The rise of a great power: starting with military industry

Chapter 692 Nobel Prize
During the 7pm news.

Across the country, countless families are watching the 7 o'clock news.

Starting at seven o'clock, all CCTV channels, satellite channels, city TV stations and county TV stations will all be unified as the CCTV 7 o'clock news.

Even businessmen will choose to watch the 7 o'clock news at this time, because it is of great value and can help them discover potential business opportunities, predict risks in advance, and discover policy dividends.

For people within the system, it is even more important to watch the 7 o'clock news, because it is closely related to their own career.

As the time on TV approached 7:30, everyone thought that the two anchors of the o'clock news would say the usual farewell words and start the commercial break, and then people would wait quietly for the weather forecast.

What happened next was a shocking scene, and even the news anchor looked surprised.

"Here's a piece of news."

"Just today, about 10 minutes ago, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the list of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics."

When he said this, the host paused for a second.

In just that one second, he adjusted his mindset and demonstrated his superb hosting skills.

He continued to report in a steady voice: "Because of his 'discovery of new superconducting materials' and his outstanding contribution to the development of superconducting materials in the world, Comrade Liu Tao, who graduated from Beijing University of Technology, is currently the general manager and party secretary of Panshan Group, and a senior party official of Southwest Associated University. As the only winner, he will receive 1000 million Swedish kronor, about 100 million US dollars."

"At the same time, he will also become the first Chinese scientist to win the Nobel Prize for Science for scientific research conducted in China. This is the highest award ever won by the Chinese physics community."

“Nobel Prize.”

It included an introduction to the Nobel Prize, as well as an introduction to the three people who had previously won the Nobel Prize, Yang Zhenning, Li Zhengdao, and Ting Zhaozhong, as well as an introduction to Liu Tao's identity and the honors he had received. The report lasted a full ten minutes.

As the 7 o'clock news was broadcast, the news that Liu Tao had won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics spread at an incredible speed.

The whole of China was in an uproar over this news.

The last time Liu Tao appeared on the 7 o'clock news was when he won the "Turing Award". It was also that widespread publicity that made the "Turing Award" the second most well-known international award in China.

At the same time, Liu Tao's family were watching the seven o'clock news in front of the TV.

When everyone saw the official news report that Liu Tao won the Nobel Prize in Physics, they were all excited.

Even Zhu Lin, who knew about this before, was also very excited when he saw the news.

This is the Nobel Prize, the most well-known international award in China.

Liu Tao had a faint smile on his face.

Excited?
I am very sure of that.

As the highest honor in academia, if someone says that he is not interested in the Nobel Prize, he is either pretending to be cool, or he is just saying the grapes are sour, or he has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But to say that I was too excited, that’s not the case.

For any Chinese scientist who has a sense of patriotism, I am afraid that this Nobel Prize is probably not as good as the highest national awards such as the National Science and Technology Award. Just like Qian Xuesen, he described the most exciting moments in his life as the time when he became one with the country.

Science has no borders, but scientists have nationalities!

Of course, since he won the Nobel Prize in Physics this time, he could also guess the game behind it.

China needs this Nobel Prize because it can inspire national self-confidence and also means that China's scientific research level is catching up with the international level.

Sometimes Liu Tao just couldn't understand why the citizens of a country that had its own industrial system and "two bombs and one satellite" could have no self-confidence. It was simply incredible.

Of course, Liu Tao was a little surprised that the jury awarded him the Nobel Prize for "discovering new superconducting materials".

To be honest, among the papers he published publicly, "the discovery of new superconducting materials" was not the most important achievement, and this achievement was published by him in 1981.

This achievement is of course Nobel Prize-level.

The biggest problem in superconducting applications is how to increase the critical temperature for entering the superconducting state. If it is cooled to the temperature of liquid helium, the cost will be too high. However, after 70 years of efforts since the discovery of superconductivity, the superconducting transition temperature has increased by less than 20K. At that time, Liu Tao took a different approach. Instead of exploring traditional superconductors, he found high-temperature superconductors from metal oxide ceramics. He found that there is superconductivity with a critical temperature of up to 0K in the La-Ba-Cu-35 system.

After Liu Tao published his paper, many countries were quick to respond and competed to manufacture and test various samples, setting off a superconducting research boom. In less than three months, the transition temperature of superconductors was raised to the liquid nitrogen temperature range (using liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium can reduce the refrigeration cost to a few tenths to one percent), and the transition temperature was raised to above 3K.

This is a great contribution to promoting the development of superconducting materials.

But there are many other achievements that are comparable to this one, and some are even more important than this one.

He just smiled at this.

Einstein's greatest achievements are the theory of relativity and quantum theory, but he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to modern physics, especially his elucidation of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Just two days later, another surprise came.

Liu Tao, John B. Goodenough and Stanley Whittingham won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of their research contributions to lithium-ion batteries.

The advent of lithium-ion batteries can be said to be a major invention that has left a significant mark in human history.

The technology of using lithium in batteries was proposed by Whittingham, a technician at an American oil company in 1976. At that time, the structure used titanium disulfide as the positive electrode material and lithium as the negative electrode material. However, the battery composed of titanium disulfide and lithium could not work stably as a secondary battery. Therefore, lithium batteries were put into practical use as non-rechargeable primary batteries such as fishing float batteries and flash power sources for disposable cameras.

In 1980, Goodenough, who was studying lithium batteries, proposed using lithium cobalt oxide as the positive electrode material. In the same year, Liu Tao published a paper proposing a combination of lithium cobalt oxide positive electrode and carbon-based material negative electrode.

Lithium-ion power plants have developed rapidly under the promotion of Liu Tao. In recent years, lithium-ion batteries used in personal devices such as mobile phones and laptops have been put on the market.

The reason for using lithium-ion batteries is that the required voltage has dropped as the device body has become smaller, from 5.5V to 3V. Therefore, compared with using three nickel-cadmium batteries that can only output 1.25V, using a lithium-ion battery that can output more than 3V is more efficient.

Nowadays, lithium-ion batteries are being used more and more widely and are becoming more and more popular in the market.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three of them, representing China, the United States and the United Kingdom, so it can be said that the face of the three countries was taken care of.

This also means that Liu Tao has set a record. He has become the first person since the establishment of the Nobel Prize to win two Nobel Prizes at the same Nobel Prize ceremony.

(End of this chapter)