Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 640 Various Arguments
On the Gnoll Planet, the Gnolls have data left behind by humans as a verification reference, but humans have nothing. Faced with an unknown future, humans can only rely on themselves.

The awakeners and pioneers did give humans some reminders, but they only made humans recognize the signs of each subsequent level. They did not mention a word about the theoretical details. I don’t know whether it was because they could not tell them or because they did not understand them individually, or it was to test humans.

In short, if humans want to find a grand unified theory, they can only rely on themselves.

However, a hundred years later, the experiment has made little progress.

At the beginning, people were still expecting news about the experiment to suddenly break out tomorrow, but as time went on, this expectation gradually turned into disappointment, and then turned into "a joke about achieving controlled nuclear fusion within 50 years." The reason was that when the experiment just started, a scientist vowed that the collision experiment would help mankind find experimental traces of the grand unified theory within 50 years.

However, a hundred years have passed, but we are still standing still. Well, it can't be said that we are standing still, at least humans have collected hundreds of collision experiment data. Yes, it took a hundred years to collect hundreds of collision experiment data. It's not that humans don't work hard to do experiments, but each astronomical collision experiment takes a long time.

The particle acceleration phase alone takes a month or so, plus the information round-trip, detection of collision results, and collider reset and maintenance. Ten collision experiments a year is already the best we can do, unless humans build a few more astronomical-grade particle colliders, but this is impossible. Building one would require the entire civilization to complete, and the current situation does not allow it.

The Awakener said that if humans want to get out of this space, they must reach level four civilization. Then the exit of the space will naturally appear. Otherwise, no matter how hard humans look for it, they will never find the exit.

This statement is very clear. On the surface, it tells humans that they must reach the fourth level of civilization before they can leave. In fact, the subtext is that humans can find a grand unified theory by using astronomical particle colliders to conduct experiments. After so much time, human scientists are still working hard and have always believed that the route of astronomical particle colliders is correct. This is the reason.

First of all, the Awakener is a benevolent civilization, and the Awakener's "illusion" of caring for humans makes humans believe that he will not deceive themselves.

But where exactly does the problem lie?
The long-term failures have caused scientists to reflect while continuing to improve their experimental methods.

The problem is theoretical, not experimental - some scientists have put forward a view that there is something wrong with the foundation of humanity's grand unified theory, but that's all they say, and they can't provide any evidence of where the problem lies.

Another point of view is that the lack of time accumulation, or in other words, the insufficient accumulation of experimental data, has resulted in our inability to find any clues in the limited experimental results data.

This view holds that what humans need to break through this time is basic theory, which is precisely the most difficult and time-consuming to make progress in. They cited an example, saying that it took about 70 years from the work of Faraday and Maxwell to Edison and his real backstage support scientist Nikola Tesla actually mastering electromagnetic force. And now, how long has it been since humans conducted real collision experiments? Only a hundred years, this time may still be a long way from trying and erroring to find the right answer.

This view is supported by most people, basically all of them are enthusiastic experimental scientists. Another group of scientists hold a different attitude. They believe that the experiment has actually been successful, but humans are not capable of discovering the successful experimental results. In other words, humans are not capable of detecting abnormal experimental phenomena or new experimental products.

The failure to discover the problem was attributed to the experimental detection technology.

They have a good reason for this statement. Historically, physicists have also solemnly declared that certain phenomena are "untestable" or "unprovable" many times, just as some scientists in the 19th century chose to declare that the composition of stars could not be measured experimentally.

In 1852, a French philosopher and social critic wrote in The Progress of Philosophy: "The stars are too far away from us, and we know nothing about them except that they are unreachable points of light in the sky." They believed that machines in the 19th century or any other century after that would not provide humans with enough power to escape the earth and reach the stars.

But facts tell us that later on, humans were not only able to determine the abundance of elements in stars through stellar spectra, but also able to launch probes to stars.

This is what scientists who hold the "undetectable" view believe. They feel that current human technology still has some room for improvement, especially in detection technology. As long as the detection technology reaches the peak of level 3 civilization, it will be able to detect new phenomena and new products of the experiment.

But there are also scientists with another attitude. They believe that other indirect methods can be used to detect or discover new products of experiments. For example, Planck energy is difficult to obtain, but we may be able to conduct indirect experiments around Planck energy and make unexpected breakthroughs.

As time goes by, more and more scientists support the idea of ​​"untestability", because there are too many such examples in history. The first one is the stellar information problem mentioned above. The second is the existence of atoms. When the atomic hypothesis was first proposed in the 19th century, many physicists refused to believe in the existence of atoms. They believed that atoms were just a mathematical means, and mathematics just happened to give the correct description by chance.

The third is the existence of neutrinos. In the early 20th century, humans had no ability to detect the existence of neutrinos, but fortunately they discovered the disappearance of the law of conservation of matter and energy in some radioactive experiments. Later, Wolfgang Pauli hypothesized a new invisible particle and called it the neutrino.

The development of history is vivid in our minds, so many scientists believe that humans are now facing a similar situation as before. This does make sense, but now even the experiments have not found any abnormalities, which has led some scientists to want to make a hypothesis or a hypothetical particle like their predecessors, but there is no basis for it.

Everything seems normal. You can't just brag. After all, scientific research is not just about using your imagination. It also needs to be based on real experimental data or unexpected discoveries.

(End of this chapter)