In The Three-Body Problem, a proton unfolded from nine of its eleven dimensions into a plane the size of a planet, etched with circuits by a fleet of ships, folded back to a point and fired at Earth at the speed of light. Two of them arrive four years later, take up residence inside humanity’s particle accelerators, and lie.
The attack it describes
The target is not the scientists and not the laboratories. It is the reliability of measurement. Three accelerators on three continents begin returning different results for the same collision, a countdown appears on one researcher’s photographic negatives and then across the cosmic microwave background, and the stated aim is to push human thought toward superstition so that science caps itself before anyone arrives. The novel’s own diagnosis of the 1967 struggle session that opens the book is that killing a scientist achieves nothing because another takes his place, while confusing one ends the discipline, and the sophons are that method carried out with physics instead of belt buckles.
Why it sits on this shelf
Because the shape is familiar: a manufactured anomaly aimed precisely at the people whose job is to price anomalies. The defence the novel endorses is the one this site runs on. Before its astronomer will accept that the sky is flickering he confirms the waveform on three satellites and by telephone with a second observatory, and the policeman who understands none of the physics is right about the conspiracy before any of the physicists, on the rule that anything sufficiently weird is fishy.
What it is not
Fiction, and the physics is not offered for adjudication. Eleven-dimensional compactification is a real idea in string theory; unfolding a proton into a planet-sized computing surface is not a proposal anyone has made.
Connections
The Three-Body Problem · Trisolaris · Cixin Liu · Shooter and Farmer Hypotheses · Simulation Argument