Chapter 1148 Experimental Data Released!

Inside a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

An old man was sitting in front of a wooden table by the window. He stared at an old computer as he typed on the keyboard letter by letter with his index finger.

A newspaper was sitting on the corner of the table. The newspaper was dated 2 weeks ago.

In the newspaper, there was an article regarding the heated tension of Brookhaven National Laboratory and its withdrawal from the ILHCRC.

Tens of billions of dollars in investment and dozens of countries partic.i.p.ated in this scientific research project. However, such a big problem occurred at the very beginning. Not only did this incident cause trouble in the physics community, but it also caused quite a lot of trouble outside of the physics community.

The old man felt a mix of emotions as he typed his email.

[… Physics should be an enlightened field, and we’re here today precisely because we respect all viewpoints. I cannot evaluate whether Lu Zhou is correct or not, but even if he is wrong, the academic community should not respond in an irrational way.

[… To summarize, it is definitely not a wise choice to withdraw from the experiment at this time. This is damaging both to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, as well as the physics community… I don’t know if there are any political reasons behind this, but no matter what the reasons are, we should not damage long-term collaboration relations.h.i.+ps.

[I hope you can reconsider your choices, maybe it’s not too late.

[- Peter Higgs.]

Peter Higgs.

An honorary retired professor of the University of Edinburgh, winner of the 2013 n.o.bel Prize in Physics, as well as the reason behind the well-known Higgs particle.

Even people outside of physics would have heard of his name.

The old man frowned as he looked up at the dark clouds outside his window.

Ever since he retired, he had gotten more and more sensitive to the weather. However, everything else had become duller. Especially the concept of time. When he got up every morning and looked at the calendar, he always forgot which day it was.

This was like the newspaper right in front of him.

When he finally read the newspaper, the story was already two weeks old.

After he quickly contacted his friends and searched for relevant information on the Internet, he finally understood the whole story. By then, his mood was already as heavy as the weather outside the window.

Immediately afterward, he did one of the most important things since his retirement.

That was, he wrote an email to Professor Browich, who held an important position at the Brookhaven Science a.s.sociates.

Regardless of whether the 750 GeV characteristic peak was worthy of spending an entire year of research, regardless of whether or not Lu Zhou was the chairman of the board, academia itself should be pure and unbiased.

This made him think back to sixty years ago.

He still remembered when he wrote a short paper and published it in CERN’s Physics Communications journal.

After that paper was published, he subsequently wrote another paper and submitted it to “Physics Communications” again, in which he described a theoretical model he envisioned, which was now called the “Higgs mechanism” model. However, his paper was called absurd and was eventually rejected.

This paper was then finally published in “Physical Review”.

If it weren’t for his insistence, perhaps people would have never been able to explain how the weak interaction of elementary particles could carry ma.s.s.

He looked at the email and thought for a long time.

He looked at the words “to summarize” in his last paragraph and hesitated for a while before deleting the phrase from the email. He made the email look as polite as possible, then hit the send b.u.t.ton.

“… Hopefully, this will make a difference.”

Even though his old friend might not listen to his suggestion, this was the least he could do.

He leaned on the armrest of his chair and stood up. He trembled as he walked to the window.

The morning clouds outside the window almost made it seem like the night time. His neighbor across the street had already taken the flower pots into the house, in fear of a thunderstorm.

“… It feels like something big is going to happen today.”

The old man closed his window curtains.

Intuition was a metaphysical thing.

Even he wouldn’t have expected his words to come true…

…

The second day in February.

Today was a special day for the international physics community.

Three days had gone by since the end of the lunar night cycle. The energy storage facilities supporting the collider had already finished charging. The ILHCRC was going to conduct its next collider experiment in the near future.

This experiment received widespread attention from the physics community even before it started.

There was only one reason.

Because not long ago, Lu Zhou uploaded a paper on the theory of hypers.p.a.ce onto the arXiv website. The paper was about how the elementary particles might include a particle that existed in the hypers.p.a.ce.

Normally, this kind of particle was quite stable and barely exposed themselves to the outside world. Only by doing particle physics experiments in which the collision energy could reach a certain level could one briefly observe this special particle in its unstable three-dimensional s.p.a.ce-time form.

As soon as this theory was published, it immediately caused a wave of controversy in the physics community.

Professor François Englert, who won the 2013 n.o.bel Prize in Physics with Professor Peter Higgs, spoke to the media in an interview.

“This theory might be even more shocking than superstring theory, it’s quite unbelievable… However, the hypers.p.a.ce theory is not an innovative theory. The M-theory has already made a similar statement regarding the eleven superstring dimensions of the universe. Besides, I’m more interested in how he is going to prove his theory.

“What I mean is that with the current physics experimental methods, the only objects we can observe are the ones in our dimension or something lower than our dimension.

“Let me give you a common example. If we’re just 2D people living on a piece of white paper, and a small ball travels vertically to the surface of the paper we are on, a.s.suming that the light source is absolutely perpendicular to the surface of the paper, we can only see a stationary point projected on the paper.

“If there really is a particle that exists in higher dimensions, we can only see its projection in three-dimensional s.p.a.ce, so forget about a.n.a.lyzing its whole trajectory.

“Even if he is correct, what kind of experiment does he plan on using to prove that his theory is true?”

Creatures living in the two-dimensional world would never learn about the three-dimensional world, and creatures living in the three-dimensional world would also be oblivious to the fourth-dimensional world.

Even though Professor François Englert couldn’t imagine what kind of experiments Lu Zhou would use to prove his theory, a new round of ILHCRC experiments was about to begin. He only expressed his curiosity; he was not as pessimistic as Professor Whittle.

After all, from a physicist’s perspective, he wanted to see Lu Zhou solve this problem.

If Lu Zhou could prove that the basic particles that made up the universe were indeed hidden in a high-dimensional world, it would solve many of the problems that the world of physics faced.

The waiting process was long.

Everyone was eagerly looking forward to ILHCRC updating its experimental data. Finally, it was midnight Beijing time when the latest experimental data was synchronized and uploaded to the official database.

The news spread around the world, and universities that cooperated with ILHCRC had already begun processing the raw data.

Even the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which had announced its temporary withdrawal from the ILHCRC, had secretly downloaded the data.

The experiment results were shocking.

While the entire physics community was being amazed by the experiment results, Lu Zhou was already hosting a seminar at the ILHCRC headquarters.