The first piece of equipment to become operational was the Particle Collider—the very device Li Qingsong considered most critical to cracking the Grand Unification Formula.
Dozens of manned shuttles departed from the habitation ships, transporting numerous Clones and Blueprint scientists to the 30-kilometer-long, rod-shaped vessel. Along with the personnel came abundant supplies of fusion fuel, experimental materials, and more.
The large-scale nuclear fusion power plants whirred to life once more. A tremendous surge of power was channeled into the Particle Collider. Through the principles of electromagnetism, this electrical energy was converted into kinetic energy and applied to infinitesimally small protons.
A great deal of energy was inevitably lost during this process. However, given the immense energy supplied by nuclear fusion plants with capacities reaching up to several million kilowatts, the energy ultimately applied to the proton beam was still extremely substantial, even after accounting for significant losses.
And what is the mass of a single proton?
Immense energy, combined with the proton’s extremely low mass, naturally resulted in extreme velocity.
They were instantly accelerated to near light speed. It took them only one ten-thousandth of a second to travel from one end of the Particle Collider to the other, where they violently smashed into a specially designed target.
In that instant, a multitude of Particles were blasted out.
Some of these Particles had pre-existed within the proton, but the majority had not existed at all before the impact.
In the quantum world, mass is not conserved. Particles can be born from energy out of nothing, and likewise, their mass can dissipate back into energy.
These Particles typically exist for only an infinitesimally brief period before instantly transforming into other Particles.
But that was of no consequence. The highly sensitive observation equipment built into the Particle Collider would record every one of these intermediate Particles—even those with lifespans as short as one hundred-millionth of a second—and completely document all their transformations.
Thus, Li Qingsong could study these transformations to investigate the underlying laws of physics.
What was particularly strange was that under such violent collisions, even protons and neutrons would sometimes "melt," releasing their internal quarks and the gluons that carry the Strong Core Force. This formed a peculiar "quark-gluon plasma," which possessed certain fluid-like properties.
In this quark-gluon plasma, the Strong Core Force exhibited properties drastically different from those under normal temperatures. Studying these changes was clearly instrumental in probing its fundamental nature and, ultimately, unifying it with the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces.
Of course, achieving this was impossible at the present stage. All the research Li Qingsong was conducting now was simply to build a foundational base of scientific knowledge.
If unifying the Strong Core Force was the final exam, then the collision experiments Li Qingsong was currently conducting were like studying the material for middle school, or even elementary school. He had to accumulate knowledge at a lower level, progressing bit by bit, to eventually have a chance of passing.
Proton collisions were just one application for the Particle Colliders. In other colliders, Li Qingsong was also smashing together heavy ions, neutrons, electrons, and positrons, among many other Particles. The methods of collision were just as varied. Some involved smashing a beam into a fixed target, while others collided two beams head-on. Some used circular accelerators, whipping Particles around for many laps until they neared the speed of light before impact, while others were more straightforward, direct collisions.
For the telescope array, Li Qingsong deployed tens of thousands of large telescopes outside the main fleet. He let them float freely in space, maintaining the same speed and trajectory as the fleet while they formed into an array. This configuration granted them an unimaginably large aperture, which he then used to begin studying celestial objects in Deep Space.
The evolutionary timescales of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and even large-scale cosmic structures—such as star clusters, galaxy clusters, superclusters, and cosmic filaments—are typically measured in hundreds of millions of years.
It was obviously not feasible to simply fixate on a single star or galaxy, waiting for it to slowly evolve in order to study the principles behind that evolution.
Fortunately, the Cosmos is vast and contains a great multitude of celestial bodies. And with such a large population, it was a certainty that it would include every type of star, galaxy, and cluster, representing every stage of their life cycles.
They were like a cosmic museum of specimens. By observing them, one could survey every evolutionary stage of the Cosmos, from its very beginning to the present day.
Light travels at light speed, covering a distance of one light-year in one year.
The Cosmos is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Therefore, if Li Qingsong wanted to study the state of celestial bodies from 13.8 billion years ago, at the very dawn of the Cosmos, he need only observe celestial objects approximately 13.8 billion light-years away.
This is because the light emitted by an object 13.8 billion light-years away would take precisely that amount of time—13.8 billion years—to reach Li Qingsong’s fleet.
Thus, what he was seeing now was those objects as they were approximately 13.8 billion years in the past.
There was, of course, a problem: the objects were so distant that their light was incredibly faint.
This necessitated enhancing the telescopes’ performance and increasing their aperture just to be able to see them.
Fortunately, Li Qingsong’s array technology was sufficiently advanced, and he possessed more than enough large—and even giant—telescopes. This allowed him to just barely make them out, enabling him to begin his research and gather information on the state of the early Cosmos.
The Gravitational Wave telescopes also commenced operation.
Gravitational Waves are ripples in spacetime. When a Gravitational Wave passes by, the dimensions of an object will change ever so slightly.
Take the two arms of a Gravitational Wave Detector, for example. When a Gravitational Wave passes through, one arm will shorten while the other lengthens.
This change affects every object. Spaceships, Warships, even planets and stars—they all undergo this transformation.
But the change is so minuscule that only a Gravitational Wave Detector can perceive it.
This is because a beam of Laser light constantly reflects back and forth within the arms of the Gravitational Wave Detector.
The arms of Li Qingsong’s Gravitational Wave Detector were 15 kilometers long. For each measurement, the Laser beam would make ten thousand round trips, covering a total distance equivalent to 300,000 kilometers.
Let’s assume a Gravitational Wave event causes a change in the Detector’s arm length equal to one ten-thousandth of a proton’s radius—a change far too small to be observed directly.
By having the Laser make ten thousand round trips, this change is effectively amplified ten thousand times. This brings the total change to the radius of a single proton, which can then be perceived by high-precision instruments.
In this way, the Gravitational Wave Detector could use the perceived change to investigate the phenomenon behind the event. It could even search for an optical counterpart responsible for the wave, then use optical telescopes for direct observation to gather even more information.
Li Qingsong possessed many such Gravitational Wave Detectors. At that moment, all of them entered full-power detection mode, employing a variety of methods and techniques to collect information on Gravitational Wave events originating from the depths of the Cosmos.