Super God-Level Top Student
Chapter 240: I've Finished Speaking, Any Objections?
Qiao Ze was gratified to see the report generated by CERN's supercomputer.
In fact, given Edward Whitten's current state, even if Qiao Ze's requests were more demanding, such as asking him to package all the recent experimental data and send it to him, it was unlikely that he would be refused.
However, Qiao Ze wasn't particularly interested in those complex data sets.
LHC sounds impressive and is indeed advanced compared to Earth's basic industrial capabilities, not to mention extremely expensive, but to Qiao Ze, the experimental process still seemed a bit crude, primarily relying on brute force. Even a kindergartner could understand the principle in a minute—it's just a forceful collision.
It's like having two airplanes speed up to their maximum power and then crash into each other harshly. Then, a bunch of people surrounding the crash collect the fragmented data to study what was on the planes.
Oh, there has to be a wing, and there have to be wheels. Is this the rudder? Ah, so an airplane also needs a steering wheel? What's this thing? A gyroscope?
The faster the speed, the greater the force generated in the moment of impact, and the more severe the shattering, thus getting closer to the origin.
It's just that the microscopic world doesn't allow for direct observation. You need to analyze what exactly is produced by the collision through energy reactions. Also, these particles aren't like objects that can be found just anywhere; at least so far, humans haven't been able to accurately describe the behavior of particles.
If you were to personify particles, they would be like neurotics; no one can know for sure what they will do next, you can only use mathematics to guess what they might do.
Moreover, particles decay and annihilate with extremely short lifespans.
One hundredth of a billionth of a second might be imperceptible in the macroscopic world, but in the microscopic universe, particles that last that long are considered long-lived. For example, resonance particles that decay through strong interaction, their decay time can only be guessed...
The estimated lifespan is about a ten-septillionth of a second, scientifically expressed as 10e-28 seconds.
Plus, with hundreds of millions of detectors in the collider, it can produce over 1000 TB of raw data per second. Even if you combined all the computing power in the world, it wouldn't be enough for this device, so from the start, the system automatically screens, filtering out the vast majority of data and selectively storing some of it.
This is also the reason why, without a ready-made model, purposelessly finding a new particle is almost impossible.
Because even if you do manage to create a new particle by brute force, it might still be filtered out immediately, and even if it's reflected in observable data, that is, as an imperceptible dot on the screen, it could easily be ignored as some kind of anomaly.
Like when they found the God particle, it was based on the basic model.
Initially, Higgs and others tried to use gauge field theory to explain the weak nuclear force. But this theory encountered a problem as soon as it was proposed: theoretically, the mass of the weak force gauge field is zero, so how do you account for the rest mass of protons and electrons?
Physicists had a stroke of genius in 1964, proposing to artificially add a function term into the mathematical equation of the weak force gauge field. This term was interpreted as originating from "vacuum," and was then known as the Higgs Mechanism.
With this function term, physicists could adjust the parameters in the mathematical equation, thereby predicting the existence of W and Z bosons, which were quickly proven by laboratory experiments. However, the problem was, if this explanation was correct, there must also be a "God particle," the Higgs boson, which remained elusive.
Not until half a century later, in 2012, after the LHC's collision energy was upgraded from 7 TeV to 8 TeV, CERN finally announced that they seem to have found evidence of the Higgs boson, and after nearly half a year of confirmation, the existence of the so-called God particle was ultimately confirmed, with its mass confirmed to be between 115 and 152 GeV.
The result was that Higgs and Englert, who predicted the Higgs boson, both received the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year.
The reason it took so long was partly due to the upgrading of the collider. After all, without enough force, it's impossible to produce this thing. Another part of the delay was due to the vague parameters provided initially, which only predicted that there must be such an example, or else gauge field theory could not be established.
Moreover, it wouldn't make sense if W and Z bosons were found, but the Higgs boson, which gives mass to particles, could not be found.
The validation of Qiao Ze's theory was extraordinarily fast; preliminary results came out in just one month because the collider had already been upgraded in the search for the Higgs boson, and because Qiao Ze had not just predicted, but also provided highly detailed equations.
Of course, some more validations are necessary, and after ensuring the results are rigorous enough, the findings can basically be released to the public.
Such attentive service has its advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage is that it saves physicists from many detours, the disadvantage is that the Nobel Prize in Physics isn't likely to be split in two.
It's very unlikely that Edward Whitten will be able to earn a Nobel for this achievement as well, to make up for his life's regrets.
After all, a physicist who has won the Fields Medal but not the Nobel Prize seems somewhat less serious.
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