Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 649: Another miracle
Failure is not terrible, what is terrible is not knowing the reason for failure.

Human engineers are no pushovers. After the first experiment failed, they quickly found the problem, improved the equipment, and then conducted a second experiment.

Once, twice, three times, four times.
Scientists and engineers constantly find the causes of failure, learn lessons from failure, analyze the causes of failure, and then optimize the experiments.

However, as the number of experiments increased, scientists discovered that experimental optimization did not seem to bring success to the experiment, because they had increased the running time of the warp engine from the initial ten seconds to dozens of hours, and it was dozens of hours of stable operation, but the platinum piece remained motionless.

Just like astronomical-level particle collision experiments, such results cannot defeat human scientists. If they fail, they will look for the reason and continue to do it, trying and failing until they find the correct answer to the universe.

More than a dozen hours of operation were enough to prove that the warp engine was stable enough, but it still could not move a 0.1-gram platinum sheet even by one micron.

At this point, scientists have to look for other reasons.

Most scientists believe that it is not a problem with the warp engine itself, because they have also participated in every optimization process of the warp engine, and these scientists and engineers can understand the existence of the warp engine structure. They all participated in the disassembly of the "Level 4 Civilization Warp Engine" and are considered to be the top experts in the engine field of human civilization at this stage.

Among these people is Yu Nanfeng, who has lived from the Callisto era to the present.

Yu Nanfeng was also a great engineer and scientist who kept up with the times. He was a dynamics engineer in the Callisto era and the most powerful dynamics expert in the Callisto base. With the advancement of human technology, his status also rose, and of course his knowledge and technology did not fall behind, but became more proficient.

He was in charge of the warp engine research back then, and he also contributed to the human mechanical expertise. Now, he is once again the head of the warp engine experimental project. Of course, he is not just doing this, he also has work to do in other fields of research and experiments, but recently he has focused his main energy on the warp engine.

As for the current problems, Yu Nanfeng, as the person in charge, after careful consideration and analysis, believes that the problem is not with the warp engine, but most likely with the energy system.

After reaching this conclusion, he wrote a report overnight on the matching of energy systems and warp engines, in which he listed many of the dismantled warp engine energy supply systems as examples. Finally, he made a suggestion, saying that if humans want to succeed in the warp experiment, they must use functional systems of the corresponding energy levels.

Simply put, the energy level is not enough to generate instantaneous energy that distorts space and time.

Hydrogen nuclear fusion is not good, and although heavy nuclear fusion is also huge and even inexhaustible, its efficiency is not high enough and the output port is not large enough. It is like having a large lake of water, but at most can only open a pinhole-sized hole to release floodwaters, and this amount of water has no power.

Yu Nanfeng's views have received widespread support, but support is support, and a solution must be found after support, otherwise it will be empty talk and the experiment will not be able to continue.

At this moment, all scientists were silent because they also realized the key to this problem. The answer was obvious: antimatter annihilation.

According to Yu Nanfeng, the main thing is to provide the warp engine with antimatter annihilation-level energy, which can provide the warp engine with sufficiently huge instantaneous energy, so that its working core can generate powerful force to distort time and space.

But everyone knows that humans do not have the ability to produce antimatter in large quantities, and even if they can, they cannot preserve it stably.

What needs to be said here is that charged antiparticles can actually be called antimatter, but the so-called large-scale production of antimatter refers to antimatter that is electrically neutral, just like real-life matter. Humans do have the ability to produce a small amount of charged antiparticles, such as anti-electrons, anti-protons, and anti-neutrons, which can be produced and separated, and with the current technical strength of the third-level civilization, they can also mix them together to form electrically neutral antimatter, but they do not have the ability to preserve them after they have converged into electrically neutral antimatter.

However, the warp engine requires energy at the antimatter annihilation level to be driven, which brings us back to the beginning of the problem - the grand unified theory.

Humans have to master the grand unified theory before they can produce and store antimatter in large quantities. From this point of view, the warp experiment seems to have come to an end, and we must wait until the grand unified theory is mastered before we can continue.

At this moment, human scientists have a clearer understanding of why the Grand Unified Theory has become the hallmark theory of Level 4 civilization. Without this theory, it is impossible to develop Level 4 civilization technologies. Even if you know that a certain technology will be mastered after becoming a Level 4 civilization, you cannot get past the Grand Unified Theory.

The towering barriers of the grand unified theory, like a mountain, once again loom over humanity.

Barrier, it is indeed a barrier.

However, just when everyone thought that the warp experiment had to wait until the grand unified theory was realized before it could continue, Yu Nanfeng came up with a bold idea.

He believed that it was possible to create an external device based on high-intensity magnetic field confinement, specifically used to store large numbers of positrons. Then, after enough positrons were stored, they could be driven by the magnetic field and shot into the combustion chamber of the warp engine, where they would annihilate with an equal number of electrons shot in from another direction.

Then use the high-energy level energy generated by the annihilation of these massive amounts of positrons and electrons to drive the warp engine.

Yu Nanfeng was still so wild. Everyone's eyelids twitched when they heard this idea, because from Yu Nanfeng's explanation, everyone knew that this so-called "external device based on high-intensity magnetic field constraints" was essentially a huge positron cannon, but it had an additional circular magnetic field for binding positrons, which was what he called a storage device.

The entire device is a combination of a positron cannon and a set of strong magnetic field confinement equipment.

Yu Nanfeng even said that if the positrons produced by one positron cannon are not enough, then two or three cannons can be used. In short, as long as the amount of positrons is large enough, they can instantly annihilate and produce tremendous energy enough to drive the warp engine.

There is nothing wrong with this statement, and it is true that great efforts can produce miracles. But it is very risky to operate, at least the laboratory cannot be placed on a scientific research ship like it is now. Otherwise, if you are not careful, the energy and spacetime generated by the annihilation of a large number of positive and negative electrons will definitely destroy the ship and kill people.

Just do it. People who are crazier than this idea have done it.

The new test site was set up separately in outer space. In order to complete the experiment as soon as possible, Yu Nanfeng also applied for several warships whose main guns were positron guns, and removed their main guns for modification.

For fear that mistakes might occur during the experiment and cause the warp engine used in the experiment to be scrapped, Yu Nanfeng specifically instructed the experimental team to prepare a few more experimental prototypes, so that if mistakes occurred and one or two were destroyed, there would be no need to waste time waiting for the next prototype to be produced.

(End of this chapter)