Although he was curious about how Senior Brother Luo had exposed the cheater's scheme, Lu Zhou ultimately felt too awkward to ask for details.
As they ate grilled fish and chatted about this and that, their conversation somehow drifted from their plans for New Year's Day to the completely unrelated Riemann hypothesis.
"...I'm certain now that if we can solve the Riemann hypothesis, we'll discover the unknown secrets hidden behind the Riemann zeta function. Just thinking about it is exciting. Theories separated by centuries actually echo one another, as if the timeline had changed at some unnatural point!"
"Do you think it's possible that Riemann, who proposed the Riemann zeta function, actually came from the future? Otherwise, how do you explain why the pair correlation function of the eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices is exactly the same as the pair correlation function of the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function? There wasn't any quantum mechanics in the eighteenth century!"
Although Lu Zhou knew it was a joke, he played along with a chuckle and casually teased him.
"How do you know the history we're familiar with isn't the result of changes made by 'time travelers'? How do you know our past isn't actually a modified future?"
"The history we're familiar with is actually the result of changes made by time travelers... You mean the past we know is actually our future?" Turning those words over and over, Senior Brother Luo briefly fell into thought. Then he suddenly snapped his fingers, slapped his chopsticks onto the table in excitement, and looked up. "I've got a new idea! Once the New Year's holiday is over... No, I'll start working on it as soon as I get back."
His voice was so loud that the other diners turned to look at them.