As raindrops smashed onto the gray pavement, a man wearing a large jacket walked through the gate of Stony Brook University, crossed the road, and walked all the way to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Professor Whittle was sitting in his office and drinking coffee. He had his back facing his desk as he looked at the rain outside his window, lost in thought.
He came to his office early in the morning, and he felt like he had forgotten something important, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember what it was.
He took a sip of the coffee in his hand, and suddenly, he heard a knock outside his door. He turned around in his office chair and spoke.
“Come in.”
The door opened.
A wave of moist and cold air flew into the room. Professor Whittle looked at the drenched person standing at his door. He almost spilled the coffee out of his hand. He got up from his chair and spoke.
“Professor Browich, what happened?!”
The person standing in front of him was the president of the Brookhaven Science Associates and the head of the physics department at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Also, he was a professor of physics at Stony Brook University, an academician at the American National Academy of Sciences, and a Nobel Prize-level scholar…
Professor Browich stared at his colleague. He thought of the email from Peter Higgs with a bitter expression on his face.
His gulped as he spoke.
“We lost.”
“Lost… Lost what? Come on in, I’ll find you some spare clothes.”
Browich didn’t react to Professor Whittle’s kindness.
It was like he only came here to notify Whittle of the bad news. He shook his head, turned around, and walked away.
Professor Whittle looked at Professor Browich walking away. He was wondering what was going on when his heart suddenly dropped.
He finally remembered.
“… The ILHCRC seminar! Damn it!”
I knew I forgot something important!
He quickly logged onto the ILHCRC website.
I knew it!
The ILHCRC seminar is today!
Like usual, the video of the seminar was uploaded to the ILHCRC website.
After watching the video for ten minutes, his pupils began to shrink.
What surprised him was not the equations Lu Zhou wrote on the whiteboard. He couldn’t understand them anyway.
Rather, it was the solemn expressions of the physicists sitting in the front row, and the applause from the audience when Professor Lu announced ILHCRC’s major discovery of the “Zhou particle”.
His heart almost missed a beat.
Professor Whittle felt dizzy; he felt like he was losing his vision.
He didn’t know what kind of feeling this was.
But one thing for certain was that this was not excitement.
His worst nightmares came true…
…
Coincidentally, at the Department of Physics at Syracuse University, which was more than two hundred kilometers away from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a female researcher cursed to herself. She smashed her keyboard violently. Her colleague who was sitting nearby was baffled.
This was only a small fraction of the chaos caused by that seminar.
After the scholars who followed this area of physics saw the seminar video on the ILHCRC, they were all astounded in disbelief.
This was a particle that weighed up to 1.25 TeV!
A superheavy particle with a mass ten times heavier than the Higgs particle!
More importantly, this particle was not included in the Standard Model!
If what Lu Zhou said was true, and this elementary particle corresponded to a higher-dimensional part of atoms, then this would hugely impact the research on the gravitational force and mass-energy.
The scene at the ILHCRC was even more chaotic.
People rushed to the front of the stage, not just the reporters, but also the physicists who eagerly wanted to ask questions.
Some people wanted to take a closer photo of the whiteboard, some wanted to catch up to Lu Zhou and ask him questions, while others… didn’t know what they wanted to do.
It was like everyone had gone crazy.
A reporter withstood the force from the crowd and struggled as he spoke in front of a camera.
“… This is February the 3rd, 10 o’clock Beijing time. Chinese physicist Professor Lu Zhou just announced their latest findings regarding the Lunar Hadron Collider particle physics experiments at the ILHCRC. This superheavy particle, which is said to be from a higher-dimensional world, is named the “Zhou particle”, or “Z particle” for short.
“A few days ago, according to Peter Higgs, professor at the University of Edinburgh, the discovery of this particle will be the greatest particle physics experiment ever. And that it will give us a better picture of the universe, expanding our horizon by a whole dimension.
“According to the prediction made by Professor Lu Zhou at the end of his seminar, the discovery of this particle might provide a theoretical basis for the faster than light travel between stars… The live scene is in chaos. We are trying to contact Professor Lu… Excuse me, sorry, coming through—
“— This is BBC News.”
It was impossible for him to get closer to Lu Zhou.
Through the camera lens, the audience at home could see how chaotic the scene was.
As for Lu Zhou, he went through a staff-dedicated elevator down to the garage, got into his car, and left ILHCRC headquarters.
This was Wang Peng’s suggestion.
It was difficult to avoid accidents in crowded places. In order to stop the chaos from expanding, he should avoid crowds.
In any case, regardless of whether or not everyone was satisfied with the outcome, this day was a historic day for the physics community.
Seven years later, the exploration of the 750 GeV characteristic peak finally came to an end.
Humans had finally discovered an unexplored world.
They were closer than ever before to the secrets of the universe.
As for whether or not the Zhou particle would become the key for faster than light travel…
Only time could tell…
