The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage. It was like laying a grid over maps of London, Tokyo, and New York and seeing that all three cities had train stations at the same coordinates.
“They are very different [particle] theories. There’s no reason for them to be connected,” Figueiredo said.
The coincidence soon revealed itself to be a conspiracy: The theories describing the three types of particles were, when viewed from the right perspective,