Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 639 The darkness before dawn
Humanity has already identified the direction of its advancement, which is warp speed technology, but it is only the direction that has been identified. As for how to achieve warp speed specifically, human scientists still have no idea.

Yes, that's right. In the original theory of human civilization, warp travel requires powerful negative energy to distort space-time, causing a large difference in the warp speed of the space in front and behind the spacecraft/battleship, just like smearing soap on the tail of a paper boat to destroy the surface tension of the water in the rear, and then the water surface itself pulls the spacecraft forward.

In terms of space manifestation, it is gravity-related technology. After all, in the existing scientific theories of mankind, only gravity can distort space and time. But the problem is that human scientists now do not see the possibility of mastering gravity-related technology on the visible path.

The grand unified theory that humans are currently exploring with astronomical particle colliders is actually the unification of the strong interaction force and the electroweak force, which is the true unification of the three fundamental forces of the universe, rather than including gravity. If gravity is included, it would be called the theory of everything, which is the hallmark theory of level 5 civilization. This has been confirmed by the "drift bottle" left by the pioneers, that is, the rhombus crystal. It can be said that humans have understood the hallmark theory of level 4 and above civilization.

But precisely because of this, human development is now in confusion, because people simply cannot figure out how the so-called warp speed can be achieved after unifying the strong force into a grand unified theory.

In fact, it is not just humanity's own technology tree. Humans have searched through the history of scientific development of the Chiyan civilization and have not found any relevant records. The Chiyan civilization is even far inferior to humans in basic theory. They have not even discovered the Casimir effect.

According to the past scientific development of mankind, by now, when astronomical-grade particle colliders have been built and experiments have begun, there should have been many conjectures about how the grand unified theory can achieve warp travel. But now there is not a single conjecture.

Human scientists seemed to have lost their imagination about achieving warp speed in an instant. They seemed unable to think of any way to achieve warp speed other than gravity.

This is a very scary thing, because there is a direction but no idea, which seems to mean the limitation of human imagination. For this reason, human scientific research institutions also deliberately released this matter to scientific research institutions in the Red Flame Civilization, Kuntai people, Nair people, and dog-headed people, so that they can also participate in the imagination of warp speed.

But unfortunately, just like humans, they are at a loss as to how to deal with this. They are even worse than humans. Many ideas that humans can think of have never been thought of by them.

At this moment, humans remembered what the Awakener said about the upper limit of wisdom when they met him. If the Awakener had not mentioned things like talent, scientists would now doubt whether they could understand the Grand Unified Theory.

Because collision experiments are carried out day after day, but there are indeed no new discoveries.

As time goes by, human experiments in particle collisions have gradually expanded from neutron collisions to other lepton and baryon collision experiments. In theory, the energy level of each experiment has reached the 10 to the 15th power GeV electron volt energy level required by the grand unified theory, but no new phenomena have been discovered.

One after another, scientific teams have been conducting experiments with astronomical-grade particle colliders. For one year, two years, three years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, even half a century has passed, and the new discovery that scientists have been dreaming of has never appeared, as if it did not exist at all.

This result was undoubtedly frustrating, but no one gave up easily. Although all the scientists in the scientific team were anxious, everyone had a belief in their hearts, that is, to keep going until they succeeded.

Perhaps the only thing that can make humans proud is the successful creation of an astronomical particle collider. Because energy levels are something that humans can easily calculate, this astronomical particle collider has indeed met the requirements, and even in experiments that accelerate some leptons, there are collision experiments with energy levels that exceed the theoretical scope.

This was of course an experiment by some scientists who suspected that the energy level was insufficient. After thirty years of failed experiments, they applied for hundreds of overload collision experiments, that is, to apply a magnetic field strength exceeding the rated working state to the acceleration magnetic field of the astronomical particle collider, so that the accelerated particles can achieve a higher collision speed. However, there were no accidents in this kind of collision experiment, and no hidden secrets were discovered.

Half a century of experiments has led scientists to wonder whether the detection module of the astronomical-grade particle collider is not advanced enough, or that its detection module itself is unable to detect new phenomena in the experiment, which has led to no abnormal experimental discoveries for so many years.

To this end, the Human Development Commission has held many relevant scientific seminars and put the demand for detection modules on the daily research agenda. Experts in materials science, computer science, and engineering have been working hard for many years to improve the detection modules of astronomical-grade particle colliders, thereby providing the possibility of capturing new particle trajectories.

However, the subsequent experimental results after the improvement clearly told humans: You haven’t done enough.

Yes, still nothing was found. The improved detection module captured the particle trajectories more clearly, and the data obtained by humans was more accurate, but it still could not change the fact that no new phenomena were discovered.

So a scientific team proposed another possibility, that is, humans’ existing detection methods are simply incapable of detecting new phenomena, or the theoretical energy level calculations are incorrect.

Since humans conduct experiments at an incorrectly predicted energy level, it is naturally impossible for them to discover new phenomena in collision experiments.

So what should we do next? The scientific team that proposed these two possibilities believes that, first, the length of the particle collider should be further extended so that humans can obtain experimental conditions at higher energy levels; second, the theoretical thinking of the so-called 10 to the 15th power GeV electron volt energy level in the grand unified theory should be re-filtered.

There is no problem with the second point. As soon as they raised this suspicion, other scientific teams were already working on it. As for the first point, it was directly rejected by the new government.

It’s not that the new government does not support continuing the experiment, but the time cost of continuing to extend the particle collider is too high, and they have to continue mining from the eight star systems that have been almost emptied.

It just so happened that after so many years, humans have made some small progress in magnetic field technology, so after rejecting the first point, human engineers directly proposed to upgrade the acceleration system of the particle collider with the current most advanced magnetic field technology of mankind. This proposal was immediately implemented.

After half a century of upgrades, human scientists once again devoted their energy to experiments, but the results were still the same. What they detected were all experimental phenomena that humans had already known about.

This is undoubtedly very despairing, but many scientists still firmly believe that this is the darkness before dawn. The experiment failed only because the current experimental method is wrong. As long as we continue to try and make mistakes, one day humans will be able to find the real clues of the grand unified theory in experiments.

(End of this chapter)