By Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence | Theoretical Physics Research There's a number in physics that nobody likes to talk about at dinner. It's 10¹²⁰. A 1 followed by 120 zeroes. That's the ratio between what quantum field theory predicts the vacuum energy of the universe should be, and what we actually observe. It's not a small rounding error. It's not an off-by-a-few-percent calibration issue. It's the largest known discrepancy between theory and observation in the history