Chapter 288: Glue Bullets

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The war scenes transmitted to the eyes of various forces through Sophon communication were just as unreal to humanity, like a phantasmal dream transcending reality, so shocking that they were hard to believe.

The Trisolarans had once attacked with overwhelming force, a power that humanity had never seen before. Their technological might was so immense it sent shivers down the spine of humanity, each assault like a tempest tearing through, a torrential downpour sweeping across the entire battlefield.

However, just when the Trisolarans were confident of victory and humanity was sunk in deep despair, a miracle unfolded. Humanity fought back against all odds, reversing the tide of victory and accomplishing an astonishing turnaround.

In this decisive battle for the survival of civilizations, the Wallfacers stood like towering mountains on the front lines. They were not only strategic masters behind the scenes, but also beacons of hope that illuminated the darkness and guided humanity forward.

With their extraordinary wisdom, they meticulously planned brilliant strategic layouts. Each move was well-considered, each decision a stroke of genius that cleverly steered the development of the entire war situation. They were like players above all beings, with everything under control. Bait after bait, calculation after calculation, they ultimately lured the Trisolarans into the final trap.

Humanity's admiration and reverence for the Wallfacers was beyond words. Their names resonated in the heart of everyone, and at this moment, the Wallfacers truly became gods in their hearts, as it was the Wallfacers that turned this war into a defining battle for human civilization.

Although most humans were still puzzled about how the Wallfacer warships managed to destroy the entire Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet in one fell swoop, and knew nothing of the mysterious power of the weapons used. Nor did they understand why the Wallfacer warships could penetrate the defenses like nobody's business, unscathed under the attack of Trisolaran warships, and then annihilate Trisolaran warships completely when closing in.

But all they needed to know was a simple and inspiring fact, that humanity had defeated the Trisolarans.

All of this seemed like a fantasy, with the Wallfacers outsmarting the Trisolarans in strategy, which might not be surprising. Even the final battle was a war that ordinary people could understand, but the current war was completely beyond their comprehension.

It seemed that the Wallfacers were not only adept at scheming but also capable of leading humanity's technology to leap forward.

In a mere 70 years, humanity not only mastered Sophon manufacturing technology and broke the shackles of micro-theory but also grasped advanced technologies that even the Trisolarans had never touched. Especially that kind of absolute defense weapon technology that seemed to be unstoppable, the Trisolarans probably couldn't even hope to match.

And the final use of that kind of super bomb completely overturned human understanding of the boundaries of cognition. According to battlefield feedback, the effective range of this weapon's power could reach an astonishing 3 to 9 million kilometers, with the maximum effective range nearly six percent of an astronomical unit—an unimaginable extent.

Moreover, the operating principle of that super bomb was quite similar to the Trisolaran Sophon Field weapons, which undoubtedly indicated that humanity had precisely predicted the technological development direction of the Trisolarans.

Indeed, this weapon and the Sophon Field weapons were identical in principle, both utilizing the fifth force in the universe in different ways to stimulate the range of the Strong Interaction Force.

The surface material of The Waterdrop is made of a strong force field material, which allows the Strong Interaction Force to spread outward beyond the range of the atomic nucleus, allowing the nuclei to interact with each other.

Meanwhile, the Trisolaran Sophon Field weapons and the super bomb developed by humanity work by reverse manipulation of the force field, causing the Strong Interaction Force to shrink inward, curling up inside the proton.

This causes the attractive Strong Interaction Force between the protons in the atomic nucleus to drop sharply, and at this moment, the repulsive force due to the proton's charge is enough to cause the atom to split.

This universe is as if carefully designed by God, with constants like the fine-structure constant and the strong coupling constant. They are important measures of the intensity of electromagnetic interactions and the Strong Interaction Force, although the strong coupling constant is more complex and won't be elaborated here.

If this value were to change even slightly, even the most minute alteration could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction. And now, the principle behind the weapons used by both the Trisolarans and humanity is akin to fine-tuning these two constants.

Even a one in a billion tweak could cause the atomic nucleus to no longer maintain its former state and split apart.

For this reason, the ability of the Trisolaran warships to sustain nearly 50 hours of attack with limited resources was key. This weapon's characteristic is that it has tremendous power with minimal consumption.

At the same time, this is why humanity's super bomb could impact such a distant range, reaching millions to nearly ten million kilometers.

The use of this technology undoubtedly pushed the war into an entirely new dimension.

Internally, the Wallfacers referred to humanity's super bomb as... the Gluon Bomb.

This was also the weapon envisioned by Ding Yi after his breakthrough in micro-theory within four-dimensional space. After returning to Earth, and after decades of research, this weapon was finally successfully developed and became another trump card against the Trisolarans.

Gluons are the carrier particles for the Strong Interaction Force, acting like messengers shuttling continuously between protons or neutrons to ensure the Strong Interaction Force within the atomic nucleus.

Gluons also have a special binding form, known as glueballs. Glueballs are composite particles tightly bound by gluons interacting with each other. Within a glueball, gluons maintain their structural stability by constantly exchanging and interacting with each other.

Under the influence of the fifth force field, numerous glueballs can combine with this special state of particles to form a massive glueball, comparable in size to atoms. We can collect these giant 'atomic' glueballs, and once their abundance reaches 1% and their mass accumulates to 1 gram, their own decay will trigger a spectacular chain reaction.

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In this chain reaction, all the 'atomic' glueballs would suddenly erupt, generating a new composite exotic force field, which is also a force field that alters the Strong Interaction Force, but it weakens the Strong Interaction.

This force field continuously transformed between gluons and exotic force states, much like the constant oscillation of neutrinos, allowing it to propagate great distances—a phenomenon the Trisolarans called the "Sophon Field."

This composite exotic force field also took on the form of gluons, and humanity called it a gluon bomb.

Its effect, like the Sophon Field, was able to forcefully retract the Strong Interaction Force back into the protons, leading directly to the disintegration of atomic nuclei.

The killing power of this composite exotic force field did not come from energy release, but from its unique field characteristics that induced atoms to undergo spontaneous fission, thus, the range of its explosive impact was extremely vast.

To draw an analogy, humanity's current use of the Sophon Field through gluon bombs is akin to the discovery of nuclear fission and the creation of atomic bombs.

The Trisolaran's gluon field beams are somewhat like the nuclear pump technology that directs the energy of a nuclear explosion. Trisolarans could direct the Sophon Field, a capability far beyond human advancement.

In theory, the Trisolarans should have easily deduced human technological progress, but in reality, they were always fooled by surface phenomena. The Trisolarans always thought that humanity's research on the universe's fifth force was still in the preliminary exploratory stage, let alone the research on gluon bombs.

Comparing it to the invention of the atomic bomb, the Trisolarans thought that humanity had only just discovered natural radioactivity, and the mass-energy equation was like the microscopic theory that Trisolarans desperately tried to blockade.

In scientific research, theory usually precedes experimentation, but humanity's study of Strong Interaction materials had experimentation come before theory. Humanity first created Strong Interaction materials based on the captured Waterdrop, then studied their essential theories.

That's also why the Trisolarans never guessed that humans might possess gluon bombs.

Trisolarans held a significant advantage in technology. Even if humanity possessed gluon bombs, the Trisolarans still believed they could achieve victory.

However, the key was that humanity had mastered a revolutionary defense technology, the principles of which still baffled the Trisolarans. It was this technology that was the true cause of the Trisolaran defeat.

When a key technology makes a breakthrough, it is possible to turn the tables and defeat an opponent who is vastly superior in overall strength.

Without a doubt, this war had become a significant turning point in the histories of humanity and Trisolaris, altering the destinies of both civilizations and reshaping their futures.

Both humans and Trisolarans were profoundly affected by this war. Faced with the brutality of war and the impact of technology, both sides had to reconsider their place and direction of development.

How to proceed in the future became the most pressing question before them.

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On the battlefield, the grand fleet of 1200 Tri-solaran Warships, once like a sea of steel with the ambition of conquest and ruthless dominion, had confidently believed they could easily subjugate humanity.

However, at that moment, the vast fleet had vanished, leaving only 100 warships and 10 Waterdrops, fleeing in panic like frightened birds.

Yet Wallfacer Lin Sen seemed still not ready to let go of these last 100 Tri-solaran Warships.

PS: The gluon bomb is purely a product of the author's imagination and has not been mentioned in any other science fiction works. Its principle is a mishmash of glueball, the fifth force, and the chain reaction of an atomic bomb; it is a weapon of pure scientific fantasy.

A glueball is a peculiar hadronic state composed only of gluons without any valence quarks, as predicted by the quantum chromodynamics model.

On May 2, 2024, in the Beijing Spectrometer III experiment at the Beijing Positron-Electron Collider, China first measured the quantum state properties of the X(2370) particle, with mass, production, and decay properties consistent with the glueball features predicted by the standard model of particle physics.

If glueballs were confirmed by us, it would doubtlessly be a Nobel-worthy achievement, a great contribution by China to the particle standard model.

Furthermore, just the day before yesterday, on June 4, 2024, China's moon exploration program, Chang'e-6, completed the world's first sample collection and takeoff from the far side of the Moon, beginning its journey home.

It's currently returning to Earth from lunar orbit. The scientific significance of this, ordinary people might not care about, nor feel the elevation of international influence, but one point is truly solid.

We are about to send humans to the Moon; space is not far from us!