Anomalous Deaths
In the early twenty-first century, a series of shocking events struck the global scientific community in rapid succession. Multiple physicists of great renown in particle physics and theoretical physics committed suicide within a short period. These scientists were distributed across different research institutions in different countries, seemingly without direct connections to one another, yet they all shared one commonality — all were engaged in cutting-edge fundamental physics research, particularly work related to particle accelerator experiments.
Among the most notable suicides was Yang Dong — Ye Wenjie's daughter, a young and brilliantly talented theoretical physicist. During her life, Yang Dong had achieved outstanding results in string theory and fundamental physics research and was considered one of the most promising physicists of her generation. Yet she chose to end her life after leaving behind a single note: "Physics does not exist." This message seemed cryptically incomprehensible at the time but was later proven to precisely reveal the essence of the events.
These scientists reached their breaking point because they encountered inexplicable phenomena in their respective experiments. Major particle accelerators worldwide — including CERN's Large Hadron Collider — consistently produced self-contradictory results in high-energy particle collision experiments. Identical experiments run at different times under the same conditions yielded completely different data, and thoroughly verified laws of physics appeared to fail at the microscopic level. For scientists who had devoted their lives to exploring the fundamental laws of the material world, this discovery was devastatingly destructive. If physical laws themselves were unreliable and inconsistent, the entire edifice of science lost its foundation, rendering all research meaningless.
Wang Miao's Encounter
Nanomaterials scientist Wang Miao, though not directly involved in particle physics research, was also drawn into this crisis. Wang Miao began seeing a mysterious set of countdown numbers in his field of vision — wherever he looked, these numbers appeared before his eyes, continuously decreasing. These numbers were not hallucinations, as they even appeared on photographic negatives of pictures Wang Miao had taken. The countdown's existence implied some threat was approaching, yet Wang Miao had no idea what would happen when it reached zero.
Even more terrifying for Wang Miao was the "cosmic flicker" event. One night, Wang Miao observed the entire universe's background radiation flickering in synchronization — all stars, all galaxies brightening and dimming at a unified frequency. This phenomenon was physically impossible, since light from sources at different distances in the universe takes different amounts of time to reach Earth, making synchronized flickering impossible. Yet it happened. This filled Wang Miao with intense terror — some force beyond human comprehension seemed to be manipulating the entire universe.
Wang Miao fell into a severe mental crisis, coming within a step of suicide. It was the gruff directness and steadfast support of retired police detective Shi Qiang that helped him through his darkest moments. With a common person's practical wisdom, Shi Qiang told Wang Miao that no matter what strange things happened, the sun would still rise tomorrow, and life had to go on.
The Truth: Sophon Interference
Behind all of this were sophons developed and launched toward Earth by the Trisolaran civilization. Sophons were intelligent particles created by unfolding protons from higher-dimensional space, etching them into supercomputers, and then folding them back to microscopic scale. Two sophons traveled from the Trisolaran system to Earth at the speed of light, possessing the following capabilities:
First, interference with particle accelerator experiments. Sophons could intervene at the instant of particle collision, altering the results and making experimental data chaotic and self-contradictory. Since the sophons' proton shells were indistinguishable from experimental particles at the quantum level, scientists had no way to detect the interference. From the experimenters' perspective, the laws of physics themselves appeared to no longer hold.
Second, visual interference. Sophons could produce images on a person's retina, which was the source of the countdown numbers Wang Miao saw. Sophons could also manipulate observational data of the cosmic microwave background radiation, creating the illusion of cosmic flickering.
Third, real-time surveillance. Sophons could unfold to a two-dimensional state to cover vast areas for monitoring, or enter any location in microscopic form, transmitting all information on Earth back to the Trisolaran world in real-time. This meant that any human military plans, scientific progress, and strategic decisions were completely transparent to the Trisolaran civilization.
The sophons' ultimate objective was to "lock down" Earth's fundamental scientific development. By continuously interfering with particle physics experiments, the Trisolaran civilization ensured that humanity could not achieve major breakthroughs in fundamental physics over the following four hundred years, thereby preventing the development of technology that could contend with the Trisolaran civilization. The wave of scientist suicides was merely a byproduct of the sophon plan — when the most perceptive scientific minds were the first to perceive the reality that "physics was dead," despair consumed them.
The Blockade of Scientific Frontiers
The wave of scientist suicides marked the true beginning of the Three-Body Crisis. Before this, the Trisolaran threat to Earth had remained in the distant future; the arrival of sophons transformed the threat into an immediate, omnipresent reality. Humanity lost its most precious weapon — the capacity for scientific progress. With fundamental physics locked down, humanity could only develop technology within existing theoretical frameworks over the next four hundred years, unable to achieve qualitative leaps. The cruelty of this scientific blockade lay not in the violent destruction of experimental facilities, but in making human scientists believe at the cognitive level that exploration had reached its end. Yang Dong's final words — "Physics does not exist" — were the most precise expression of this despair.