The paper Lu Zhou had posted on arXiv sent shock waves rippling outward.
Professor Ohanian's astonishment was only a small glimpse of the turmoil sweeping through the physics community at that very moment.
As he hurriedly booked a flight and hotel for the next day and wrote up a leave request for his trip to Shanghai, almost the entire physics community was in an uproar over this astonishing paper.
"This is truly astonishing. I don't know how to describe my amazement right now!"
"As for the paper itself, I think it's too early to give a yes-or-no answer. I think... it would be more appropriate to reserve judgment until after Professor Lu's presentation... that would also show him the respect he deserves."
Professor Frank Wilczek, who had always loved making bets and never shied away from commenting on his colleagues' work, took the unusually cautious approach of remaining silent this time.
Perhaps he had lost too badly betting against Lu Zhou before, or perhaps it was because he had narrowly missed out on his second Nobel Prize. All that uncertainty left him unsure whether he should offer an opinion at all.
Professor Edward Witten, a leading figure in contemporary theoretical physics whose work had earned him a Fields Medal, also expressed his surprise on his personal blog after reading the paper.
And, much like Professor Wilczek, he made no judgment about the paper's correctness... even though many of his colleagues hoped he would.
"Z particles moving from higher dimensions to lower ones opened a passage between dimensions? Straightened out curved spacetime? This sounds like science fiction... does that mean we could use this method to find a truly straight path through a curved universe?"
"Although I can't yet determine whether he's right, I hope he is."
Although the paper Lu