A sublime coincidence slipped by unnoticed last month. While audiences were thrilling to premieres of Tim Burton’s film
Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice steps into a strange world where everything is “contrariwise”, physicists in Hungary announced they had possibly found the key to an unseen portion of the universe.
The results, which are a talking point in laboratories the world over, are remarkable because they might point to the existence of a fifth fundamental force. The current model for nature’s physical laws allows for four forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear interaction, the weak nuclear interaction, and gravitation. A fifth would, literally, be a force for revolutionary change.