Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 77: Physics, LV3!

　　In the field of theoretical physics, as research in this area becomes more systematic, it is worth discussing who deserves more credit. According to the practice of the Nobel Prize, the medal will not be awarded to the discoverer of the particle or the researcher who operated the Hadron Collider, but is more "inclined" to be awarded to the proposer or perfector of the theory.

　　This is because, in the prevailing academic view, the work of the first two is important, but not decisively so. (Not absolutely, e.g., when the author of the theory is dead or has won an award, or has designed a pioneering experiment, or has made an outstanding contribution.)

　　And it is the latter work that is of decisive importance.

　　It is on the basis of this rule that the 2013 Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Higgs and François Englert, the authors of the theory of the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson, which was proposed in the 1960s. As for the CERN researchers involved in the experiments, although everyone gets credit, there has never been a precedent for the Nobel Prize to be awarded to an institution, and it is unlikely that so many people would share the prize money.

　　Another example is that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations was discovered in the Daya Bay reactor, but it was Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Professor Arthur McDonald of Canada who were nominated for the 2015 Nobel Prize.

　　One might ask, in that case, wouldn't it be a good idea to just make up a fictional particle and set up a whole bunch of various physical properties about it, and then wait until it's discovered by someone else, and then win the prize?

　　The first thing that must be said is that this is certainly possible.

　　And that's exactly why the Arxiv website and the major theoretical physics journals saw a spurt of submissions after the 750 GeV data was published, because a lot of people were betting on this piece of theory.

　　However, it's possible that it's possible, and it's hard to say how likely it is.

　　A brand new theory, or a novel model of physics, to be accepted has to be at least theoretically valid and logically autonomous. For example, although superstring theory is becoming more and more marginalised in theoretical physics, no one has been able to falsify it theoretically.

　　And if you can't be logically autonomous, even if you name the particle that you discovered 'the Higgs particle', or claim to have found 'gravitational waves', you won't get any academic recognition at all ......

　　If this particle is found to be a supersymmetric particle, then the Nobel Prize will likely go to Hironari Miyazawa, who proposed supersymmetry theory and supersymmetric particles in 1966, or to the perfector of the theory. As for Orion, is there any possibility of the prize being awarded?

　　Of course there is.

　　Not only Orion, but also Frank Wilczek, who has already won the prize once, has a chance.

　　Because it's not just the means of observation that are constantly being refined, but also the theories that correspond to them.

　　The 750 GeV, for example, was unexpected by supersymmetry theory and the Standard Model, so unexpected that it could even accommodate a completely new "Wilczek-Orion" or "Orion-Wilczek" model to explain this new phenomenon.

　　The amount of work involved, however, is much more difficult than solving a mathematical conjecture, and it is basically impossible to do it by oneself. This was true for both Frank Wilczek and Orion.

　　So, the day before yesterday, Frank sent him an invitation to participate in this imaginative subject. The two agreed to exchange emails and collaborate on this theory, co-signing it.