Christmas of 2023 passed peacefully.
The colonists of Guanghan City had successfully moved into their new homes. After a major domestic mining company won the extraction rights to a rare-earth deposit with estimated reserves of over thirty million tons, news about Guanghan City seemed to die down for the time being.
As the story gradually faded from public view, with no new hot topic taking its place, life seemed to return briefly to its everyday routine.
However, while the world finally enjoyed a moment to catch its breath after one shock after another, the physics community experienced precisely the opposite.
Like a gift from Santa Claus, a piece of news from the IMCRC drew the attention of almost every physicist in the world.
Professor Luo, secretary-general of the IMCRC, had joined the research group studying the Z Particle's gravitational anomaly.
And the Z Particle gravitational fluctuation formula had actually been solved by Professor Wei Hong of the Hua Academy of Sciences and Professor Daivik of Brussels University?
"Simply unbelievable..."
In the IMCRC café.
Sitting almost exactly where Lu Zhou had last spoken with Senior Brother Luo, Professor Witten stared at the paper in his hands, his face full of disbelief.
"Even from a mathematician's perspective, the contents of this paper are quite brilliant. Its grasp of algebraic geometry and topology makes you wonder..."
Frank Wilczek asked, "Did Lu Zhou help?"
"...No, not that." Turning a page of the paper, Witten could not help praising it. "There's still a considerable gap between this and Lu Zhou's work, but for a researcher in high-energy physics, this level of mathematical mastery is already quite rare. After all, I've seen far too many physics professors casually erase a letter from an equation while calculating a phenomenological model, then pretend nothing happened."
Noticing the melancholy