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A respected international physics organization that argues science is hitting a fundamental wall — and which serves, secretly, as the ETO's primary recruitment channel into elite scientific circles.
The Frontiers of Science is an idea before it is an organization: that the methods of science can be turned on science itself to discover where its limits are, and that those limits are no longer abstract — modern physics is producing experimental results so contradictory that the field is fragmenting. To outsiders this is a fashionable academic movement. To insiders, it is preparation. By the time a member is invited to log into the Three Body game, the philosophical ground has already been tilled. Ding Yi describes the organization to Wang Miao as a serious intellectual project that has been quietly captured. Its loudest members — Pan Han, Shen Yufei — are ETO. Its quieter ones are not, yet.
Has no headquarters; its presence is a network of academic conferences, journal special issues, and salon-style discussion groups in private homes and university common rooms. The salons are where the recruiting happens — comfortable rooms, good wine, very smart people, conversations that drift, very gradually, toward the question of whether physics has stopped working.
Also known as: FoS