There was an unusual duo at Princeton.
They were Paul Krugman and Professor Albert-László Barabási.
What made them unusual was not anything that had happened between them, but rather how difficult their research topic was for ordinary people to understand. Even the forward-thinking President Isgroob had merely given them an indescribable look after hearing about it, offering no comment.
The story of how they had met was also full of unexpected twists.
It had begun with an exchange of business cards at a dinner following an academic conference. Later, while discussing the grand question of where humanity would go in the future, they had unexpectedly found themselves in agreement, leading to the idea of "using mathematical models to quantitatively analyze this evolutionary process."
As it happened, one was an economist passionate about the natural sciences, while the other was a physicist passionate about sociology. Their respective specialties complemented each other perfectly.
Although they had regrettably failed to recruit Lu Zhou to work with them on that mathematical model for predicting the future back in Saint Petersburg, neither had given up pursuing this direction, even without the help of the world's finest mathematician.
Though, so far, their research had made little discernible progress...
In a café near the teaching building.
As usual, the two sat across from each other, enjoying afternoon tea while discussing recent events through topics that were difficult to follow.
"...For high-speed interstellar travel, relativity dictates that time dilation occurs between different reference frames. Suppose there are twin brothers, and one day the older brother boards a spaceship for a long-distance journey to Alpha Civilization, while the younger brother stays on Earth. When the older brother returns to Earth, we'll find that he's younger than his brother who stayed behind... Is there anything wrong with that interpretation?"
Listening