jin imperial curator, Zhang Zhu (active late 12th century) to the original scroll:

Yangtze River,

Tanggula Mountains.

li,

Li (Chinese: 里, lǐ, or 市里, shìlǐ), also known as the Chinese mile,[citation needed] is a traditional Chinese unit of distance. The li has varied considerably over time but was usually about one third of an English mile and now has a standardized length of a half-kilometer (500 meters or 1,640 feet or 0.311 miles). This is then divided into 1,500 chi or "Chinese feet". The character 里 combines the characters for "field" (田, tián) and "earth" (土, tǔ), since it was considered to be about the length of a single village. As late as the 1940s, a "li" did not represent a fixed measure but could be longer or shorter depending on the effort required to cover the distance. There is also another li (Traditional: 釐, Simplified: 厘, lí) that indicates a unit of length 1⁄1000 of a chi, but it is used much less commonly. This li is used in the People's Republic of China as the equivalent of the centi- prefix in metric units, thus limi (厘米, límǐ) for centimeter. The tonal difference makes it distinguishable to speakers of Chinese, but unless specifically noted otherwise, any reference to li will always refer to the longer traditional unit and not to either the shorter unit or the kilometer. This traditional unit, in terms of historical usage and distance proportion, can be considered the East Asian counterpart to the Western league unit. However, English league commonly means "3 miles". Based upon the etymology of English mile from Latin mīlle ("1,000") abbreviating mīlle passūs ("1,000 paces"), Victor Mair coined the neologism "tricent" ("300 [paces], about a third of a mile") to translate li as a unit of distance.

Jiangnan region,

Wu topolect

Jiankang, the City of Stones

Every moment brought him a nearly infinite amount of information, like that infinitely complicated glowing figure in which a grand meaning contained within it smaller understandings, and each smaller understanding was made up of even smaller significations.

But intelligence in this universe has devolved far too quickly, and you can receive ideabstractions only with great difficulty.

the year 1453, Constantinople fell to the forces of the Ottoman Empire, thereby extinguishing the Eastern Roman Empire, which had lasted more than a thousand years. As the fortress of Europe fell, the entire continent trembled before the might of the Ottoman invaders. “No one at the time could have thought that this tragedy would turn out to be the catalyst for the rebirth of Europe and the beginning of modern civilization. Many scholars from Constantinople fled to Western Europe, bringing with them the best that Hellenistic-Roman culture had to offer and facilitating the start of the Renaissance. Also, since the Ottoman Empire lay between Europe and Asia, European merchants had to find new ways to travel to India and China, thereby opening the Age of Exploration. Only a century later, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English explorers had already circumnavigated the globe, creating in the process a new civilization capable of wonders that would have been unimaginable to the Romans, let alone the denizens of the Middle Ages.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

MSG I need to emphasize, friends, that our natural, earthy lives don’t in themselves lead us by their very nature into the kingdom of God. Their very “nature” is to die, so how could they “naturally” end up in the Life kingdom?

“I am nothing more than a program created by the Master, and you are my master.” Sophon was finished with the tea ceremony and presented a cup to him with both hands. “This is why I can speak to you using your language, but the Master can only communicate with you through ideabstractions.”

The Lurker is capable of altering the gravitation configuration within a galaxy and, by manipulating Cherkoff forces, cause all the stars to rapidly fall into the center of the galaxy, where the Steffankin effect results in a supermassive black hole that is capable of deforming space to penetrate the barriers between universes. The energy is then directed against the supermembrane for the transuniversal strike.

“The Master lives somewhere on the supermembrane beyond the grand universe. If the Lurker found out the coordinates of the Master, the Lurker would be able to destroy it. Similarly, the Lurker is concealed in the depths of the grand universe. If the Master discovered its location, it would also be able to eliminate the Lurker. Am I right?” “Yes,” said Sophon. “However, if either side made a mistake and launched an ill-aimed strike, the error would reveal the attacker’s location to the other side, thereby leading to its own destruction. And thus we have a stalemate.” “Exactly,” said Sophon. “So the dark forest state does exist, though not at the level of billions of civilizations who are strangers to one another, but at the level of two opponents who are intimately familiar with each other.”

“The ten-dimensional universe was a world of light. The entire universe was constructed upon energy exchange between photons. All particles and antiparticles were formed from photons, and their mutual annihilation resulted in yet more photons. Thus, everything occurred at the speed of light, which was infinite. Even more marvelously, because particles and antiparticles balanced each other out, the total energy level of the universe was zero. This was an incredible state of symmetry, and the foundation of the emergence of intelligence in the ten-dimensional universe.” Matter, life, sentience, civilization … in this Edenic universe, everything was part of the same whole. All matter possessed life, and all life possessed sentience, and all sentience existed in a state of harmonious civilization. Unlike the three-dimensional universe, in which lonely stars hung in the vast emptiness of space, the entire universe was a living being. All life was but a part of this one grand Life, and all intelligence but a component of the highest Intelligence. The dark forest state was an impossibility for this transcendent being of unified matter and spirit.

“The Master is not an individual like a human being; rather, it is the sum of an infinite number of self-aware consciousnesses. Every consciousness shares the awareness of every other consciousness as well as the presence of the universe itself, and yet each possesses an independent will. This is a state of existence simply unimaginable by humans: individual presence absolutely, seamlessly harmonized with the universe, akin to the geometric construction of the Spirit you saw.”

Hesiod’s Theogony,”

The Theogony (Greek: Θεογονία, Theogonía, Attic Greek: [tʰeoɡoníaː], i.e. "the genealogy or birth of the gods") is a poem by Hesiod (8th–7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, composed c. 730–700 BC. It is written in the Epic dialect of Ancient Greek and contains 1022 lines. Hesiod's Theogony is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the cosmos. It is the first known Greek mythical cosmogony. The initial state of the universe is chaos, a dark indefinite void considered a divine primordial condition from which everything else appeared. Theogonies are a part of Greek mythology which embodies the desire to articulate reality as a whole; this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first later projects of speculative theorizing. Further, in the "Kings and Singers" passage (80–103) Hesiod appropriates to himself the authority usually reserved to sacred kingship. The poet declares that it is he, where we might have expected some king instead, upon whom the Muses have bestowed the two gifts of a scepter and an authoritative voice (Hesiod, Theogony 30–3), which are the visible signs of kingship. It is not that this gesture is meant to make Hesiod a king. Rather, the point is that the authority of kingship now belongs to the poetic voice, the voice that is declaiming the Theogony.

“Just as Chronos split the heavens from earth, time divided the universe, and destroyed the eternal, changeless being that was the ten-dimensional universe. After that, all civilizations had to exist within the limits of time and space. The universe became the infinite unknown. With time came hope, anticipation, surprise, remembrance, oblivion … and above all, freedom.”

True life could only exist in the cruel and severe dark forest; death was the required condition for life. “That is why the Master must stop it!” Sophon brought the conversation back on track. “The Lurker is insane. It wants to sacrifice the entire universe on the altar of time. If the universe is reduced to zero dimensions, nothing can be done. By then there will be no life or intelligence. And even if anything could exist in such a universe, it would be stuck in infinite time.

indurate

pliant

But if we restrict the domain to physics, time’s solidification can be read as a description of the dimensionalization of time. In other words, it was the process by which time became … time.” “Isn’t time fundamentally a dimension?” asked the King. “No. Time itself is not a dimension, but a form of energy distribution. Scientists had long since realized that the dimensionalization of time is a compensation for the universe’s dimensional differential.” “What’s dimensional differential?” “The only balanced state for the universe is in ten dimensions. When the number of dimensions has been reduced below that, the curling up of certain dimensions into the quantum realm ruptures the balance between matter and energy and leads to the mutual annihilation of particles and antiparticles. The disturbance in the total energy in the universes leads to the separation of energy and gravity, which must be balanced by the transformation of time.”

“Scientists believe that the universe’s initial state is ten-dimensional, but it is in the process of collapsing into ever fewer dimensions. Each collapse leads to a dramatic imbalance between matter and energy, leading to space constantly expanding in the remaining dimensions. Since energy is unevenly distributed in the expanded universe, the high-entropy universe becomes low-entropy, which leads to directed transformation going from a low-entropy state back to a high-entropy state. This is the meaning of time.”

“Are you saying that there was no time in the ten-dimensional universe?” Singer asked. “That is not an easy question to answer. The ten-dimensional universe was changeless, and so it could be described as lasting but an instant or for eternity. All we can say is that it had no time as we understand the concept.”

Time was the Creator’s greatest gift. Time gave rise to life and everything that accompanied it. Time frustrated the ambition of tyrants who wished to conquer the universe and ground them into dust, and gave countless embryonic civilizations the space necessary to evolve and flourish. The only things sacrificed on the altar of time were dimensions—and the Exiled God of Death.

time is the Creator’s gift. Time made our rich and varied existence and society possible, but we had to pay a price for this gift: to be bound up in time. We had to submit to death and destruction. From the coddled interior of an eternal existence, we were pulled to the edge, where we must live and die in time. We are neither of existence nor of nonexistence, but always in a state of growth and change, ending with death.”

“Outside this universe, there are nine other universes. This life is at an end, but no one knows about the life to come.”

sky calyx.

Generative AI is experimental. Info quality may vary. The calyx is the outermost whorl of a flower. It is made up of leaf-like structures called sepals. The sepals protect the flower while it is developing. They are often the same number as the petals. The calyx and the corolla together make up the perianth, the non-reproductive portion of a flower. The corolla is the collection of petals. The word calyx comes from the Latin word calyx. It is derived from the Greek word κάλυξ (kalyx) which means "bud, calyx, husk, wrapping"

Byzantium

Byzantium /bəˈzantēəm bīˈzantēəm bəˈzan(t)SHēəm/ an ancient Greek city, founded in the 7th century BC, at the southern end of the Bosporus, site of the modern city of Istanbul. It was rebuilt by Constantine the Great in AD 324–330 as Constantinople.

fora.

Ananke.

In ancient Greek religion, Ananke (/əˈnæŋkiː/; Ancient Greek: Ἀνάγκη), from the common noun ἀνάγκη, "force, constraint, necessity") is the personification of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. She is customarily depicted as holding a spindle. One of the Greek primordial deities, the births of Ananke and her brother and consort, Chronos (the personification of time, not to be confused with the Titan Cronus), were thought to mark the division between the eon of Chaos and the beginning of the cosmos. Ananke is considered the most powerful dictator of fate and circumstance. Mortals and gods alike respected her power and paid her homage. Sometimes considered the mother of the Fates, she is thought to be the only being to influence their decisions (according to some sources, excepting Zeus also). According to Daniel Schowalter and Steven Friesen, she and the Fates "are all sufficiently tied to early Greek mythology to make their Greek origins likely." The ancient Greek traveller Pausanias wrote of a temple in ancient Corinth where the goddesses Ananke and Bia (meaning force, violence or violent haste) were worshiped together in the same shrine. Ananke is also frequently identified or associated with Aphrodite, especially Aphrodite Urania, the representation of abstract celestial love; the two were considered to be related, as relatively unanthropomorphised powers that dictated the course of life. Her Roman counterpart is Necessitas ("necessity").

“Niangziguan Power Plant.”*

The Niangziguan Power Plant is a retired coal-fired power station in Niangziguan, China. It has a capacity of 400 megawatts (MW). The plant is located in Pingding County, Shanxi. China has 3,703 coal power plants with a total installed capacity of 1,458 GW. China's dominant fuel source is coal. In the last month, China generated 14% more electricity from coal than it did in June 2022. This is due to a national campaign to expand coal mines and build more coal-fired power plants

Tianshan Mountains,

The Tian Shan, also known as the Tengri Tagh or Tengir-Too, meaning the Mountains of Heaven or the Heavenly Mountain or Mountains of God, is a large system of mountain ranges in Central Asia. The highest peak in the Tian Shan is Jengish Chokusu, at 7,439 metres (24,406 ft) high. Its lowest point is the Turpan Depression, which is 154 m (505 ft) below sea level. Quick Facts Tian Shan 天山, Highest point ... One of the earliest historical references to these mountains may be related to the Xiongnu word Qilian (traditional Chinese: 祁連; simplified Chinese: 祁连; pinyin: Qílián) – according to Tang commentator Yan Shigu, Qilian is the Xiongnu word for sky or heaven. Sima Qian in the Records of the Grand Historian mentioned Qilian in relation to the homeland of the Yuezhi and the term is believed to refer to the Tian Shan rather than the Qilian Mountains 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) further east now known by this name. The Tannu-Ola mountains in Tuva has the same meaning in its name ("heaven/celestial mountains" or "god/spirit mountains"). The name in Chinese, Tian Shan, is most likely a direct translation of the traditional Kyrgyz name for the mountains, Teñir Too. The Tian Shan is sacred in Tengrism, and its second-highest peak is known as Khan Tengri which may be translated as "Lord of the Spirits". At the 2013 Conference on World Heritage, the eastern portion of Tian Shan in western China's Xinjiang Region was listed as a World Heritage Site. The

Sino-American contest in the South China Sea

The United States and China have been involved in a geostrategic competition in the South China Sea. China's claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea, which is estimated to contain 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, have antagonized other claimants. These other claimants include Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The United States has not made any territorial claims in the South China Sea. The U.S. has urged that disputes be settled without coercion and on the basis of international law. The U.S. has also supported the Philippines in upholding the rules-based international order and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan) claim almost the entire South China Sea. Their claims are demarcated within the "nine-dash line". These claims overlap with almost every other country in the region.