The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started to wonder if the math could be interpreted physically. Eventually, he realized that it seemed to describe a new type of particle: one that’s neither a matter particle nor a force-carrying particle. It appeared to be something else altogether.
Wang was eager to develop the accidental discovery into a full theory of this third kind of particle. He brought the