Voyage of the Stars

Chapter 873 Failure is the key to success...

Even for people who have reached the pinnacle of the fourth-level civilization, it is still very difficult to produce a large amount of strong materials. They can be produced but the output is not high.

It is precisely because of this that humans have only one ship like the Lyra equipped with a star destroyer. If it is not necessary, the time used to produce strong materials to build other warships of the same level can build more than a million ships, so humans have not yet built a second Lyra.

It is also because of the difficulty in producing strong materials that the preparation time for this experiment is long, and it took humans 20 years.

Twenty years is just to produce the consumables required for the first stage of the experiment. Yes, the mirrors made of strong materials have become consumables. After all, they cannot be taken back after they are fired.

And in these 20 years, humans have only produced about a thousand mirrors with various detection equipment installed.

When the experiment was launched, although it was not as concerned by all mankind as the astronomical particle collision experiment, it was also a sensation. Basically, except for some people who have nothing to do, everyone will pay attention to it.

However, the experiment is just the beginning. After the launching ceremony, ordinary people returned to their peaceful lives, because the result of the first experiment was undoubtedly a failure.

Humans did not observe any signs of negative energy.

And the subsequent experiments require a long and boring repetitive process. Of course, this process also requires experimental scientists to constantly adjust the experimental parameters. It is no different from previous experiments. They all use a large number of experiments to obtain big data, and then analyze the experimental data to draw conclusions.

The specifics are naturally more complicated than this, but scientific experiments basically follow a set of procedures. Humans have developed to the fourth level of civilization, so they naturally understand these.

However, the subsequent experiments have told humans that things are not that simple, because all the experimental consumables have been used up, and humans still have not found any signs of negative energy. Humans have not observed any traces of polarons and Bose-Einstein condensed matter being accelerated in the opposite direction.

Experiments have failed again and again.

Although everyone has made sufficient mental preparations, they are still a little upset by this kind of experiment that seems to never see the results. But even so, scientists or the new human government have not given up, and are still organizing the production of new experimental consumables, and then continue to do experiments.

If it doesn't work once, try twice, try three times, thirty times, three hundred times, and if it doesn't work, try three thousand times. If it still doesn't work, try it, thirty thousand times, three hundred thousand times.

For exploring the unknown, as a civilization, sometimes it is very desperate, because everyone doesn't know whether it will succeed if they continue to move forward. No one knows whether they can find the answer by doing 300,000 experiments, or maybe they still find nothing after doing 300,000 experiments.

This feeling is very powerless, but scientific research is like this. Real research on the unknown does not have the progress bar in the game, but a kind of hesitation that cannot see the future.

Maybe a certain road is a dead end, but as a civilization, you don't know that you are walking on a dead end, and you still want to make it through. Similarly, sometimes this road is passable, but you are unlucky and have not encountered the chance of success after doing so many experiments.

This is like drawing cards without a guarantee. You never know whether you will get SSR in the next consecutive draw.

As a new government leading the human race forward, it must have the courage to support it despite all kinds of pressures. Even if it ends up in vain, it must invest even if it knows it is a bottomless pit. After all, maybe it will succeed next time. If it is abandoned halfway through, and it happens to be a feasible path, then it will never be able to progress.

Nature treats all civilizations equally in this respect.

In this way, humans stop and go, and the experiment continues, so that they claim that the star destroyer cannon of the Lyra has not been heard since the experiment began. Every once in a while, it shoots a "strong material mirror" into the dark starry sky, which is a bit like firing a blank cannon.

Repeated failures did not defeat humans, but they also did not allow humans to see success.

This experiment gave humans the feeling of an eternal bottomless pit, and the more it was done, the more disappointed it was. In this case, many scientists finally couldn't help but question this method.

They felt that this path was wrong, and there would be no results if they continued in this way.

The reason they gave was also quite real, probably talking about the so-called speed of light.

As we all know, humans have never really measured the speed of light. The speed of light we are familiar with is 300,000 kilometers per second. If we want to apply this data to all physics and astronomy calculations, it must be based on a premise, that is, the speed of light is constant.

So humans have recognized a fact: the principle of the constancy of the speed of light. As Einstein said, in order to define the validity of time, we must agree on the fact that the speed of light propagation in all directions is the same.

Therefore, from the perspective of optics, humans have not really measured the speed of light, and from the perspective of electronics, humans use lasers to calculate the speed of light, and what is measured is not light itself. So it seems that humans have not really measured the speed of light.

So the human measurement of the speed of light has fallen into a strange circle. If the light itself is used to measure the speed of light, the real equipment cannot measure the one-way speed of light. If the laser is used to calculate it from the side, the subject of measurement is not the light itself, and the distance divided by time must be calculated based on the premise that the speed of light is constant. However, the constant speed of light itself is the premise of relativity.

But what does this have to do with the doubts raised by scientists now?

Of course there is. This experiment says that if the "mirror" is accelerated to near the speed of light, negative energy will accumulate on the mirror surface.

However, the so-called speed is not an absolute speed. There is no absolute speed in the universe. It is all relative speed. A mirror is launched by humans, so it is naturally the speed of light relative to the current speed of humans. But for the mirror itself, it is actually stationary, if the detector on it uses it as a reference.

Even if other objects are used as references, its speed is not the speed of light, such as a planet that is orbiting.

In this way, it is the speed of light only for humans, so even if there is negative energy, it is only negative energy for humans, and it has no energy reaction for other objects that are stationary relative to it.

However, as a cosmic physical quantity, it cannot be only effective for humans, it should be universally applicable. Therefore, this so-called method of accelerating the mirror to the speed of light is not advisable.