The auditorium was packed with people. At a rough glance, there had to be around eight hundred of them.
They were almost all among the brightest minds and most authoritative scholars in high-energy physics.
Not only were there researchers working at IMCRC, but also leading physicists who had traveled thousands of miles from other countries.
Everyone had come with an unexpectedly unanimous purpose.
They wanted to understand where the inflated mass and the experimental results that overturned the standard model had come from, and what they meant...
In the front row of the auditorium, an elderly man in a gray jacket sat down beside Professor Witten.
He rested his cane against the corner of the desk, unscrewed the cap of the bottled water on it, took a slow sip, then turned his gaze toward the podium.
"Thank you for saving me a seat. There are far too many people here... I nearly got lost outside."
Professor Witten glanced sideways at the old man beside him and raised an eyebrow.
"I didn't think you'd actually come."
The old man chuckled and gave him a look that said, Why wouldn't I? Then he turned his attention back to the podium.
"How could I miss something this interesting? Perhaps today, the rules of physics will be rewritten, and our horizons will expand by an entire dimension into a realm we cannot perceive... Is there anything more exciting than that?"
Anyone who heard those words would certainly have been surprised.
Not because of what had been said, but because of who had said it.
The man sitting beside Professor Witten was none other than Professor Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
People unfamiliar with physics might not have heard the name, but he was, in fact, an outstanding physicist.
As a recipient of