Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 873 Failure is the key to success...

Even for people who have reached the pinnacle of the fourth-level civilization, it is still very difficult to produce a large amount of strong materials. They can produce them but the output is not high.

It is precisely because of this that humans only have one ship like the Lyra that is equipped with a star destroyer. If it is not necessary, the time used to produce strong materials to build other warships of the same level can produce more than a million ships. Therefore, humans have not built a second Lyra to date.

Precisely because of the difficulty in producing strong materials, the preparation time for this experiment was very long, and it took humans twenty years.

Twenty years is only enough to manufacture the consumables needed for the first phase of the experiment. Yes, the mirror made of strong materials has become a consumable, after all, it cannot be taken back once it is thrown out.

In the past twenty years, humans have only produced about a thousand mirrors equipped with various detection equipment.

When the experiment started, although it did not attract the attention of the whole human race like the astronomical-level particle collision experiment, it was still a sensation. Basically, except for some people with nothing to do, everyone would pay attention to it.

But as for the experiment, what everyone is paying attention to is just the beginning. After the launching ceremony, ordinary people return to their peaceful lives, because the result of the first experiment is undoubtedly a failure.

Humans have observed no evidence of the existence of negative energy.

Subsequent experiments will require a long and boring repetitive process. Of course, this process also requires experimental scientists to constantly adjust the experimental parameters. This is not much different from previous experiments. A large number of experiments are used to obtain big data, and then the experimental data are analyzed to finally draw conclusions.

The details are naturally more complicated than this, but scientific experiments basically follow a set of procedures. Humans have developed to the fourth level of civilization, so they naturally understand this.

However, subsequent experiments have told humanity that things are not that simple, because all experimental supplies have been used up, and humanity still has not found any signs of negative energy. Humans have not observed any signs of polarons and Bose-Einstein condensate matter being accelerated in the opposite direction.

Experiment again and again, and fail again and again.

Although everyone had prepared themselves mentally, they were still somewhat upset by the experiment that seemed to never produce results. But even so, the scientists or the new human government did not give up, and continued to organize the production of new experimental supplies and continue the experiment.

If it doesn’t work once, try it twice. If it doesn’t work twice, try it three times. If it doesn’t work thirty times, try it three hundred times. If it still doesn’t work, try it three thousand times. If it still doesn’t work, keep trying. Try it thirty thousand times or three hundred thousand times.

As a civilization, it is sometimes very desperate to explore the unknown, because we simply don't know whether we will succeed if we continue to move forward. No one knows whether we can find the answer by doing 300,000 experiments, and perhaps there will still be no discovery after doing 300,000 times.

This feeling is very powerless, but this is what scientific research is like. Real research on the unknown does not have a progress bar like in a game, but rather a feeling of confusion with no view of the future.

Maybe a certain road is a dead end, but as a civilization, it does not know that it is heading towards a dead end, and still wants to make it through. Similarly, sometimes this road is feasible, but it is just bad luck that after so many experiments, it has not encountered the chance of success.

This is like drawing cards without a guarantee. You never know if you will get an SSR in the next draw.

As a new government leading the advancement of mankind, it must have the courage to support it despite all kinds of pressures. Even if it ends up in vain, it must invest even if it knows it is a bottomless pit. After all, maybe it will succeed next time. If it gives up halfway and it happens to be a feasible path, then it will never be able to make progress. Nature treats all civilizations equally in this regard.

In this way, humans stopped and started, and continued to conduct experiments, so much so that they claimed that the star destroyer cannon of the Lyra had not been heard since the experiment began. Every once in a while, it would fire a "strong material mirror" into the dark starry sky, which was a bit like firing a blank cannon.

Repeated failures have not defeated humanity, but they have also not allowed humanity to see success.

This experiment gave people the feeling that it was an eternal bottomless pit, and the more it was done, the more disappointing it became. So in this situation, many scientists finally couldn't help but question this method.

They felt that this path was wrong and that continuing this way would lead to no results.

The reasons they gave were quite realistic, probably about the so-called speed of light.

As we all know, humans have never actually measured the speed of light. The measured value of the speed of light that we are familiar with is 300,000 kilometers per second. If we want to apply this data to all physics and astronomy calculations, it must be based on a premise, that is, the speed of light is constant.

As a result, humans have generally recognized a fact: the principle of the constancy of the speed of light. As Einstein said, in order to define the validity of time, we must agree on the fact that the speed of light is the same in all directions.

Therefore, from an optical point of view, humans have never truly measured the speed of light. From an electronic point of view, humans use the side of lasers to calculate the speed of light, and what is measured is not the light itself. So it seems that humans have never truly measured the speed of light.

Therefore, human beings' measurement of the speed of light has fallen into a strange circle. That is, if light itself is used to measure the speed of light, the one-way speed of light cannot be measured by real equipment. If laser is used for indirect calculation, the subject of measurement is not light itself. If the method of dividing distance by time is used, it must be assumed that the speed of light is constant. However, the constancy of the speed of light itself is a premise of relativity.

But what does this have to do with the questions raised by today’s scientists?

Of course there is. This experiment says that if the "mirror" is accelerated to near the speed of light, negative energy will accumulate on the mirror surface.

However, the so-called speed is not an absolute speed. There is no absolute speed in the universe, only relative speed. A mirror is launched by humans, so its speed is the speed of light relative to the current speed of humans. But for the mirror itself, it is actually stationary if the detector on it uses it as a reference.

Even with other objects as reference, its speed is not the speed of light, such as a planet in orbit.

In this way, it is the speed of light only for humans, so even if there is negative energy, it is only negative energy for humans. It has no energy reaction at all for other objects that are stationary relative to it.

However, as a cosmic physical quantity, it cannot be valid only for humans, but should be universally applicable. Therefore, this so-called method of accelerating the mirror to the speed of light is not advisable.

(End of this chapter)