“I really wished you called me in the morning instead.”
“Why?”
“Because I was at the eastern docks this morning, and it only takes half an hour to get here from there. But now, I think I have to stay in Shanghai for dinner.”
“Eastern docks? Where the Star Voyage One is?”
“Yeah.”
Luo Wenxuan cast a curious look at Lu Zhou and said, “I heard you calculated pi to 10^100 digits?”
“Technically, Star Voyage One was the one that did the calculations… Why?”
“Nothing… I just think it’s pretty cool. Man! It’s a shame we were all doing experiments at that time, and we didn’t get the chance to watch it live…” Luo Wenxuan sighed and looked up at the sky. He said regretfully, “Damn, I feel like I missed a chance to witness history.”
“If you want to, you can witness history every day…” Lu Zhou walked into a corridor of the IMCRC headquarters. He glanced at his silver watch on his wrist and said, “Okay, back to business, tell me what happened.”
Luo Wenxuan nonchalantly shrugged and said, “Sure, so here’s the thing…”
It took him about ten minutes to tell Lu Zhou the whole story.
Basically, three days ago, they conducted a high-energy particle collision experiment in the 1.13-1.14 TeV energy region using the Lunar Hadron Collider. They hoped to find more evidence for the high-dimensional particle theoretical model proposed by Lu Zhou, as well as the proof for the hyperspace theory that Einstein dreamed of.
However, after they completed the last set of experiments, they discovered something extremely unusual…
“The last three sets of experiments were originally intended to be a control group. However, the energy data observed by the four detectors all showed violent fluctuations… These were not fluctuations that could be explained by quantum fluctuations; it was an order of magnitude more powerful!”
“It feels like…”
Luo Wenxuan struggled to think of an analogy, so Lu Zhou spoke instead.
“It feels like you’re playing pool, and someone used the cue to hit the moving white ball?”
“Exactly!” Luo Wenxuan snapped his fingers and said, “That’s exactly how it feels! But there is a slight difference. Not only did someone hit the ball mid-shot, but they also added an extra black ball to the table.”
Lu Zhou raised his eyebrows.
If only the energy were increased, there were many theoretical explanations that provided a basis. However, both the energy and the mass were amplified at the same time, making it somewhat unusual.
“Are you sure you read the data correctly?”
“Come on, do you really think I’m that careless?” Luo Wenxuan said as he looked at Lu Zhou’s obvious distrust on his face. Luo Wenxuan sighed and said, “Fine, even if you don’t believe me, you should trust the team of engineers and physicists at the ILHCRC.”
Lu Zhou: “Did you inspect the experiment machine?”
Luo Wenxuan said, “Is that even a question? The second after the experiment was over, I asked the engineers at the lunar scientific research station to inspect the experiment machine. Nothing unusual was found on the superconducting magnet and the high-energy particle emitter.”
“This does seem a bit unusual…” Lu Zhou rubbed his chin for a while. He then asked, “What about the meeting? Did you guys host a meeting?”
“I called you right after the meeting.”
In fact, calling Lu Zhou was one of the conclusions for the meeting.
Even though the ILHCRC had many Nobel Prize-level scholars, their prior experience in experiments was not applicable to this new abnormal observation.
Instead of having endless debates, most people wanted to hear what Professor Lu thought.
After all, the purpose of this experiment was to perfect his theoretical model of high-dimensional particles.
Luo Wenxuan looked at Lu Zhou and spoke.
“… Professor Witten’s guess is that the low-dimensional expansion of some high-dimensional matter disturbed the nearby space-time curvature, resulting in anomalies in the observed data, and there was actually no change in the mass and energy under the space-time scale. In fact, my opinion is the same, but Professor Wilczek has a completely different point of view. Academician Wu from the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a different opinion… Regardless, no one can convince anyone else on this issue.”
Lu Zhou: “Regardless of what actually caused the abnormality, there has to be a clue… Let me look at the experiment data first.”
“Come with me.”
After walking into Luo Wenxuan’s office, Luo Wenxuan put his laptop on the desk, entered his work password, and logged into the database.
Soon after, he retrieved the experiment data and said, “Look at it yourself… Do you want to drink anything?”
Lu Zhou was sitting in the office chair. His attention was totally grabbed by the data in front of him. He then said casually, “Just instant coffee.”
“It’s not like I have freshly ground coffee… I’ll be right back.”
Luo Wenxuan turned around and went to make the coffee. As Lu Zhou looked at the lines of data on the screen, his eyebrows began to gradually furrow.
Finally, his eyes stopped at a certain row.
After three minutes, Lu Zhou took in a cold breath and spoke.
“Interesting…”
Just like Luo Wenxuan had said, the experimental data was quite unusual. The four detectors distributed in the collider all detected a mass far greater than the lead ions themselves; all from the lead ions colliding fragments.
Actually, according to quantum chromodynamics, the increase and decrease of mass energy were normal. After all, there were strange things such as the zero-mass Goldstone boson, or it might have been interfered with by a future quark mass, or it might have created something that couldn’t be observed with current human technology.
However, there was a limit to the fluctuation of energy.
Generally speaking, a supercomputer that was used to calculate quantum chromodynamics could normally account for 93% of the fluctuations.
However, the data in front of him was totally different.
After analyzing the data collected in the experiment, the collision detected by the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy exceeded the expected value by an entire order of magnitude…
This couldn’t only be attributed to quantum fluctuations anymore.
Not only did this threaten his high-dimensional particle theory model, but it also threatened the theory of relativity, the standard model, and even the mass-energy equation… This could ruin the entire foundation of modern physics.
Perhaps something was interfering with the experiment, just like Luo Wenxuan had described, maybe someone put an extra ball on the pool table…
Lu Zhou suddenly had a thought.
It felt like he was daydreaming.
A blue chat box appeared in his sight.
[Emergency mission: Call From The Void]
When Lu Zhou stared at the chat window, he froze.
The last time something like this happened was because of the Mars bacteria…
Luo Wenxuan walked into the office with two cups of coffee.
He looked at Lu Zhou and asked curiously, “Did you find anything?”
Lu Zhou, who was sitting at the computer, looked like he just saw a ghost.
Lu Zhou looked up at Luo Wenxuan, and after a moment of silence, he spoke.
“I think… we might be in trouble.”
Luo Wenxuan looked at him and put down the coffee cups on the desk.
“Trouble? Why?”
“Intuition…” Lu Zhou clenched his jaws and said, “This is what my scientific intuition is telling me.”
