If there was one buzzword in the physics community in 2023, it had to be the number "1.25."
Research in high-energy physics had long remained focused on proving the existence of higher-dimensional space. According to the ADD phenomenological model's explanation of gravity and the other interactions, the world we saw might be stuck to a "wall" in a space with extra dimensions. Electrons, protons, photons, and all the other particles in the Standard Model could not enter those extra dimensions; only gravitational field lines could extend into them.
The discovery of the Z Particle, however, offered a new interpretation of this theory built on a phenomenological model.
In other words, although the world we saw was stuck to a wall in a space with extra dimensions, electrons, protons, photons, and all the other particles in the Standard Model were not necessarily unable to enter those dimensions. Rather, part of them might already exist in the curled-up extra dimensions, and what we observed was merely their projection into the three-dimensional world.
If this conclusion held, it could effectively explain an earlier prediction in the physics community that "Newton's inverse-square law will show deviations at submillimeter scales"-namely, that when two objects were less than a millimeter apart, their interaction would no longer follow an inverse-square relationship with the distance between them.
And this was only one of the many results yielded by the Z Particle.
The discovery of this superheavy, higher-dimensional particle had led the entire physics community into a completely new realm. That was precisely what had so many physicists excited.
What lay before them was not merely an unexplored continent, but countless treasures hidden deep within its jungles...
Meanwhile, this event that had shaken the physics community had attracted attention far beyond the field itself.
The prediction left at the