Scientists are busy at work, even at the level of Witten, who wakes up early in the morning and routinely scrolls through arXiv for three or four hours, and then flips through the latest journals piled high on his desk.

"Edward, I heard you're going to Huaguo recently?" Freeman Dyson walked in without knocking on the door and sat down on the chair in front of him.

"Yes, after the LHC discovered the Higgs boson, everyone became enthusiastic about the construction of the collider, and although the International Linear Accelerator (ILC) discussed in Neon, the United States and Europe was lively, everyone also knew that their economy has been sluggish in recent years, and a lot of scientific research funding has been cut by the government, and the future of the project is uncertain!" Witten closed the magazine in his hand.

"If the SSC is successfully completed, how can it be Europe that discovers the Higgs boson first!" Dyson shook his head depressedly, "Philip, that guy is probably going to be scolded to death! Especially after the LHC has made such an important achievement." ”

"Huaguo seems to want to make a big move in this regard! In recent years, they have developed well in the economy, and now they are willing to invest in the basic field!" Witten did not say anything, but he could also see that he was dissatisfied with the role played by Philip Anderson in the process of the SSC being terminated, "So Mizuki University invited me, David Gross, Gerald Ter Hooft, Nima Akani Hamid, Eight physicists, including Joseph Yin Candela, will exchange views on the future development of the physics community after the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the conference will be chaired by Yau Chengtong!"

David Gross, last year's Nobel Prize winner, was a Witten teacher, and made outstanding contributions to gauge fields and particle physics; Gerald T-Hooft was a Nobel Prize winner in '99 and made a lot of achievements in gauge theory and quantum chromodynamics, and by the way, he was also the grandnephew of Fritz Celnick, the 1953 Nobel Prize winner in physics, and it seems that the family has quite a high IQ.

Hamid and Ikandra are both winners of the Fundamental Physics Prize. The eight physicists are all world-class scholars, and the invitation to them also demonstrates Huaguo's ambition to make a breakthrough in the field of high-energy physics.

"It doesn't seem to be long before our students will be working for the Chinese!" Dyson said with a helpless shrug, he and Witten are both a little old, and they may not be able to wait until the day when CEPC is officially launched, but if their students want to make achievements in this field, they must rush to China like they often go to CERN.

"Maybe Lu will be in charge of this project in the future!" Witten guessed, "The project is expected to take twenty years from design and construction to operation, and he is in the prime of life at that time, and I can't seem to find a better candidate." Although there have been many outstanding young scholars in China in recent years, I have not heard of him. ”

"I'm afraid he already won the Nobel Prize by then, right?" Dyson guessed with his legs crossed, "plus the Fields Medal that will definitely be awarded to him next year, Lu will create a miracle before you, the first scholar in history to win both the Fields Medal and the Nobel Prize!"

If the string theory is confirmed, Witten will undoubtedly have this honor, but at least at the age of his life, he probably won't see this day. But at the level of Witten, I don't take awards or anything so seriously. Rather than focusing on who will win the award, it is interesting to pay attention to what new theories have come to me recently.

"Okay, isn't that what you're looking for me to talk about?" Witten picked up the magazine again, you're old, I'm still young. I still want to make more things academically, but I don't have time to talk nonsense with you all the time!

"Well, what do I want to say to you? Oh, yes. Lu posted another article in which he gave a new dark matter model!" Dyson pulled out Nature from the magazine stack and handed it over, "I took a look. I think it's interesting, so I'd like to hear what you think!"

In the early 80s of the last century, Witten predicted a strange combination of quarks. He believed that light-mass quarks could be combined with heavy-mass quarks to form a new composite particle. But unlike protons and neutrons, this new composite particle cannot be part of the nucleus. However, they can coalesce to form a very massive cluster of particles with no particular structure. Witten calls them "quark blocks".

Physicists call "quark blocks" macroparticles, which are made entirely of a bunch of quarks without any electrons or voids, so they cannot fuse and do not produce light. The high density also makes them less likely to interact with incident light. In short, macroparticles are dense, but they are so small that they are difficult to spot, if not completely absent. Therefore, many people also see macroparticles as one of the possible forms of dark matter.

Physicists have also carried out a series of experiments in this direction, such as installing a polycarbonate plastic film on the Skylab space station, if there are particles passing through the plastic film, then it will leave etching traces, and for example, using a 2-ton aluminum rod at ultra-low temperatures to detect, when the macro particles pass through the aluminum rod, they may interact with the aluminum and release energy, which will cause the aluminum rod to be heated and slightly deformed, but after they analyzed the aluminum rod, they did not find any signs of macro particles.

At the same time, they also used cosmic ray detectors to monitor the interaction of macroparticles with molecules in the earth's atmosphere to produce a special kind of light signal, and used hydrophones in the sea to listen to the vibrations produced by macroparticles as they pass through the sea.

"I'll take a look first!" Witten flipped to the page where Lu Qiujian's paper was, browsed it carefully, and after reading it, turned on the computer and tested the model with various software to see if it conformed to the existing theories and phenomena.

Just when Dyson was about to wait impatiently, Witten frowned and said, "From what I just tested, this model can indeed solve some problems, but there are too many models like this, some of them can explain this phenomenon, but they don't match another phenomenon, so I can't be sure of more things for the time being!"

"That means you can't deny that such a model exists?" said Dyson with a shrug, and he had already done what Witten had just done! )

PS: The time of this meeting has been advanced;There are not many operators who will keep three chapters updated during the New Year, right?Ask for a wave of rewards! Thank you for the 10,000 reward of 13500554170 and my sheep for feeding the horses, and there is one more chapter. Hey, during the Chinese New Year, Mu has recommended running naked for a month! Please give me some recommendation votes! Let me hang on the urban classification recommendation list is also a small recommendation!