My IQ has been increasing year by year.

The second basement level had no windows, but the fluorescent lights on the ceiling illuminated the entire laboratory, leaving little shadow.

Zhao Peng pulled over a folding chair with some chipped paint and sat down before starting his work.

He reached up and rubbed his temples, his gaze returning to the CRT monitor.

The screen displays the interface of a material tensile testing software.

The green real-time stress curve extends slowly from left to right, its trend is very stable, and it climbs steadily upwards, drawing a beautiful diagonal line that conforms to Hooke's Law. "It's almost at the critical point."

Zheng Nan stood behind him, holding a disposable paper cup in her hand.

Zhao Peng didn't speak, his fingers resting on the mouse, his eyes fixed on the green line.

"Cheer".

A muffled sound came from the heavy vacuum chamber.

That was the sound of an alloy material sample fixed to a clamp being forcibly pulled off.

Just before the sound rang out, the green curve on the screen suddenly dipped.

The amplitude is very small.

But on this diagonal line that should have flowed smoothly to the top, the sloping burr is quite jarring.

Immediately afterwards, the curve plummeted to zero.

The material is broken.

Zhao Peng pushed the mouse forward, leaned back in his chair, and let out a long breath.

"Group 84"

Zhao Peng looked at the burr on the screen.

"At the exact same location, 0.1 seconds before the yield point, the stress dropped by 0.2 MPa."

Zheng Nan placed the paper cup on the table and looked at the screen for a while.

"The clamp is slipping?" Zheng Nan asked.

"Impossible." Zhao Peng shook his head.

"After finishing the previous set, I used a torque wrench to tighten the bolts of the clamp again, setting the torque to the highest standard. If it slips, there will be horizontal scratch marks on the fracture surface. Look at the fragments we just took out; the cross-section is very clean."

"Was the probe moving around?"

"The probe was replaced with a spare part yesterday afternoon, and the calibration data was done again at eight o'clock this morning. The zero-point drift is less than one ten-thousandth. This drop of 0.2 MPa is definitely not due to the probe's error." The laboratory fell silent.

These newly synthesized titanium-aluminum alloy samples are part of a classified military project that Professor Liu is working on.

The material's properties were all excellent, except for the tensile strength test, where it got stuck on this inexplicable burr.

"Old Zhao, how about we smooth it out?"

Zhao Peng turned to look at him.

"Just use the built-in filtering algorithm in the software."

Zheng Nan lowered his voice slightly.

"By setting a five-point moving average, this drop of 0.2 MPa can be easily smoothed out. Once smoothed out, the line will be perfect. Anyway, the overall trend is fine, and the final value of the fracture limit will be accurate." Zhao Peng remained silent.

His hand was still on the mouse, his eyes fixed on the flawed green curve on the screen.

"Old Zhao."

Zheng Nan pulled up a chair and sat down next to him, his voice very low.

"This batch of titanium-aluminum alloy is a key project. Even if we disassemble and reassemble this tensile testing machine, we might not be able to find the cause of this 0.2 MPa drop." "If we use a five-point moving average, the curve will be smoother, we can hand it in, and the teacher can use it to run the next fluid simulation report..." Zhao Peng's Adam's apple bobbed.

He knew Zheng Nan was telling the truth.

Scientific research often involves compromising with these inexplicable specter data.

As long as the general direction is correct, no one will obsess over a tiny noise point a fraction of a second before the critical point.

But he always felt uneasy about it.

Just as Zhao Peng was about to release the mouse and click on the filtering menu at the top of the software, he heard a screeching sound of a chair being moved behind him. Wang Dayong stood up.

He was holding a thick equipment maintenance logbook as he walked to the operating area.

"Senior Brother Zhao."

Da Yong looked at the screen.

"What was the exact system time when the 84th fracture occurred?"

Zhao Peng paused for a moment, then removed his hand from the mouse.

"Two minutes and fourteen and seven seconds."

Zhao Peng recited a string of numbers, looking at Dayong with some doubt.

"What's wrong?"

"Let me check the bottom line log."

Da Yong didn't explain much, and turned to walk to the backup host next to him, which was specifically used to monitor the status of the underlying hardware.

He typed a few times on the keyboard and brought up the database.

Although he personally modified the vacuum chamber and the base of the tensile testing machine, he couldn't guarantee that the dampers and sensors wouldn't age or loosen over time. When Senior Brother Zhao mentioned the burrs, his first thought was whether there was something wrong with the hardware he was in charge of.

Dayong pulled over a chair and sat down, then precisely dragged the timeline to two minutes and fourteen seconds.

He clicked on the first channel.

Acoustic emission sensor.

A long waveform appeared on the screen.

Dayong zoomed in on the waveform, zoomed in again, and stared intently at the small segment around two minutes, fourteen seconds, and seven seconds.

The lines are flat.

He then opened the second channel.

Data from the micro-vibration level at the four corners of the base.

The parameters of the four channels are neatly arranged on the screen, and the fluctuation range is all within the normal noise range of four decimal places.

Next is the temperature compensation channel and power ripple monitoring.

Dayong stared at the screen for a good three or four minutes.

He repeatedly compared the peak changes of these key channels at that instant, and then casually flipped back to the times when the previous sets of problems occurred. Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan watched him from the side, without saying a word to disturb him.

Dayong's brows slowly relaxed. He let out a long sigh and turned his chair around.

"Senior brothers, come and take a look."

Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan huddled together in front of the backup screen.

Dayong tapped on the few lines of data that he had highlighted on the screen with his finger.

"This is the log from the bottom layer around 2 minutes and 14 seconds ago."

Dayong's tone was calm, carrying a sense of relief after checking for potential hazards.

"The acoustic emission channel did not sound the moment the stress curve dropped."

He looked at Zhao Peng.

"The clamp didn't slip. If it really did slip, even by just a fraction of a millimeter, the high-frequency acoustic sensor would definitely record the screeching sound of metal rubbing together." He then pointed to the next few lines.

"The micro-vibration meter is not moving, the temperature is a straight line, and the entire base is as stable as it gets."

Da Yong didn't preach; he simply presented the objective facts to the two doctoral students.

"I dare not say what's wrong with this material."

Dayong stared at the jagged curve on the main monitor.

"But from the hardware perspective, the device didn't shake, the probe wasn't interfered with, and all external cross-validations were clean."

The laboratory fell silent.

Zheng Nan held the now-cold coffee in his hand, forgetting to drink it. Zhao Peng stared intently at the few lines of zero-fluctuation data that Da Yong had pulled up, his expression changing. Da Yong spoke with great restraint, but as doctoral students at USTC, Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan couldn't possibly be unaware of what this implied. If all the hardware was absolutely stable...

If there is no external interference.

That leaves only one explanation, which is extremely frightening.

"This is a ghost..."

Zhao Peng muttered to himself, then suddenly turned his head to look at the two broken alloy fragments inside the vacuum chamber.

"The machine wasn't lying... it was this material itself that absorbed the force?"

Zheng Nan also gasped.

When a material is subjected to an external limit of tension, a stress reorganization occurs spontaneously within it.

This was beyond their previous understanding of this batch of titanium-aluminum alloy.

"Smoothing can't be done anymore."

Zhao Peng's voice was a little hoarse as he pushed the mouse away.

If they had been quicker and filtered out the burr, they might have inadvertently destroyed a completely new material property.

"But how do we define this?"

Zheng Nan had a headache.

"If we include it in the report, the teacher will definitely ask about the mechanism. We're completely clueless right now, we don't even know why it trembles, how are we going to explain it?" Da Yong stood to the side, looking at his two senior brothers in a dilemma.

He took an old USB drive out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Zhao Peng.

"Senior brother, do you have a copy of the original data for these eighty-four sets of tests in the system?" Dayong asked.

"have."

Zhao Peng took the USB drive.

"You want to copy it?"

"Um."

Da Yong nodded.

"I want to take it back and take a look. The computer screen can only show the trend of a single group. I want to break down all eighty-plus groups of external variables and calculate whether there are any commonalities among them." Zhao Peng didn't waste any words and plugged the USB drive into the host.

The plain text scatter data packets are small and can be copied in a few seconds.

"They're all inside."

Zhao Peng unplugged the USB drive and handed it back.

"If you make any discoveries or need our help, please call us anytime."

Dayong took the USB drive and installed it.

In Hefei in March, the night breeze carries a damp chill.

Dayong walked back to his dormitory at a leisurely pace, the light from the streetlights filtering through the gaps in the camphor trees and shimmering on him. His mind kept replaying the data he had just collected.

I pushed open the dormitory door.

No one's in the dorm, so Xiao Zhuo stayed up all night again.

Since I arrived this semester, I've been staying up late quite a bit. Do professors abroad really exploit their students too?

How come this is different from what I saw in "Yilin" magazine?

While complaining in his heart, Dayong changed into slippers and borrowed Xiaozhuo's computer.

Returning to his desk, he bent down and pulled a large roll of graph paper, the kind he usually used for drawing mechanical diagrams, from a cardboard box under the desk. He then took a pair of scissors and trimmed the edges of the graph paper.

The desks in the dorm room aren't big enough.

Dayong pushed the chair aside and sat down cross-legged on the empty floor.

He used transparent tape to meticulously stitch four or five large sheets of graph paper together, creating a massive drawing that occupied almost half of the dormitory floor. He flattened the four corners with several thick textbooks.

After doing all that, he stood up and turned on the power to the computer tower.

Insert the USB drive and open the first file.

Raw data, without any software rendering, is just rows of boring numbers.

Time, temperature, stretching rate, micro-strain, absolute tensile force.

Dayong held a hardcover notebook, looked down at the screen, and copied down all the environmental parameters from the 84th data set at the exact moment the spike appeared. After copying down one set, he closed it and opened the 83rd set.

He paced back and forth between the desk and the floor.

Copy down a set of parameters, find the scale on the huge coordinate paper on the ground, and mark a point heavily with a pencil.

He didn't use the data analysis software that was already on his computer.

He wants to use the most primitive method to establish his own multidimensional coordinate system.

The horizontal axis represents a combination of temperature and stretching rate, the vertical axis represents deformation displacement, and he holds three different colored pencils to represent the stress drop when burrs appear. Dots fall one after another onto the paper.

Time passed little by little.

Two o'clock in the morning.

Dayong had been bent over for too long, and his back was a little stiff.

He stopped what he was doing, straightened up, put his hands on the floor behind him, and let out a long breath.

Four o'clock in the morning.

The last point of the eighty-four sets of data was heavily marked on the upper right corner of the graph paper by Dayong with a red pencil.

Da Yong stood up.

His legs were a little numb, so he stomped his feet a couple of times and went to the bathroom to wash his face with cold water.

(For those of you with numb legs and feet, I highly, highly, highly recommend this method. It's incredibly effective, and everyone who has tried it says it's great! ~ (一一)) Water droplets dripped down my chin.

Dayong dried his face with a towel and walked back to his dormitory.

He didn't sit down, but stood at the edge of the coordinate paper, looking down at the entire drawing.

When I first started plotting the points, they looked messy and disorganized on the two-dimensional paper, scattered here and there.

Zhao Peng and his team kept changing the room temperature and stretching speed during the test, making the timing of the burr appear random. But now, with all eighty-four points laid out...

When he integrates temperature, deformation, and stress drop amplitude in this complex coordinate system.

Da Yong's breathing paused slightly.

He saw a hidden thread.

These seemingly randomly distributed noise points are not scattered throughout the space.

Conversely, when a specific environmental thermodynamic threshold is applied, all these points fall on a smooth curved surface.

This means that no matter how intense the external pulling is, no matter how the temperature changes, at the moment the titanium-aluminum alloy decides to release the force, a certain energy state inside it is constant. Da Yong stood there and closed his eyes.

The numbers and coordinates on the ground quickly materialized in his mind, shedding their mathematical guise and transforming into incredibly real physical entities. A taut, thick hemp rope appeared in his mind.

The two ends of the rope were being pulled tightly by a tremendous force, becoming tauter and tauter, gradually approaching the edge of breaking.

Just before the entire rope was about to snap, a few extremely fine fibers deep inside the rope succumbed to the pulling force and broke. The breakage of these micro-fibers caused the taut structure to loosen slightly.

The surrounding fibers quickly shifted and rearranged, releasing some of the force that had been building up at that point to the side.

This is the 0.2 MPa stress collapse on the screen.

Da Yong suddenly opened his eyes.

This is neither an impurity nor a random error.

This is an extremely brief slip-reorganization that occurs at the microcrystalline lattice level under extreme stress conditions.

It is a microscopic phase transition.

The atomic arrangement inside the titanium-aluminum alloy was displaced under the intense tearing of the force field.

The moment of misalignment releases the accumulated thermodynamic potential energy, which in turn causes a drop in stress on the macroscopic equipment.

If we can figure out the process of this microscopic phase transition, we can fully understand the fatigue resistance of this material.

Da Yong's heart began to race.

He found the ghost's true form.

He stepped over the coordinate paper on the ground, walked to his desk, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

He took out a stack of blank manuscript paper and a pen from the drawer.

Discovering the laws of physics is only the first step; he now needs to translate them into rigorous physical language.

He wanted to prove to Professor Liu that the rope in his mind was real.

Da Yong held the pen.

In the first line, he wrote down the tensor expression for macroscopic mechanical tension.

Everything went smoothly.

This is stuff from a basic solid-state physics course; he could write it out with his eyes closed.

In the second line, he introduced the gradient variable of ambient temperature.

He paused for a moment, but he still finished writing.

The fundamental laws of thermodynamics were clear in his mind.

We've reached the third line.

Da Yong's pen tip hovered over the paper.

He needs to add the microscopic process he just figured out—the slippage energy transition of character flaws—into the equation.

Furthermore, this microscopic energy transition must be closely coupled with the two macroscopic variables mentioned above.

Dayong tried to write a partial differential equation about dislocation density and placed it on the right side of the equation.

After he finished writing, he stared at the left and right sides of the equation.

wrong.

The dimensions don't match at all.

The left side calculates a macroscopic force field vector, while the right side, when substituted, becomes a microscopic energy density unit.

These two things are not even in the same theoretical framework. It's like using kilograms to measure length, which is utterly absurd.

Da Yong crossed out the line heavily with his pen, leaving a thick black line on the paper.

He changed his approach.

Try to use the partition function from statistical physics to describe those broken fibers.

He pushed for two steps, then stopped.

There are too many variables.

Temperature, strain rate, lattice constant, slip angle of slip planes...

These variables are coupled together in a non-equilibrium state.

If one parameter is changed, the other parameter will also change non-linearly.

He is now facing a tangled mess that requires nonlinear tensor analysis and nonequilibrium thermodynamics to unravel.

He needs an extremely sharp and high-dimensional scalpel.

He wouldn't use that knife.

Dayong stared at the messy, illegible equation on the paper, which was covered in corrections.

My wrists are a little sore, and my palms are sweaty.

He put down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and slumped into the chair.

This was the first time since he entered the University of Science and Technology of China and became a student in the gifted youth program that he had felt a wall so clearly.

He has an unparalleled talent for hardware; all machines are completely under his control.

He possesses an incredibly powerful physical intuition, allowing him to see through the internal workings of materials at a glance.

But he's missing something.

They cannot bridge the gap between engineering practice and theory.

Da Yong raised his head and glanced out the window.

A glimmer of light had already appeared on the horizon.

It's almost dawn.

Da Yong looked away.

He gathered up the scraps of paper on the table, folded them neatly, and put them in the back of the drawer.

Then he bent down, carefully rolled up the huge graph paper covered with red and blue dots on the floor, tied it with two rubber bands, and leaned it against the corner of the wall. He stood up and went to the bathroom.

I turned on the tap and scooped up the icy tap water, splashing it hard on my face.

Water droplets dripped down his chin into the pool.

Dayong dried his face with a towel, changed into a clean coat, and prepared to go to the library.