Inside a coffee shop.
Lu Zhou sat down by the window and gestured to Wang Peng to wait for him outside. He then looked at Professor Miro and asked, “Would you like something to drink?”
“Anything cold is fine.”
Lu Zhou nodded and ordered two cups of iced coffee.
He then turned his eyes to Professor Miro and asked, “To be honest, I don’t quite understand how the 53% mass expansion is related to… the spirit of the universe?”
“You are the first person to ask me this question.” Professor Miro said, “The first reaction most people have is that I’m talking crazy. They think I’m a conspiracy theorist.”
“My opinion is not that different from them.” Lu Zhou shrugged and continued, “My curiosity lies purely in the connection between the two.”
Professor Miro didn’t say anything as he searched his pockets.
This movement made Wang Peng a little nervous.
However, this American professor did not make any fishy moves. Instead, he took out a sticky note and a signature pen from his pocket.
“Since you’re good at mathematics, I’ll show it to you using a mathematical proof.”
Lu Zhou made an inviting gesture.
“I like that idea. Mathematics will definitely not deceive anyone.”
Professor Miro wrote down a line of calculations.
[MN=m0-4c1Mπ2+O(Mπ3)]
“This is the nucleon mass obtained by the chiral extrapolation, m0≈880 MeV; c1≈-1GeV-1; Mπ2 is the mass square of the pion…”
Lu Zhou took the cup of coffee from the waiter’s tray and spoke calmly.
“So? I’m not here to listen to your simple explanations on quantum chromodynamics.”
“I just want to go over the basic concepts again in order to better explain my point of view.”
Professor Miro cleared his throat and continued, “According to this formula, we can clearly see that most of the mass of the visible matter in the universe can be determined by pure quantum chromodynamics without introducing quark mass… Except for the 7% part, that is temporarily unexplainable. It might come from outside the standard model or from statistical errors, but that is not a big problem.”
Lu Zhou nodded his head without saying anything, waiting quietly for Miro to continue.
“However, recent experiments have completely overturned all of my previous guesses. I thought that a collision on a larger energy level would reveal to us the secrets of the 7%.
“Instead, the experiments revealed a 53% unexplainable mass energy in our system!”
“It’s shocking, isn’t it? We should have less matter than what we started with. But the fact is that we observe more than what we started with, and it’s not an insignificant amount!
“Think about it, we can only conserve both sides of the equation by introducing a particle with a negative mass. The original perfect universe is like a piece of play-doh that’s being manipulated by an invisible hand…”
“Perfection is subjective.” Lu Zhou interrupted him and said, “I don’t think the universe is perfect.”
“Really? Haha, maybe! What if I tell you, I saw that ghost… Forget about it, that’s too weird to say. I guess I shouldn’t make you think I’m a crazy person.”
Are you not a crazy person?
Lu Zhou subconsciously thought Miro was crazy, but he did not show it on the surface.
Professor Miro suddenly lowered his head quickly and wrote a few lines of calculations on the paper.
After finishing all this, he then folded the paper carefully and gave it to Lu Zhou.
“Bold assumptions and careful verification are what brings us to the advanced physics of today. Just like we proved the existence of gravity from a falling apple, scientific thinking allows us to get rid of ignorance and learn to build models… And let us forget our own insignificance.
“Do you know?
“That the universe is like a designed game. Normally, it will respond to our expectations. Until one day, the parameters we input finally exceeds its threshold, and it finally fails to respond to our expectations. All scientific theories collapse at this singularity.
“Collisions above 5 TeV shatter not only the conservation of mass energy but also the entire physics.”
Lu Zhou looked at him quietly.
He finally knew why this young scholar with extraordinary talents had fallen into a paranoid and crazy mindset.
Physics was the discipline of studying the most general laws of the movement of matter and the basic structure of matter. However, Lu Zhuo’s discoveries were now revealing to them that the universe had no laws.
It wouldn’t be so scary if only one physical theorem was disproven, but this changed everything.
This changed the truth itself.
The human’s boat of exploring the truth of the universe was being dragged into the ocean by an invisible hand.
Lu Zhou finally understood why this matter had developed to the extent that the system had to come forward and issue an [emergency mission] to him.
To be honest, if he hadn’t heard the voice from the Void, he might be more confused than Professor Miro at this moment.
“The universe itself is irregular. Our ignorance and insignificance make us think that the sky we see is blue.
“It’s like there is an invisible ghost wandering in this universe. It plucked the apple from the tree and strangled Schrödinger’s cat with its hand, allowing light to be a particle or a wave, manipulating everything as it wanted… But we still want to explain its behavior with some contradictory theories.”
Professor Miro’s bloodshot pupils suddenly widened.
He tapped his index finger on the small piece of paper as he lowered his voice.
“This is my prediction, dear Professor Lu.
“The mass expansion phenomenon in the high-energy zone is irregular. We have been doing a very stupid thing for the past half-century.
“We will restart the experiment in half a month, and soon, you will prove that I am right.
“All of this is planned.”
After this, Professor Miro stood up and walked away.
It was obvious that the results of the experiment hit Miro hard.
Whether in a spiritual or physical sense.
After the meeting with Professor Miro, Lu Zhou returned to the car and sat in the back without saying a word. He looked at the paper in his hand and began to think.
When Wang Peng looked at Lu Zhou through the rearview mirror, he hesitated for a moment before speaking.
“That professor is…”
“Self-destructing.”
Wang Peng: “…?”
Lu Zhou: “If one day I told you that, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and even Chinese… Everything is actually fake, how would you feel?”
Although it was not the first time Professor Lu had asked such a weird question, this time, it seemed more difficult to understand than usual.
Wang Peng thought for a while before speaking.
“I can’t imagine… No matter what, language can’t be fake.”
“I’m just giving an example. After all, you haven’t studied quantum chromodynamics, and you didn’t spend most of your life writing papers.”
Lu Zhou sighed, thought for a while, and continued, “Let me give you another example. Suppose one day the person you admire the most turns from a saint to an evil demon or something like that, pushing the world to the brink of destruction.”
Wang Peng said almost without hesitation, “This is impossible.”
“Really?” Lu Zhou shrugged and said, “I also think it’s impossible. But you can imagine what this might mean to you once something like this happens.
“Professor Miro is facing this situation. What he has always considered impossible is coming true before his eyes.
“His past two decades of research have become waste; physics and life have lost meaning for him.
“In some sense, sometimes science is more than just an idea.
“It is also a belief.”
Professor Miro was suspended from his work.
This was the doctor’s recommendation.
His current state made it suitable for him to participate in research.
Not only did he affect himself, but he also affected other people in the project team.
Lu Zhou originally thought that the young genius would not accept this arrangement.
However, to Lu Zhou’s surprise, after hearing the advice given by ILHCRC to receive medical treatment, Miro was unexpectedly calm. He had a relaxed look on his face as he was packing his things from his office.
“This is good, I finally have time to plan the trip I always wanted to go on.”
He bid farewell to his colleagues one by one and left his office.
Lu Zhou paid special attention to Professor Miro’s situation. Interestingly enough, the physics professor did not leave Shanghai immediately. Instead, he still lived in the apartment arranged by ILHCRC.
It seemed like Miro wasn’t so sure about his own speculation either and that he intended to wait until the next experiment to see if he was correct.
However, this also made Lu Zhou feel even more uneasy.
Because it meant that all of Miro’s conclusions were made in a sober state.
Lu Zhou also noticed that during this period of suspension, Professor Miro had been updating his blog. From an objective evaluation, Miro was quite talented at writing. He could present boring physics theories in an easy-to-understand form. Thus, he had gained a lot of fans and believers.
Half a month went by.
It was time for ILHCRC’s next experiment cycle.
This time, Lu Zhou stood inside the ground command center.
This wasn’t necessary. He just wanted to use his eyes to confirm whether all this was just an accident or would this discovery truly change physics.
He constantly squeezed and loosened his fists. He paced back and forth several times in the hallways of the ground command center. Finally, he waited for the results to be released.
He looked at the data on the screen in front of him.
The anomaly happened again!
After the collision of the two lead ions in a high-energy region, an extra mass occurred!
There was an uproar in the ground command center. People widened their eyes in disbelief. They exchanged glances and talked quietly, nervously, and even excitedly.
Lu Zhou had a calm and stiff look on his face.
This was the first time he didn’t know what to do.
He reached out into his pocket and took out a piece of paper.
He looked at the paper and muttered, “You really guessed it.”
The extra mass was no longer just 0.53 lead ions.
It was 0.71.
Also…
The data collected by the four detectors in the experiments were surprisingly highly consistent…