Double Frustration

When quantum physicist Lu Chen's forty-seventh experiment fails, he discovers a state of matter that should not exist. When geometric frustration and dynamical frustration coexist, a third kind, “observer frustration,” transforms human cognitive dissonance into real quantum entanglement. But this state can only be experienced once. The moment you know that you know, it vanishes forever. An outcast with eight years of fruitless research behind him resonates across time and space with a pioneer who died thirty years ago, through the noise fingerprint of the golden ratio. Lu Chen gradually realizes that “failure” isn't the end of research, but research itself, and that he may be the product of someone's deliberate failure: an experiment, a universe. When abilities can be transmitted, memories become currency, and existence itself can choose to have “never happened,” Lu Chen faces not a scientific problem, but the question of how to die properly as a failure. “Don't trust symmetry. Trust broken symmetry.”