A genius? I just love studying.

Chapter 252 Respect for the Light in the Crack
At 3 a.m., the third floor of the power building of Chengdu Aircraft Industry Research Institute was brightly lit, like a star that had fallen into the night.

In the laboratory of the internal combustion engine combustion efficiency project team, the air was filled with the bitter aroma of caffeine, the smell of engine oil, and a certain tension of impending transformation—the huge electronic screen on the wall was displaying the 372nd set of combustion test data, and everyone was waiting for that crucial number to appear.

"Stay calm, don't blink." The veins on the hand holding the marker were bulging, and the pen tip poked a small dent into the whiteboard.

Behind him, more than twenty pairs of eyes were fixed on the thermal efficiency column on the right side of the screen. The first three tests showed 54.3%, 51.2%, and 53.7% respectively, which was already far beyond the previous 50% data, but still far from their target of 60%.

Young computer engineer Xiaolin, whose eyes were bloodshot from staying up all night, was now repeatedly refreshing the backend with his fingers smeared with instant noodles: "Brother Sen, the error rate of the turbulence correction term in the theoretical model derivation has dropped to 2%..."

Ding-

The beeping sound of data updates pierced the stagnant air in the laboratory like a fine needle.

The number on the screen jumped to 65.3%!

The first to react was Old Zhou, who was sitting in the corner. This senior expert, who had participated in the development of three generations of fighter jet engines, was holding a thermos cup, and the steam from the cup blurred his glasses.

He suddenly stood up, and the thermos clattered to the ground, rolling to the foot of the table while still steaming.

He staggered toward the screen, his fingers trembling as he tapped the number. "65.3%?! Old Wen, look at this! Is this real?"

Wen Yusen's marker fell onto the lab notebook with a thud, the ink spreading across the words "372nd test" like a flower suddenly blooming.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes frantically, then quickly put them back on. "That's right, it's 65.3%. Xiao Wu, bring up the raw data!"

Assistant engineer Wu Yutong's hands were trembling, and she clicked the mouse three times faster than usual.

A holographic projection rose in the center of the laboratory, and a dynamic simulation of the combustion process covered the entire wall—the orange-red flames were no longer twisting and jumping as before, but presented a near-perfect laminar flow structure. The mixing zone of fuel and air was like a finely sculpted work of art, with even the slightest turbulent vortex obediently swirling.

"Look here!" Kobayashi suddenly pointed to a corner of the combustion chamber in the simulation diagram. "There used to be a turbulent flow here, but now it's completely gone! The new solution to the Navier-Stokes equations has advanced the boundary layer separation point by 0.3 millimeters and corrected the fuel injection angle by 2 degrees... This isn't just a 15% efficiency improvement; it's like completely clearing the blood vessels of the combustion chamber!"

"Old Chen!" Professor Wang from the combustion theory group squeezed out of the crowd, his glasses fogged up. "I told you last week that the boundary conditions of that set of unsteady equations were problematic, but you wouldn't believe me..."

He suddenly stopped, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Now it seems that the smoothness of the Navier-Stokes equations proves our model assumption—turbulence is not the destroyer, but an ordered factor in the new solution!"

"We made it!"

Wen Yusen, Lao Zhou, Lao Wang, and the others exchanged glances. They stopped dwelling on the mistakes they had made before, and all their thoughts boiled down to this one sentence.

A burst of cheers erupted in the laboratory.

Someone tossed their lab notebook into the air, scattering pages all over the floor; others hugged each other, their shoulders bumping against the equipment rack. Suddenly, the usually shy intern, Xiao Lu, exclaimed, "Old...it was worth the all-nighter!"

Wen Yusen wiped his face and felt the wetness on it—only then did he realize that he had been crying without even realizing it.

He walked to the window and looked out at the fighter jets waiting to take off on the runway of Chengdu Airport. The national flag on the tail fins glowed dark red in the night.

Three years ago, when the project was launched, they were questioned at the demonstration meeting that a 5% increase in combustion efficiency was the limit. Two years ago, the first simulation failed, and Lao Zhou slammed his fist on the table and said that this broken equation could not be solved at all. Half a year ago, the team almost disbanded. It was the director who patted him on the shoulder and said that he would give them three more months. Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group could not wait.

Unexpectedly, just a month ago, Professor Chen Hui completed the proof of the smoothness of the solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. That paper was like a key to open Pandora's box, allowing them to clearly see the road ahead. Their experiments, which had been stalled for three years, made breakthroughs one after another in a short period of time.

It's a pity that Professor Chen Hui had to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians; otherwise, if Professor Chen himself had come, he would certainly have performed even better than them.

“Old Zhou,” he turned to the old man who was still staring at the screen, “look at this flame, doesn’t it look like the flame from the tail nozzle of the Qingluan-20?”

Old Zhou took off his glasses and wiped them vigorously with his sleeve. "It's just like it! Back then, when we modified the engine for the Qingluan-10, every 1% increase in combustion efficiency meant an extra 50 kilometers of range. Now it's 65%..."

His voice was hoarse as he said, "Our fighter jets no longer need to worry about fuel anxiety during long-range maritime patrols."

The clock in the lab struck four, and someone brewed a pot of strong tea, the aroma of which mingled with the scent of coffee in the air.

Xiaolin suddenly raised his phone. "I texted home! My mom was saying yesterday that there's nothing to be done about this lousy job of yours. Now I'm going to tell her that the project I'm involved in has made the engines of Chinese fighter jets even more powerful!"

Wu Yutong squatted down to pick up the scattered notebooks, her fingertips brushing over the handwriting on a certain page—written three months ago: "Today's 127th test failed, fuel mixture error 0.1%, combustion chamber temperature fluctuated abnormally. If the smoothness proof of the Navier-Stokes equations can be implemented, it might solve this problem."

She looked up and saw everyone gathered around the simulation, their eyes shining, just like the perfect flame on the screen.

"Thank you all for your hard work these past few days!"

Wen Yusen bowed deeply to everyone in the lab. "Everyone, organize and record today's data. Take a break tomorrow. Once the landing is complete, I'll give you all a week off!"

Another cheer erupted in the laboratory.

At that moment, the laboratory door was pushed open, and a middle-aged man with a buzz cut walked in. It was Duan Xiaofei, the chief engineer of Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group.

Seeing the jubilant scene in the laboratory, he roughly guessed what had happened. He approached Wen Yusen and asked, "How much have you increased your efficiency?"

"65%!"

Wen Yusen had a smug smile on his face, which seemed to indicate that he wanted to take credit.

"Yes, Not Bad."

Duan Xiaofei nodded expressionlessly.

"What does the director mean by this? Does this promotion not meet the institute's requirements?"

Wen Yusen's smile faded, and a feeling of grievance welled up inside him.

They worked tirelessly day and night to achieve such amazing results, only to receive one sentence: "Not bad"?
"Could it be that Shen Fei's side achieved even better results?"

Wen Yusen knew the temperament of his superiors. Such an important project could not possibly be handled by only their team. However, he did not believe that Shenfei's team could achieve better results than this; at most, they would be about the same.

Duan Xiaofei shook his head, "Everyone has worked hard, let's go back and rest first."

It's already 4 a.m., and so many people are still working here. He sees how hard they're working and can't bear to blame them or dampen their enthusiasm.

But these people did not leave. They were also filled with grievances. This was a project they had poured their hearts and souls into for three years.

Wen Yusen became even more certain of his guess. "Director, please tell us who it is. We're not afraid of the gap; we'll just work harder to catch up."

Seeing that Duan Xiaofei's expression wasn't good, his heart skipped a beat. If it wasn't Shen Fei, could it be Xi Fang?
Duan Xiaofei glanced at everyone in the laboratory and saw the resentment in their eyes. He knew that if he didn't explain things clearly, these people probably wouldn't leave.

"A company in Hebei that researches internal combustion engines recently submitted a patent for a solution that achieves a combustion efficiency of 70%." Duan Xiaofei's words were sure to be sensational.

"impossible!"

"how is this possible?"

A collective gasp filled the lab as everyone stared wide-eyed at Duan Xiaofei, trying to catch a glimpse of mischief on his face.

Unfortunately, they were disappointed.

Soon, their faces turned pale.

These people consider themselves the chosen ones, but they never expected that the results of three years of hard work would be inferior to those of a small company.

Just then, Duan Xiaofei's secretary walked in and said with a mix of amusement and exasperation, "We've found out. The company's project was a collaboration with Jiangcheng University. The model was completed by an undergraduate student named Chen Ling'er, who was in the same year as Professor Chen and participated in the IMO."

According to her, this model was improved by Professor Chen.

"Chen Hui?"

Duan Xiaofei was taken aback for a moment, then smiled with relief.

The others in the lab also felt relieved. If Professor Chen were to personally take action, a 70% efficiency wouldn't seem so hard to believe, and it wouldn't be so hard to accept that they couldn't compare.

"Alright, everyone, go back and rest now."

Duan Xiaofei clapped his hands and said, "Tomorrow I will bring Professor Chen Hui's model over. You can take a look and see if there is anything you can learn from it. Let's try to complete the demo construction as soon as possible and put it into production as soon as possible."

With the successful development of the fourth-generation engine, Professor E Weinan's laboratory is producing new materials every day, and now combustion efficiency has achieved an amazing breakthrough. The seventh-generation engine is just around the corner.

Duan Xiaofei was excited just thinking about it.

Each generation has its own mission, but he never expected that his generation would accomplish such tremendous results that would have taken several generations to achieve.

……

"Hui, it's been a long time."

In the restaurant on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel in Philadelphia, Terence Tao approached Chen Hui with two cups of coffee. "It's only been less than a year, and you've really surprised me!"

"Your theory of equations is also very interesting; it might become a new discipline in the future."

These days, Chen Hui has been planning the engineering application of the Navier-Stokes equations in controlled nuclear fusion, while also keeping up with the latest international mathematical advancements. He has naturally read Terence Tao's paper, which is indeed full of ingenuity.

Terence Tao handed one of the coffees to Chen Hui, then waved his free hand, saying, "Just some fancy tricks."

A few months ago, he might have been complacent, but now, he truly felt that his little achievement was insignificant compared to Chen Hui's accomplishments.

“Honestly,” Terence Tao pushed the sugar jar toward Chen Hui, “how did you manage to make breakthroughs in two completely different fields at the same time? The turbulence problem of the Navier-Stokes equations and Yang-Mills’ gauge fields are like the North and South Poles of the mathematical world.”

Chen Hui stirred his coffee, the spoon handle making a soft sound against the cup. "Actually, it's two sides of the same coin."

"The nonlinearity of the Navier-Stokes equations stems from the self-interaction of fluids, while Yang-Mills' nonlinearity arises from the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry—both of them ask the same question: how does a complex whole evolve from a simple local one?"

“Wow,” Terence Tao raised an eyebrow dramatically, “this is much more profound than the lectures on the beauty of mathematics I give to undergraduates at Princeton.”

He suddenly lowered his voice, "But to be honest, when I saw your energy gradient analysis of reconstructing the Navier-Stokes equations using complex geometry on arXiv, my first thought was—did this kid secretly learn Einstein's field equations?"

Chen Hui laughed out loud, "How could that be? It was your arithmetic geometry that gave me some inspiration."

He took out his phone and pulled up a photo of half a sheet of draft paper, densely covered with symbols for topological spaces. "Look," he said, "I embedded the connection form into the curvature tensor of the Navier-Stokes equations and found that the nonlinear terms of both actually share the same algebraic structure..."

“Hui”.

Schulz squeezed in, beer in hand, croissant crumbs stained the cuffs of his dark gray suit. "Don't just sit there drinking coffee with Tao, try this dark beer I just brought back from Berlin—so, what's your next move?"

He leaned closer to Chen Hui, his blue eyes gleaming with curiosity. "I bet five marks that your next step will definitely be to work on the geometry of quantum field theory."

"Professor Schultz, when you used the p-entry Hodge theory to solve the Weil conjecture back then, you weren't so sure which path I would take."

Chen Hui waved his hand and declined Schultz's dark beer. He had always believed that alcohol would damage a mathematician's brain, so he had never touched a drop of alcohol for many years.

“That’s because you and I are different,” Schultz said unconcernedly, tilting his head back to finish the dark beer Chen Hui had refused, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m a hunting dog following a map, you’re a wolf pioneering a new forest—”

He suddenly lowered his voice, "But seriously, you constructed a complex-topological unified framework when you proved the Navier-Stokes equations? My colleague in Bonn was complaining to me yesterday that his related paper, which he had just finished, is now all worthless."

“It’s not that exaggerated.”

Chen Hui is always humble.

"Come on."

Schultz patted him on the shoulder. "Your work is tearing a new rift open in the entire mathematics and physics community—"

He raised his glass, "To the light in the crack!"

"Homage to the light within the cracks!"

Someone spoke up, and Chen Hui turned his head to see Kong Nie raising his wine glass in their direction and giving him a gentle smile. Gromov joined in, and there were even two unfamiliar young mathematicians carrying notebooks.

“Professor Chen,” a girl with a ponytail squeezed through the crowd, clutching a crumpled copy of “Lectures on Partial Differential Equations”, “I’m Emma, ​​a PhD student at Cambridge. Could you please sign this for me?”

She opened the book, and on the title page were densely covered with various derivations of the Navier-Stokes equations. "I was still using your preprint about energy level strings last week, I never expected..."

She kept talking as if she had endless things to say, and even her voice trembled slightly with excitement.

Chen Hui took the pen, wrote his name on the title page, and then, as if possessed, added, "To Emma, ​​there is always light in the cracks of mathematics!"

(End of this chapter)