What would happen if electrical energy did not decay during transmission?
And what if a computer possessed exponential processing speed and perfect accuracy?
Professor Duncan Haldane had once given a standard answer to this question. In the autumn of 2016, this physicist and two other colleagues received that year's Nobel Prize in Physics for "the discovery of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter"!
Simply put, through rigorous experiments, they discovered that even microscopic matter at the smallest scale could exhibit macroscopic properties and possess topological phases.
That might sound difficult to understand. To grasp it, one had to understand the concept of topology.
As everyone knew, mathematicians often viewed problems differently from ordinary people. They were accustomed to seeing through appearances to the essence beneath. Topology was precisely such a discipline, studying the properties that geometric figures or spaces retained even after undergoing continuous changes in shape.
One classic example was that, to a topologist, a doughnut and a coffee cup looked exactly the same because they both had one hole.
Since they each had only one hole, one could transform a doughnut into a coffee cup through a smooth deformation process, and vice versa... Though ordinary people might find that hard to understand, or even completely baffling, this mathematical method had in fact helped scholars in other fields discover many interesting things.
Especially in Physics and materials science, many astonishing discoveries in the 1980s originated from topological methods, which provided their theoretical foundations.
However, while people had long been accustomed to applying topology to solve problems in the macroscopic world, they had been at a loss as to whether topology could be applied to subatomic particles such as electrons and photons.
That was because they were all affected by the strange laws of quantum physics, leaving their