The Road Ahead Lies Beneath Our Feet

"Abelian gauge theory was still recognizable, not too different from Earth... Non-Abelian gauge theory, though, was very hard to identify. If it was only an approximate equation, directly modifying Earth's Yang-Mills equation might work, but... it might not fit."

"Spontaneous symmetry breaking... insufficient data. Doubtful. I never paid attention to this field before, so I don't know whether they ever encountered 'massless scalar particles.'"

"The Higgs mechanism... after reducing physical quantities to spiritual energy, only a ghost could recognize it."

Wang Qi looked at the pages before him, crammed full of writing, as though he were staring at a swarm of flies. The sight made his head spin. Wang Qi shook his head and sighed. "Honestly... I've never seen such an ugly theoretical model in my life."

The Higgs mechanism, the Genesis mechanism. It was a theory exploring "where mass came from."

"The origin of mass" was a question concerning the very source of the world. Why did matter exist? Why did elementary particles possess mass? What, exactly, bestowed that mass upon them?

The Higgs mechanism was an attempt to explain that question.

Put poetically, it explained where the world's mass came from.

It was an important mechanism behind the birth of the universe.

And after Wang Qi rewrote it, mass had been reduced away. It should have become, "Why does spiritual energy exist?"

Yet when faced with this mechanism, Wang Qi once again scratched his head in frustration.

The original Higgs mechanism combined spontaneous symmetry breaking with non-Abelian gauge theory, possessing an indescribable mathematical beauty.

But Wang Qi refused to acknowledge that the thing before him possessed any "beauty." He had never seen such a grotesquely malformed mathematical model!

"Looks like what I said last night—that this universe and Earth's universe 'only overlap in the known regions'—was somewhat inaccurate.