Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 222 Proton Decay
Looking at the dim star in the sky, Li Qingsong felt heavy in his heart.

As long as he could still see it, it meant that the acceleration of the Omnic Scourge Fleet was still continuing, which meant that as expected, the shorter the time it took for the Omnic Scourge Fleet to return, the slimmer his hope of a breakthrough.

At this moment, it is estimated that the speed of the Mechanical Scourge Fleet has reached its acceptable upper limit.

Just as Li Qingsong was gradually beginning to despair and had even begun planning to reopen the factory and retain as many clones as possible during the reopening process to preserve the technology he had developed over the years, he suddenly saw that the dim star had disappeared.

What happened? Disappeared?
Li Qingsong was somewhat incredulous and mobilized more deep space telescopes to point in that direction for detailed detection. However, after still failing to see anything, a feeling of ecstasy surged in his heart.

There is nothing there, only the vastness and depth of the universe. Even with the most advanced deep space detection methods, no optical fiber can be detected.

Really...really disappeared?

Did the acceleration really stop?

At this stage, the speed of the Mechanical Scourge Fleet is only 9.4% of the speed of light!

At this speed, the time it would take them to reach a new star system, complete material collection, restore their own strength, and then arrive at the Pegasus V432 galaxy would be extended to a minimum of about 305 years, which has exceeded the time they estimated to take to break through the strong core level!
I have great hope of completing a breakthrough from the electro-weak to the strong nuclear level during this period of time, and completing the fleet construction work in the initial stage of the breakthrough!

Even if he breaks through, he is only at the early stage of strong core, and may not even have time to convert the technological breakthrough into combat power. In a head-on confrontation, he still cannot be a match for the intelligent mechanical disaster fleet, but, so what?

If I can't beat him, I can always run away, right?

Even if I still can't escape - which is highly likely, but if I can't escape, I can at least delay a little longer, right?

What Li Qingsong was striving for was not to defeat or annihilate the intelligent Scourge Fleet, nor even to escape from its pursuit.

That's not realistic.

After enduring for so many years, working tirelessly and making every effort, taking advantage of the right time, place and people, all Li Qingsong is pursuing is to delay a little longer!

As long as his fleet could be faster, Li Qingsong would have the hope of completing subsequent "application"-level physics breakthroughs during his escape, and truly transforming breakthroughs in basic physics into real combat power.

Only in this way can he have the possibility to truly confront this intelligent mechanical disaster fleet head-on.

At this moment, although the powerful nuclear intelligent mechanical disaster was forced back at the unprecedented electro-weak level, it was still only the first step of Li Qingsong's entire plan.

In the future, we don’t know how many difficulties we will have to overcome.

But at least, this first step has been taken successfully. In this case, why bother thinking so much? No matter what the future holds, just go all out in the present!

"Finally, I can finally eliminate all external interference and devote myself to basic physics research."

Thinking back to the difficulties of the past period, Li Qingsong cherishes this opportunity very much.

This opportunity is really hard to come by... Every minute and every second is so precious that Li Qingsong feels that wasting even a little bit of it would be a huge sin.

"From this moment on, no one can stop me from studying fundamental physics. No one can stop me!"

Li Qingsong's heart was filled with excitement.

At this moment, the first major scientific device used to truly launch a unified strong nuclear force attack has been completed. It is a huge water storage tank built tens of thousands of meters underground on a dwarf planet, with a total volume of hundreds of millions of cubic meters.

It's a neutrino telescope.

Li Qingsong's primary task at this stage is to verify the existence of proton decay and, by extension, the correctness of his grand unified model. Only with this foundation laid can further work proceed.

The verification of proton decay seems unrelated to the neutrino telescope, but in fact the two are closely related.

Because when the neutrino telescope, a large scientific device, was originally developed, it was intended to verify proton decay. However, the research on proton decay has been slow to progress, and this device happened to show unique advantages in the field of neutrino research, so it gradually turned to the neutrino field.

The neutrino telescope's mode of studying neutrinos is to use extremely deep external barriers to eliminate external interference as much as possible and only allow neutrinos to enter the pure water inside the detector.

Once a neutrino collides with the microscopic particles that make up water molecules, its secondary particles will move faster than light in water, triggering Cherenkov radiation in a superluminal state, and the signal will be captured.

The pattern for detecting proton decay is similar.

The lifetime of protons is extremely long and the probability of decay is extremely low.

Based on the preliminary scientific research data that Li Qingsong currently has, he believes that the lower limit of the proton's lifespan is approximately 10^36 years, or one trillion trillion trillion years.

This is the lower limit, which means that the proton's lifetime is at least this long.

This number far exceeds the current age of the universe, which is approximately 138 billion years.

Assuming that the proton lifetime is this lower limit, then the probability of a proton decaying from the beginning of the universe to the present is only about one in 72.5 trillion trillion.

Even if Li Qingsong waited until the end of the universe, he would never be able to watch a proton decay.

So how do we detect proton decay?

The approach adopted by Li Qingsong is to increase the probability of observing proton decay by increasing the number of protons.

The probability of a proton decaying in one year is one in 10^36. What about ten thousand protons?
The probability of one of the protons decaying within a year has obviously increased to 10 in 36^.

What if Li Qingsong has 10^36 protons?

Then the probability that at least one proton decays within a year is close to 100%.

The proton decay detector built by Li Qingsong at this moment - or the neutrino detector, anyway, they are the same thing, has a pure water reserve of 1.2 million tons.

A water molecule contains ten protons, and 1.2 million tons of water contain about 4*10^37 protons.

This number is 40 times the lower limit of the expected lifespan of a proton.

That is to say, if the proton lifetime is exactly this number, the proton decay detector built by Li Qingsong can detect about 40 proton decay events in a year, an average of one every 9 days.

Even if the expected lifetime of a proton is increased to ten times its current value, that is, 10^37 years, with the performance of this proton decay detector, it can still detect it once within 90 days.

(End of this chapter)