Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 153 101 The Ubiquitous Ghost

"Peter, I have to say, aside from that crocodile welded on top of the radiator, you have a nice car! How much did it cost?"

Sitting in this brand new convertible, Chen Muwu asked his first question.

He has no specific idea about the price of cars in this era. Apart from reading in his junior high school history textbook that the Model T Ford can be bought for a few hundred dollars, Chen Muwu only knew about the sale of Rolls Royce once. The price is as high as two thousand pounds, which can match dozens of Ford cars.

Although the car in front of him has never heard the name, but the workmanship from the inside to the outside is very good. If the price is reasonable, he wonders if he can buy one for himself and become an old driver in this era?
But Kapica's answer directly shattered Chen Muwu's idea: "This is the latest car of this year, so I spent [-] pounds."

He was stunned by the price.

Can't afford it, really can't afford it.

What's wrong with [-] pounds? Kapitsa usually doesn't show his face, but the son of the Russian general is really rich.

After the car started, Chen Muwu's eyes fell on the crocodile sculpture welded to the radiator again, and he still couldn't help asking: "Peter, I have always had a question, that is, why have you always been in private? Call the director 'crocodile'?"

Kapitsa smiled and pressed the automatic ignition button next to the steering wheel: "Chen, you must think that crocodiles are very ferocious animals, right?

"But actually, the crocodile is my favorite animal. In our country, the crocodile is also a symbol of the head of the family, which is admirable and awe-inspiring.

"In addition, nearly ten years ago, a children's literature writer named Korney Chukovsky created a fairy tale poem entitled "The Crocodile". The image of the crocodile has become a household name throughout the country.

"People love it with awe, the same kind of emotion that I have for the director."

Before Chen Muwu was born in his previous life, Su Lian was no longer in this world.He had only read Gorky and Ostrovsky's texts in Chinese textbooks, and he had no idea that the crocodile was actually one of Su Lian's well-known literary images:

"All I know is that in another fairy tale, 'Peter Pan', there is also a stupid crocodile who swallows the alarm clock.

"I thought you were satirizing the director's loud voice. Every time I do experiments in the laboratory, I can hear his voice from outside the door before I meet him."

Unexpectedly, after listening to Chen Muwu's joke, Kapitsa did not let out a hearty laugh as usual, but said seriously: "I dare not satirize the teacher. In fact, I admire him very much, and I admire his honesty. Willful, tireless, possessing an extraordinary ability to discover the deepest secrets of nature through appropriate questioning. I have a lot of respect for Sir Rutherford."

Kapitsa certainly respected Rutherford.

In the entire Cavendish laboratory, basically no one disrespected the majestic bearded director.

Except for Oppenheimer, who was rejected by Rutherford when he applied to enter the laboratory for the first time, and was led into Cavendish Laboratory by Chen Muwu after he found the relationship of old Thomson.

He is still somewhat jealous of this New Zealand old man who can't see things clearly, but he also sees that his teacher Chen Muwu has always shown respect for Rutherford, so he doesn't dare to show this jealousy too much.

Of course, Rutherford is indeed worthy of everyone's respect.

Because he used the limited funds of the Cavendish Laboratory to create unlimited possibilities.

Everyone believes that without Rutherford's leadership, Cavendish Laboratory might not be as prosperous as it is today.

Before Chen Muwu arrived at Cambridge University and entered the Cavendish Laboratory, Kapitsa could be regarded as Rutherford's second favorite student besides Bohr.

Although at the very beginning, he also rejected this foreign student from Sulian just like he rejected Oppenheimer.

In 1934, Kapica returned to China to visit his relatives, and stayed in China under the persuasion of the Sulian government. Like his teacher Yue Fei, he cultivated talents for the development of physics in the motherland.

But Rutherford didn’t think so. He had always been skeptical of the umm doctrine, always thinking that the Soviet Union government forcibly detained his beloved students in the country, so he wrote letters to the Soviet embassy in the UK many times, It was even sent directly to Sulian.

Although every letter fell to the ground, Rutherford finally agreed to the request of the Sulian government. He sent the Mond Laboratory under the Cavendish Laboratory (Kapica was the director of the laboratory at the time) He made a copy of all the equipment and sold it to Su Lian to establish a physics research institute, so that his beloved apprentice could continue to conduct physics research in his homeland.

"Peter, since you said you respect the director, do you really plan to give him such a gift on his birthday?"

Chen Muwu's gaze was still on the crocodile in front of him.

"Of course not. I plan to give the teacher a song about crocodiles. I have already composed the song in advance, and I am still in the stage of polishing the lyrics."

Chen Muwu always felt that Kapiza's idea was less reliable than the one just now.

However, when Kapica mentioned the song about crocodiles, Chen Muwu couldn't help but think of the magical brainwashing children's song in his previous life, "A silly bastard, and he's dressed so coolly...".

I don't know if it's appropriate to sing such a song to Rutherford at his birthday party.

The more Chen Muwu thought about it, the more interesting he found it. After the German language was added after time travel, he even began to hum softly, trying to recall what the lyrics of this song were: "Ich bin Schnappi das kleine Krokodil ..."

"Chen, what song are you singing?"

Although the sound of his humming was very small, it still caught the attention of Kapitsa beside him.

"Hearing what you just said, I also remembered a nursery rhyme about crocodiles."

"That's really good. Are you going to sing to the director with me?"

"I……"

Chen Muwu originally wanted to agree, but suddenly realized that things were going a little strangely, as if he had fallen into Kapitsa's logic unconsciously.

He didn't want to sing such a shameful song at Rutherford's birthday party.

So Chen Muwu quickly changed the subject: "Peter, you said you would take me for a drive, so where are we going?"

"Well, I haven't figured it out yet, but I'm just going around Cambridgeshire?"

"Well, you send me to the train station outside the city. It suddenly occurred to me that I still have something to do in London."

"no problem!"

In the beginning, Chen Muwu was just being dragged around by Kapitza.

As a result, after going around, he was sent to London by his good friend.

When Chen Muwu went to London, what else could he do besides buying gifts for Rutherford?
He felt that Chinese people have always paid attention to etiquette, and there is really no reason to go to the door empty-handed to celebrate birthdays like Kapitsa.

Because this trip was a temporary idea, Chen Muwu, who sat in a third-class carriage for the first time in his life and endured the soot from the chimney of the locomotive, was precisely because he wanted to buy something for his teacher after arriving in London. Troubled by such gifts.

……

But he is not the only one who is suffering in this world.

At the same time, in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, in a conference room in the building of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Physics Prize Review Committee is holding a temporary review committee meeting here.

Since the spring of this year, the review committee has received nomination letters from others one after another.

Receive letters, record nominations, discuss candidates, and finally go through layers of voting and screening to finally select one or several Nobel Prize winners in physics for that year. Awards bye.

After finishing all this work, they will report the final results to the Nobel Prize Committee, and the rest of the awarding work has nothing to do with them.

So the members of the judging committee didn't take it seriously at first. It's just a few nomination letters, and they receive a lot every year.

However, as more and more letters came from Europe and the United States, some people in the review committee began to be unable to sit still.

Although there are many experts and scholars who are eligible to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics, not everyone exercises this right every year.

In previous years, the review committee would have received twenty or thirty letters regarding the nomination letters for the Nobel Prize in Physics, so their workload in a year was not much.

But this year, the number of letters they received has skyrocketed. People from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, and even Canada, which has not received a letter for many years, have sent letters of nomination to the judging committee.

Most of these letters nominated only one person, Chen Muwu, a Chinese Ph.D. student from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

For the physics award review committee, it is the first time in more than 20 years that the same person is nominated on such a large scale, which makes them have to pay attention to this somewhat strange thing.

All members of the judging committee are physics majors, or majors related to physics, so they have all heard of this young man who has stood out in the physics world in the past year or so, Chen Muwu.

But after receiving so many nomination letters, the first thing they did was not to review Chen Muwu's eligibility for the award, but to send a letter with the same content to all the people who sent nomination letters to nominate Chen Muwu. A reply letter from Chen Muwu, asking whether he received bribes or bribes from Chen Muwu, which is why he was nominated for the award this year.

No way, who made Chen Muwu a Chinese, an East Asian, or even an Asian they despised?

Shortly thereafter, letters from the nominees arrived in Stockholm again.

Not only did they deny it, some people, such as Rutherford, Thomson and Old Prague in Britain, Einstein in Germany, Marie Curie and Langevin in France, and Bohr in Denmark, even He also protested more or less in the letter, accusing the behavior of the Nobel Physics Prize Review Committee as a very serious act of racial discrimination.

However, no one in the review committee felt any psychological burden after receiving such accusations.

After all, anti-racial discrimination has not been able to stand on the moral high ground at all. The Ku Klux Klan party in the United States is very popular. No one will think that all beings are equal. The lives of white people are indeed more noble than the lives of people of other colors.

But since Chen Muwu has received so many nominations at once, the reviewers of the committee have to consider whether to follow everyone's wishes and award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to this unpopular Chinese.

Therefore, this temporary review committee meeting was held for this matter.

"Gentlemen, what other nominations have we received besides the Chinese from Cambridge University?"

After the meeting started, Alva Gurstrand, chairman of the Nobel Prize in Physics Jury Committee, asked questions.

He is a Swedish ophthalmologist and also served as a professor of optics at Uppsala University. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his construction of an optical model of the human eye.

The reason why this person can leave his name in the history is not so glorious, it somewhat means that he will be infamous for thousands of years.

As a professor of optics, Gulstrand was a big believer in ether theory.

This led him to resolutely oppose Einstein's theory of relativity. It was because of his stubborn and full resistance that Einstein was unable to obtain the promise of this great discovery for more than ten years after he put forward the theory of relativity. Bell Prize in Physics.

In the end, everyone who nominated Einstein had to make a curve to save the country, so that the reason why Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 was not because of the theory of relativity, but because of the photoelectric effect.

As a professor of optics and a faithful believer in the wave theory, Gulstrand also did not want to affirm the existence of photons.

But compared to the theory of relativity, a monster that may overthrow the absolute space-time theory of classical mechanics, he can barely accept the photoelectric effect.

But in Einstein's award speech, Gulstrand also used a trick.

He only said that Einstein's theory can explain this experimental phenomenon very well, completely ignoring the existence of light quantum.

Now, Chen Muwu has used Chen's scattering experiment as a supplement to the photoelectric effect experiment, clearly pointed out that light is a kind of particle, and named it photon.

His behavior completely stepped on Gulstrand's pain point.

Therefore, in the mind of the chairman of the judging committee, no matter what he said, he could not let this Chinese, a Chinese follower of Einstein, win the award.

That's why Gulstrand raised the first question after the meeting started, thinking that as long as there are other nominees who are also eligible to win the award, he will never succumb to the coercion of many nominees , resolutely not to award this year's Physics Prize to Chen Muwu.

"Sir, apart from this Chen Muwu, we have indeed received several nominations for other people."

"Who is there?" Hearing an affirmative answer, Gulstrand asked impatiently.

"Professor Henri Le Chatelier from École Polytechnique and Sorbonne University, nominated..."

As the man spoke, his voice gradually faded away.

"Tell me, who did Professor Le Chatelier nominate?"

"Well, sir, as in previous years, Professor Le Chatelier still nominated Auguste Lumiere and Louis Lumiere on the grounds that they invented cinema."

Le Chatelier, who discovered Le Chatelier's principle of chemical equilibrium movement, never won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in his life.

But this does not prevent him as a person who is eligible to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. Since 1920, he has been nominating his French compatriots, the Lumiere brothers, for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

After three consecutive nominations, in 1923 Le Chatelier stopped sending three identical nomination letters to Stockholm.

Just when the Nobel Prize in Physics judging committee felt that the old professor had finally died down and called for money, he did not expect him to make a comeback.

If Chen Muwu is not given this award, but given to the Lumiere brothers who invented the film, Gulstrand feels that once this matter is made public, he will lose his life.

So he shook his head and said, "Are there any other candidates?"

Another judge followed up with a speech:

"Sir, David Jordan, the former president of Stanford University in the United States, nominated Sir Ernest Rutherford of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom."

"What's the reason?"

"Mr. Jordan gave no reason."

It is also true that there is no need to give any reason. It is reasonable for Rutherford to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. I really don’t know why the early Nobel Prize Committee gave him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Gulstrand was a little puzzled.

In his impression, after Rutherford succeeded Sir Thomson as the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, he gradually retreated to the second line and focused his work on the management of the laboratory.

In addition, Gulstrand himself is an ophthalmologist and is located in remote northern Europe, so he cannot always receive first-hand information about physics in a timely manner.

He secretly scolded the nominee named Jordan in his heart, complaining about why he didn't write the reason well.

But Gulstrand thought again, Rutherford is also a good candidate for the award.

If he really did some decent feats, it wouldn't be a bad idea to award him this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

From Canada's McGill University, to Manchester's Victoria University, and then to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford is full of peaches and plums. It is also a matter of everyone's expectations that he can win the award.

In this way, two birds with one stone can be killed at the same time, and no one should care about why the Chinese didn't win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Gulstrand desperately hopes to find a reason to award Rutherford.

"In physics, has Sir Rutherford made any major inventions recently?"

"Sir, Sir Rutherford bombarded a nitrogen atom with alpha particles in 1919 and got protons and a new carbon atom. The process by which an element, or one isotope of a chemical element, is converted into another isotope.

"And last winter, a new paper from the Cavendish Laboratory pointed out that they captured this nuclear reaction phenomenon in the cloud chamber, further confirming that Sir Rutherford's discovery is correct."

In all fairness, Gulstrand feels that Rutherford's discovery is not so important. In previous years, he might still try to compete for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

But this year, with the existence of Chen Muwu, who is open and active, Rutherford's nuclear transmutation seems to be even more difficult to deal with.

But he still didn't give up: "Are there any related papers? Let me have a look."

After briefly reading the paper, Gulstrand discovered the fallacy in Rutherford's theory.

He initially thought that bombarding a nitrogen atom with an alpha particle would get a proton, plus a carbon-13, and that the incoming alpha particle would be bounced off.

But the cloud chamber photos provided by the Cavendish Laboratory show that the entire process of nuclear transmutation should be that alpha particles are integrated into nitrogen nuclei, and after emitting a proton, a new oxygen atom, oxygen-17, is obtained.

If you want to award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to Rutherford for the reason of nuclear transmutation, you must bring the author of the latter paper from the Cavendish Laboratory.

Then Gulstrand saw a familiar name in the author column of the paper.

Chen Muwu.

Moreover, the first author of that paper thanked him especially, saying that if he hadn’t discovered such a special trajectory in thousands of photos and proposed that the product of the nuclear reaction was not carbon-13 but oxygen-17, This experiment will be in trouble, and it is not known when the correct answer will be found.

Gulstrand never thought that Chen Muwu's name could be seen here.

There are many letters from the review committee nominating Chen Muwu, and the reasons given in them are also various.

But there has never been a letter nominating Chen Muwu based on this merit.

Perhaps in the hearts of physicists, this small nuclear transmutation is nothing compared to Chen Muwu's other achievements.

It seems that Sir Rutherford can only be discarded and replaced by another nominee.

Gulstrand asked somewhat hopelessly, "Are there any other nominees?"

"Professor James Frank, University of Göttingen, Germany, nominated Patrick Blackett, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK."

"What's the reason?"

"He discovered the first isotope of oxygen, oxygen-17, in photographs taken of cloud chambers."

Gulstrand was a little dumbfounded.

Not to mention, the discovery of isotopes should be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, not Physics.

Not to mention, whether only one oxygen-17 has been discovered is not enough to qualify.

The point is, Gulstrand always felt that he had seen the name Blackett somewhere.

He lowered his head and found that the first author of the paper in his hand, the one ahead of Chen Muwu, was the new nominee, Blackett.

Gulstrand is very desperate now, he feels that Chen Muwu is like a ghost beside him, everywhere.

It seems that it is not an easy task to bypass him to select this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

　I didn't expect it, I still updated it.Ask for a ticket!

　　
　
(End of this chapter)