It's Actually It...

"Oh, right—Yongnian." After finishing with the results of the spiritual root detection, Sun Guozhu suddenly thought of something. He turned his head toward Pan Yongnian and asked: "After your electron beam failed, which particle did you use to excite the spiritual energy?" Pan Yongnian and Ma Heng had originally planned to use a frequency-modulated electron beam. When it failed, they had switched to a particle beam injector, and only after introducing a new particle had the spiritual energy been excited at all. As a physicist, Sun Guozhu felt some curiosity about the identity of that particle. The moment he finished speaking, Pan Yongnian and Ma Heng shot each other a swift glance. Their expressions turned abruptly graver, and Pan said solemnly, "Sun Lao, the beam parameter records indicate that the particle responsible for the escaped signal was... the anti-sigma-minus hyperon." The anti-sigma-minus hyperon? Sun Guozhu was mildly stunned. The anti-sigma-minus hyperon is the antiparticle of a class of charged heavy baryons that carry strangeness. Sigma—pronounced xigema in Chinese—was the very letter behind a hot internet buzzword from a while back: the "sigma male." And tracing the anti-sigma-minus hyperon back to its origins, it had a direct connection with another of Huaxia's academicians, one who had already passed away: Wang Ganchang. In 1958, Academician Wang Ganchang led a team doing research at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, in the Soviet Union, and in the end he discovered the anti-sigma-minus hyperon among forty thousand photographic plates. It was the first antihyperon ever found in the history of human physics, and even today it remains one of the achievements the Republic takes the greatest pride in within the field. What's that? You ask why, if the discovery of the anti-sigma-minus hyperon was so important, Wang Ganchang never won much honor internationally? The reason was simple. In the very first year after he found the anti-sigma-minus hyperon, Wang Ganchang turned down every invitation, returned resolutely to his homeland, and—under the alias Wang Jing, his true name buried for seventeen years—went off to the northwest to take up another earth-shaking undertaking. That's right: Academician Wang Ganchang had also been an old comrade-in-arms of Sun Guozhu's, one of the meritorious scientists of the Republic's Two Bombs, One Satellite. He had never imagined that here, in this setting, Sun Guozhu would hear his old friend's name once more... "And one more thing, Sun Lao." Just as Sun Guozhu sat lost in thought, Pan Yongnian drew another report from his briefcase and held it out to him. "Please take a look at this." Sun Guozhu accepted it by reflex. "This is..." "This is part of the detection report from the transmigration point, recorded when Comrade Lin Yi sent supplies back," Pan Yongnian explained, flipping to a certain page and pointing at its contents. "During the earliest stage of one transmission, one of my students caught a strange transient wave peak." "Comparing it with Academician Ma, every data point of this peak matches almost exactly the phase of the Penning-trap capture-potential response produced at the instant the anti-sigma-minus hyperon activated the spiritual energy..." Sun Guozhu was taken aback again. But this time he quickly collected himself and began comparing the figures against the report. Main peak center frequency: 7.3184 MHz... Rising-edge slope: 13.91 millivolts per nanosecond... Harmonic amplitude fraction: 0.172... As he read on— Beep beep beep— The heart-rate monitor on Sun Guozhu's wrist began to sound its warning. But Sun Guozhu only waved a hand at Pan Yongnian and Ma Heng, signaling the two of them that he was fine, and kept reading. Sure enough. Just as Pan Yongnian had said, apart from a handful of negligible intervals of difference between the two sets of figures—the sort of thing at the seventh or eighth decimal place—the data as a whole were all but completely identical! A dozen or so minutes later, Sun Guozhu finished the entire report, gripped it tightly in his hands, and looked back up at Pan Yongnian. "Yongnian, what do you make of it?" "It is absolutely no coincidence!" Pan Yongnian met his gaze with burning eyes, his tone utterly certain. "A wave peak of this magnitude could not possibly appear twice in independent experiments—let alone with completely identical parameters." "In other words, the anti-sigma-minus hyperon must have played a key role somewhere in the excitation of spiritual energy and in cross-world transmission—and above all in the latter!" The latter? Cross-world transmission itself? Sun Guozhu grasped his meaning at once. "You mean that during cross-world transmission, collisions involving antibaryon number took place inside the channel?" Pan Yongnian nodded hard. "Exactly!" Unlike ordinary particles, the anti-sigma-minus hyperon can hardly ever come into being naturally in an everyday environment. The conditions for producing it are punishingly strict—for instance, the process must create quark-antiquark pairs while baryon number and strangeness stay conserved, and under ordinary circumstances its lifetime is a mere 10⁻¹⁰ seconds. Yet a wave peak betraying the anti-sigma-minus hyperon's presence had been detected during the crossing between the two worlds. Combined with the timing of its appearance, one inference followed naturally: The energy collisions taking place at the microscopic level during two-world transmission must have something to do with antimatter. It was even quite possible that the anti-sigma-minus hyperon was itself a core key to that transmission! That is to say: the spiritual energy reacts in some way with the light ring on the Tianling Realm side, producing anti-sigma-minus hyperons, and only when those hyperons verify successfully, like a password, does the two-world channel formally dock! And more important still—if the anti-sigma-minus hyperon really was the key that opened the lock, then the "rule" that living beings cannot pass through the light ring was very likely tied to it as well! Which meant that so long as the mystery of the anti-sigma-minus hyperon in the transmission process could be deciphered, crossings between the two worlds in the future would never again be limited to all manner of inanimate objects! "..." Even with Sun Guozhu's extraordinary breadth of experience, realizing this left him unable to sit still. "Yongnian, how confident are you in this conjecture?" "Close to 1σ—perhaps a touch lower," Pan Yongnian weighed it over in his mind for a while before giving a relatively conservative figure. "The experimental sample is simply too small. At this point, all we can confirm is that the anti-sigma-minus hyperon played an important role in spiritual energy excitation and in cross-world transmission." "As for pinning down its exact role... I'm afraid that will take research on a major scale." The σ in Pan Yongnian's words was the so-called confidence level, a term common throughout the sciences: a 2σ confidence interval works out to roughly 95.4 percent, and 1σ to about 68.3 percent. Generally speaking, only at 5σ can an event be counted as confirmed or discovered in the physical sense. But as conjectures go, 1σ was already very high. When general relativity was first born in 1915, its confidence stood at only 10 percent; after it explained the precession of Mercury, it reached roughly 30 percent. Even after physicists found that light bends as it passes the sun, confidence in general relativity was still no more than 50 percent—not even 1σ. So it was that Sun Guozhu narrowed his eyes, a flicker of resolve crossing his always kindly face. "That probability is already high enough. I believe we should pursue this in depth." "Here's what we'll do, Yongnian. Write up a detailed report afterward—equipment, supplies, everything you need—and I'll put it through for you under a special review quota." The special review quota was a project channel specially approved by the organization for Dawn Base: essentially, whatever you asked for, you received, and it was handled personally by Chief Lin Huaian himself. Under the base's first-phase planning, only three such quotas had been allotted in the beginning. Of course, judged by the level this conjecture touched, it was well worth the weight of such a quota. Then Sun Guozhu glanced once more at the report, and a thousand feelings rose in his heart. The anti-sigma-minus hyperon, of all things... So it was actually it... But how could it be it... Suddenly, as if a thought had struck him, Sun Guozhu slowly raised his head and looked upward. Though the ceiling and the mountain itself stood in the way, his eyes seemed to cross those barriers all the same, reflecting a field of stars. His old comrade, asleep these many years... Could it be that your spirit watches from above, still holding this country in your heart? Otherwise, why would the particle you discovered with your own hands cross the years and, just as you once did, appear again in the place it was needed most—pointing the way for this land you loved best? ...