Wilson Ohanian was a physics professor at Stanford University, and he was mainly involved in particle physics research. As the forr winner of the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, he was regarded as one of the outstanding young physicists that had erged in recent years.
Even though he was bathed in the envious gaze from his peers, only Ohanian himself knew how difficult the road he had chosen was.
Because of technology limitations, they still couldn’t verify if the conjectures from the last century were correct. The exploration of the future had hardly begun.
Fortunately, the Chinese, who had suddenly beco rich in recent years, had generously built a collider larger than CERN on the moon. This had fast tracked the developnt of particle physics.
For example, the Z particle.
This particle was discovered in the high-dinsional world at the end of last year. It had broadened the research of particle physics to the invisible world.
Lu Zhou, who discovered this particle, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023 because of this groundbreaking discovery. He beca a candidate for the most outstanding physicist of the century.
Ohanian saw the broad prospects behind this research area at a glance. He imdiately changed his research area and began researching the Z particle. He achieved quite good results for the research on the “dinsional change of the Z particle”.
If everything went well, he would win the next Dirac dal.
However...
Sothing didn’t go well.
“This is bull crap...
“Hyperspace channel? The curvature of spaceti?
“According to this, I only need to dig a hole in the ground to get to the other side of the galaxy?”
Ohanian cursed and threw the paper in his hand into the trash can. He didn’t hesitate to express his contempt for the theory of “hyperspace channel” and “spaceti curvature change”.
In fact, his contempt was not without reason.
In general relativity, if the topological structure of space changed in a bounded area, then a closed ti curve in the spaceti range would exist where this change occurred.
The ti curve was the physical trajectory of a mass object in spaceti.
A popular explanation for this was that changing the topology of space was forbidden by general relativity!
This was not a just conjecture, it was a theorem proven by Stephen Hawking.
In fact, Ohanian had a similar idea a long ti ago when he saw the disturbance of the gravitational field when the Z particle fell from a high dinsion to a low dinsion.
However, this idea was quickly denied by himself.
Because if he wanted to prove or disprove this idea, he would need a huge amount of calculation to support it. Even mathematicians who specialized in topology and algebraic geotry would find it difficult.
He verified this with a mathematics professor at Stanford University.
Therefore, he preferred believing in another explanation.
Which was that, when the Z particle moved from a high dinsion to a low dinsion, a loss of mass would occur. This loss of mass in dinsionality would eventually lead to a decrease in the gravitation observed in classical spaceti.
And where did this part of gravity go?
He thought it could be an extra dinsion.
However, this paper completely went against his research. It seed like the Dirac dal was out of his reach...
The office assistant stood tremblingly beside him, afraid to speak to the angry professor.
After the professor seed to have cald down a little, the assistant gulped and whispered, “But the author of this paper is Professor Lu...”
The air in the office froze.
Professor Ohanian, who was reaching for his coffee cup, froze.
“What did you say?”
“The paper was written by Professor Lu... He posted it on arXiv. I followed your instructions and printed out all the papers worth seeing in this research area.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. With a stiff expression on his face, Professor Ohanian asked, “Is he the corresponding author?”
This happened from ti to ti. Not all supervisors had the ti to correct every paper their students wrote. For academic leaders like Lu Zhou, maybe he didn’t even rember how many students he had.
It was helpful to put the na of a great scholar as the corresponding author. It could prevent the reviewing editor from throwing the paper into the trash can, and the attitude of the scholars who peer-reviewed the paper would also be more cautious.
If Professor Lu was only the corresponding author, it didn’t an he had participated in the research. Perhaps he hadn’t even read this paper.
After all, the papers listed on arXiv weren’t published; they were just preprints...
“He is the only author...” The words that ca from his assistant’s mouth completely shattered Ohanian’s hopes. He said, “His na is the only na...”
There was a long silence in the office.
After a minute went by, Ohanian suddenly sighed. He stood up with his hands on the armrest and walked to the trash can.
He picked up the crumpled pages from the trash can and took them back to the desk. After he spread them out, Ohanian sat down patiently and read the entire 20-page paper from beginning to end.
After about half an hour, he muttered, “Well... I can’t be too sure, even though it sounds ridiculous, it’s not necessarily completely wrong.”
The assistant looked at his grumpy boss in amazent. It took only half an hour for Ohanian to completely change his attitude. The assistant standing in the office almost doubted whether the person sitting here was the real Ohanian. The Ohanian he knew used to berate others for having a different academic point of view.
The assistant gulped and said, “Professor.”
Professor Ohanian replied without looking up, “What?”
Assistant: “If he is correct... What does it an?”
“What does it an? Haha, what does it an...”
As if he was going crazy, Professor Ohanian grinned and stared at the paper motionlessly.
“It ans that the spaceti view of general relativity will be subverted. Our understanding of classical spaceti will change... In fact, that’s not all.
“The most important thing is...”
Professor Ohanian was halfway through a sentence. He stopped speaking for a long ti. The young assistant, who was holding his breath, couldn’t help but ask, “The most important thing is?”
Professor Ohanian spoke with confidence and certainty.
“The most important thing is that this ans of traveling faster than the speed of light might be possible.
“The science fiction movies you’ve seen, whether it’s Hollywood or elsewhere...
“At least half of the technology in the movies could beco real.”
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