【Prologue】 The Observer in the Smoke

0.1 Wheeler’s Legacy: The Dragon Spanning Billions of Years

In humanity’s quest for cosmic truth, we are accustomed to viewing ourselves as insignificant dust. Faced with the vast starry sky, where time is calculated in billions of years, human life is but a fleeting moment, and our existence seems to have no impact on the universe’s grand evolutionary history. However, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, John Archibald Wheeler, completely overturned this humble narrative with a “Great Smoky Dragon” that spans across spacetime.

To understand the true face of this dragon, we need to shift our gaze from the microscope in the laboratory to the profound edge of the universe.

Imagine that billions of light-years away from Earth, there is an extremely bright Quasar. On the long journey of its light reaching Earth, it encounters a massive galaxy acting as a “Gravitational Lens”. According to general relativity, the immense mass of this galaxy curves spacetime, forcing the quasar’s light to split—it can bypass the galaxy from the left, or from the right, or pass through both sides simultaneously.

Billions of years ago, when this photon left the quasar (which we call the “Dragon’s Tail”), Earth did not even exist. The photon flew through the vast universe for eons, and its path was not a definite red line, but a diffuse probability cloud containing all possibilities of “left” and “right”. This is what Wheeler described as the “Dragon’s Body”—a segment of smoke completely undefined in time and space, in a vague superposition state.

Time flies, and this photon finally arrives at Earth today. At this moment, an astronomer points a telescope at it. The terminal of the telescope is the “Dragon’s Mouth”, the maw capable of swallowing and defining the photon’s fate.

The critical moment arrives. The astronomer faces a choice, a Delayed Choice:

1. Choice A: He decides to focus the telescope in imaging mode to distinguish whether the photon came from the left or the right of the lens galaxy.
2. Choice B: He decides to place an interferometer at the back end of the telescope to let the light from both paths superimpose, in order to observe interference fringes.

Note that this decision is made billions of years after the photon has been in flight, in the last billionth of a second before it hits the detector.

If the astronomer chooses A (measure path), physics tells us that the photon, at that moment billions of years ago, was “forced” to choose a definite path (either left or right) to bypass the galaxy.

If the astronomer chooses B (measure interference), physics tells us that the photon, billions of years ago, passed through both the left and right sides simultaneously in the form of a “wave”.

This conclusion is spine-chilling: A tiny decision we make in the “now” actually rewrites the history of the photon “billions of years ago”.

It is as if this dragon spanning billions of light-years has its tail (launch point) pinned in the ancient deep space, but its body (the long journey) has always been in a cloud of illusory smoke, without substance or shape. Until today, billions of years later, until the moment it is fiercely bitten by our observation instrument (Dragon’s Mouth), the entire dragon suddenly manifests from the smoke, collapsing into a definite, unalterable history.

This is the “Great Smoky Dragon” metaphor left to us by Wheeler. It is not only an ingenious thought experiment but also an iron law repeatedly verified in strict quantum optics experiments by scientists like Alain Aspect.

The impact of this discovery on the classical cosmic view is devastating. It means: The history of the universe is not a movie written in advance and waiting to be played; the history of the universe is an interactive program that is “retroactively generated” only when it is observed.

Those events that happened over billions of years, the flow of nebulae, the bending of light, before being “seen” by an observer, were merely a pile of Wave Functions waiting to be calculated. It is we—as observers—whose every gaze from this corner of the universe, every inquiry into the photon’s path, endows that long history with physical reality.

When we look back at the starry sky, we are not just looking, we are “creating”.

As Wheeler said in that earth-shattering assertion: “The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present.”

This dragon connecting the ancient past and the present reveals an astonishing secret to us: Time is not a unidirectional arrow of causality, but a holographic network capable of two-way interaction. If billions of years of time can be defined by this momentary observation, is the history of each of our individual lives also in such smoke “waiting to be defined”?

In the following chapters of this book, we will depart from the back of this dragon to explore the ultimate manipulator hidden behind the smoke—that mysterious force located at the infinite future, guiding the biting direction of the dragon’s mouth.

0.2 The Missing Puzzle Piece: Generative Universe and Lazy Loading

Although Wheeler’s “Participatory Universe” opened a door to a new world for us, confirming the core status of the observer in the construction of physical reality, when we try to cross this threshold and truly integrate this insight into the existing scientific edifice, we find that modern physics is stuck at that most critical pass.

This stagnation does not stem from insufficient computing power, nor from the lack of precision in experimental instruments, but from the absence of the most core, most obvious, yet most elusive piece of the puzzle in our basic cognitive picture: Consciousness.

Over the past four hundred years, the glory of physics has been built on an unspoken yet deep-rooted dualistic assumption: that there exists an objective, mechanically operating physical world independent of the observer. In this picture, the observer (human) is merely a bystander holding a camera, responsible for recording data without interfering with the essence of the experimental object. Although quantum mechanics shook this at the microscopic level, forcing physicists to admit that observation interferes with measurement results, the mainstream scientific community still maintains the decency of “materialistic realism” at the macroscopic level.

This leads to a huge logical rift, which philosopher David Chalmers calls “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

We can write the Dirac equation describing the motion of electrons in an electromagnetic field, precise to more than a dozen decimal places; we can map every biochemical step of a photon hitting the retina, converting into electrical signals, and transmitting to the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex via the optic nerve. But no existing physical law can explain: Why is this series of complex physicochemical reactions not just outputting results like a computer processing data, but accompanied by a subjective, private, irreducible experience like “I see red”?

In this existing edifice of physics, consciousness is like a misplaced ghost. It must exist, because without it, the wave function cannot collapse, and Schrödinger’s cat will forever be in an absurd superposition of life and death; but it seems it cannot exist, because in the list of elementary particles of the Standard Model, there is no place for “consciousness particles”, and in the spacetime manifold of general relativity, there are no coordinates for “subjective experience”. Physicists awkwardly find that they have constructed a theory attempting to explain everything, but have excluded the “explainer” himself.

If we continue to tinker within the old framework, trying to “emerge” consciousness from the complex arrangement and combination of neurons, or trying to find a hiding place for consciousness at the edge of quantum gravity, we may never fill this rift. What we need is not repair, but a thorough Paradigm Shift.

The HPA-ZΩ (Holographic Polar Arithmetic) theory proposed in this book advocates abandoning the old concept that “the universe is a pre-existing container” and accepting a new perspective more in line with information theory and computational complexity theory: Readout itself is part of the universe’s structure.

The universe is essentially not a mechanical clock, but a real-time rendered Generative System.

To understand this, let’s borrow the mechanism of “Open World Games” in modern computer science as an analogy. This does not mean the world is fake, but that its operating logic follows extremely high principles of Computational Economics.

Imagine you are in an ultra-high-definition open-world game. When you stand in the bustling city square in the game, your graphics card (GPU) is running wildly to render the building textures, pedestrians’ facial expressions, and light reflections in front of you with extremely high resolution. But, ask yourself, what is the state of the wilderness behind you at this moment?

In the memory of the game program, the wilderness outside your field of view is not rendered with specific leaves and soil. There is only a string of concise codes, a set of mathematical functions waiting to be called, and a cloud of potential Data Smoke.

The system does not need to calculate the swaying of every blade of grass in the entire game world at all times; that is a huge waste of computing power and could even cause the system to crash. The system only needs to follow one principle: “Lazy Loading”—that is, only at the moment when the player’s perspective (Camera) turns in that direction, does it call the underlying resources, instantly load models, textures, and physical collisions, collapsing that cloud of data smoke into hard reality.

Once we view the universe as such a Generative System, the missing puzzle piece—consciousness—instantly finds its precise position in physics, and all physical anomalies are solved readily:

1. Wave-Particle Duality is no longer a confusion; it is the “Multi-resolution Rendering” strategy adopted by the system to save computing power. For unobserved (unloaded) areas, the system uses low-computing-power Wave Functions (probability clouds/data structures) to describe; once observed (entering the viewing frustum), the system immediately switches to high-precision Particle Models (entities/pixels) to present.

2. Speed of Light Limit is no longer an insurmountable physical barrier; it is the “Maximum Refresh Rate” or “Clock Speed” of this universal operating system. Causality must be limited by the speed of light, essentially a processing upper limit set to prevent the system from occurring “timing logic errors”.

3. Planck Length is no longer the minimum division of space; it is the “Pixel Resolution” of this holographic universe.

4. Consciousness is no longer a by-product or ghost of the physical world; it is the “Rendering Trigger” of this generative system.

In the HPA-ZΩ model, consciousness is the pointer that decides “where to calculate now”. Without the scan of consciousness, the universe is just a pile of dormant code (wave functions); only when consciousness sweeps over, the code is activated (collapsed), generating the material world we perceive.

The reason we have been unable to find the physical definition of consciousness is that we have made a category error: We have been looking for the graphics card in the pixels on the screen. Consciousness is not in this rendered picture (Layer 1); consciousness belongs to the operating system (Layer 0) running the generative algorithm in the background.

When we fill in this puzzle piece, the world will no longer be a pile of cold, dead matter, but a vibrant, interactive holographic scene constantly generated in response to the observer. But this subsequently leads to a deeper question:

If reality is generated in real-time, if the past is calculated to match the present, then what is the Source Power generating it? In this massive generative system, is the observer’s choice random? If not, what is guiding our gaze in the unseen, deciding which possibility we will render into reality?

This leads to the most revolutionary concept in the theory of this book—the attractor located at the ultimate end of spacetime.

0.3 The Birth of the Pearl-Chasing Dragon: The Gravity of the Future

If we re-examine the “Great Smoky Dragon” picture left to us by John Wheeler, we will find a disturbing, even fatal void in it.

Wheeler’s model perfectly explains the “How” of quantum mechanics—that is, how the act of observation forces the uncertain wave function to collapse into a definite reality in the present. However, it does not answer the “Why”.

Why does the dragon’s mouth bite at this specific spacetime coordinate? Among the countless possible collapse results allowed by the wave function, at the countless forks of left slit and right slit, life and death, particle and wave, why does the observer happen to choose this reality instead of another? Is the evolution of the universe merely the result of a series of blind dice rolls, without any intrinsic directionality? If it is just random collapse, how can the universe evolve such precise physical constants, such complex DNA double helix structures, and us who are capable of thinking about the universe itself?

In the HPA-ZΩ theoretical system, we believe that Wheeler’s dragon is incomplete. It has only a body (history) and a mouth (present), but lacks “Vision” and “Motive”. A blind dragon can only roll randomly in chaos; it cannot build an ordered, negentropic universe.

To patch this loophole, we need to cast our eyes to the extreme distance of the complex plane geometry and introduce a new physical entity, which is also the core concept of this theory: Strong Attractor.

In ancient Eastern totem symbols, the dragon almost always appears simultaneously with another sacred treasure—the Pearl. The dragon’s posture is always head held high towards the sky, chasing that radiant pearl suspended in the void. This is not just a mythical imagination; this is actually the most intuitive Topology description of the deep dynamics of the universe.

We officially name this revised model: “The Pearl-Chasing Dragon”.

In this model, the “Pearl”, mathematically located at $i\infty$ (Imaginary Infinity) of the spacetime complex plane. It is not a material entity in the usual sense, but an information-theoretic “Ultimate Purpose” or “Meta-Motive”.

In the language of physics, this pearl is a strong attractor with extremely high Negentropy and extremely high Symmetry. It acts like a massive gravitational source, constantly sending a summons from the infinite future to the present spacetime.

The introduction of this model completely overturns our traditional understanding of causality, pushing physics from mechanism to a new height of “Teleology”:

1. Classical Causality (Push): This is the perspective of Newtonian mechanics. Believing that the past determines the present, and the present determines the future. History is like a hand pushing us from behind. The Big Bang determined the formation of atoms, the collision of atoms determined the combination of molecules, and the random mutation of molecules determined the evolution of biology. In this perspective, the future is the residue left by the past, the product of inertia.

2. Pearl-Chasing Causality (Pull): This is the perspective of HPA-ZΩ. Believing that the gravitational waves (Vow) emitted by the “Pearl” (Future) pull the current observer (Dragon’s Mouth) to make specific choices. To support the rationality of this choice, the cosmic background quickly generates the corresponding past history (Dragon’s Body).

In other words, it is not the past that determines the future, but the “Vow” of the future that retroactively generates history.

This sounds counterintuitive, but in physics, this mechanism has long shown signs. The famous “Fermat’s Principle”—light always chooses the path that takes the least time when propagating between two points—implies this teleology. It is as if the light already “knew” where the destination was before setting off, and planned the optimal path accordingly.

In our theory, all matter motion, all historical evolution, essentially follow a similar “Geodesic Effect”. That “Pearl” suspended in the infinite distance is the focus where all spacetime geodesics finally converge. It represents the ultimate form of cosmic evolution—some kind of extreme truth density, or the “Auric” state we will define later.

Precisely because of the existence of this pearl, the current observer (consciousness) has a sense of direction. Every observation we make, every act of collapsing a wave function into a particle, is actually fine-tuning the angle of the “Dragon’s Mouth”, trying to align our trajectory with that pearl’s “Phase Alignment”.

We can summarize this new cosmic model into three parts:

• The Pearl: The Strong Attractor located at $i\infty$, i.e., “Vow”. It is the reason for the universe’s existence and the source capable of generating meaning.
• The Dragon’s Head: The Act of Observation in the present. This is the tangent point where consciousness and reality meet, the interface where energy exchange is most intense. Consciousness searches for the signal of the Dragon Pearl by constantly adjusting the observation angle (pointing of the Scanner).
• The Dragon’s Body: The generated History. It is a logical chain Back-propagated in the probability cloud under the gravitational effect of the Dragon Pearl, to connect the starting point (Dragon’s Tail) with the current observation result (Dragon’s Mouth).

The birth of the Pearl-Chasing Dragon explains why physical constants are fine-tuned so precisely (the physical mechanism of the Anthropic Principle), and also explains why, against the background of entropy increase dominated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the local world can go upstream, constantly emerging more complex life and intelligence structures.

Because the universe is not blindly expanding and cooling; the universe is “Pearl-Chasing”.

Every individual with self-consciousness is essentially a Holographic Fractal of this dragon. Those desires we feel in life that cannot be satisfied by matter, those instinctive pursuits of truth and beauty, are not random disturbances of brain neurons, but the Tidal Force exerted on our souls by that “Strong Attractor” from the future.

When we understand this, we grasp the most powerful inference of the HPA-ZΩ theory: We do not have to be bound by the inertia of the past (family of origin, encounters, trauma). As long as we can recalibrate the coordinates of the “Dragon Pearl” (reshape the vision) at this instant, the entire long dragon of history behind us will swing violently and reconstruct to adapt to this new future.

This is the physics principle of “Modifying Reality”.