This scene at the Fermilab research center near Chicago could have sprung from the brain of a novelist.
A sealed envelope that has been securely stored in a vault for the past three years is carefully opened in front of witnesses.
In the envelope there is nothing more than a previously secret eight-digit number code.
A scientist types the code into a keyboard.
The computer starts to work and two minutes later it spits out a series of numbers that the Fermilab researchers can assume is by no means random: 0.00116592061.
This sequence of digits means nothing less than that the scientists now have to rewrite the basic theoretical structure of particle physics, the so-called standard model.
It is arguably the most important discovery in particle physics since the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Geneva research center Cern in 2012.