As soon as the time reached six o'clock in the evening, the heads of various departments of the Cavendish Laboratory began to go to the laboratories they were responsible for to announce that six o'clock had arrived and asked everyone to stop working.
This rule of getting off work on time also originated from Rutherford, the current director of the Cavendish Laboratory.
He once said that whoever fails to complete the work that must be completed before six o'clock, there is no need to delay it any longer. He hopes that everyone will go home immediately, think carefully about the work done today, and then think carefully about the work to be done tomorrow.
If someone is stubborn and stays in Cavendish to conduct experiments after six o'clock, he will probably be caught by Rutherford who occasionally wanders around the laboratory after dinner on a whim, and then be scolded. A bloody mess.
After finishing the work, Kapitsa took Blackett to the conference room to find Chen Muwu, with a gloating expression on his face: "Chen, this is your first time being taught a lesson by a crocodile. How did it feel?"
Chen Muwu was not too depressed, because Rutherford's words were a wake-up call and woke him up: "It's okay. Although the director spoke a little louder and his tone was a little heavier, I know that he It’s for my own good.”
"Tsk, tsk, tsk..." Hearing this answer, Capita couldn't help but click his tongue, "Speaking of which, why did he catch you and curse you when he just returned to the laboratory today?"
"Because the director went to the conference room and asked me what I was doing recently, and I told him that I thought electrons were also a wave."
Kapitsa, who had been chattering all the time, and Blackett, who had been silent all the time, coincided with the fact that their eyes widened after listening to what Chen Muwu said.
Kapitsa was the first to exclaim, his voice even louder than Rutherford's: "What do you mean, electrons are a wave?"
"Yes, I had such a feeling somewhere, but I was actually not sure, so I proposed it to the director. I wanted to do an experiment to verify it, but I was rejected without mercy." Chen Muwu smiled bitterly. Said.
"Chen, to be honest, although you are indeed a genius compared to us, I always feel that this time, you seem to be a bit too whimsical."
"Let's go, eat, eat, George has been waiting for us for a long time." Blackett tried to smooth things over next to him.
The trio now regarded Ye Gongchao's place as a place to satisfy their cravings and have a good meal, and they would go to Magdalen College every now and then to have a meal.
In Magdalen, Chen Muwu heard another piece of news from East Asia from Ye Gongchao, which made him very happy.
On September 1st, a major earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale occurred in the Kanto region of a certain country, which includes the two major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama.
Although it was wrong to joke about natural disasters for fun, and he might be scolded as inhumane, Chen Muwu couldn't help but want to laugh.
According to the post-disaster statistics of a certain country's government, the number of dead and missing people in this earthquake exceeded 140,000, of which more than 40,000 died of baking or suffocation in the fire in Tokyo after the earthquake.
After learning this specific number, Chen Muwu even came up with a hell joke.
To say that the immunity of the people of this country is really poor, they had already been collectively immune to the fire so many years ago. Why are they still unable to escape General Li Mei's barbecue after twenty-two years?
Those who do unjust things will be punished by death. You damn deserve it!
Seeing Chen Muwu trying his best to hold back his smile, Kapitsa couldn't help but asked curiously: "Chen, why are you so happy all of a sudden?"
"I suddenly remembered something happy. My wife, er, no, there was a letter from home saying that my second brother's wife had just given birth to a baby."
Fortunately, no one present had seen the peak moment of his acting skills in this article, so Chen Muwu was able to get through the danger.
After coming out of Magdalen College, a certain countryman from a certain country's alumni association at Cambridge University had set up a table on campus to call on everyone to donate to the disaster area. Chen Muwu even wanted to pretend to be a noisy person, and roped in a few people with whom he usually had good relations. British "ghosts" protested against their genocidal massacre of noisy suspects after the Great Kanto Earthquake.
Damn it, if you have this kind of spare money to save the Japanese, you might as well buy me a vacuum pump!
…
In a short period of time, the electron diffraction experiment could not be completed, but Chen Muwu could not write to Davidson, an engineer in the Experimental Department of Western Electronics Company in the United States, to persuade him to conduct this experiment instead.
Maybe now, the reputation of Xidian Experimental Department is not big.
But when this experimental department was acquired by AT&T in 1925, it became independent from Western Electric and became the famous Bell Telephone Laboratory.
The experiments conducted by this experimental department are basically related to business, so confidentiality is very high.
Calculating the time, Davidson should have just started to do related experiments on electron bombardment of metal surfaces, and has not yet published a paper recording the experimental results in the corresponding journal.
If Chen Muwu wrote to Davidson at this time, asking him to make slight improvements based on the current experiment, then what he would get would not be a letter of thanks, but would stir up the whole Xidian family to find out the business secrets that leaked the company's secrets. Spy and no peace.
Although the experiment cannot be done, Chen Muwu feels that the theory of matter waves cannot be allowed to gather dust in the brain.
So he could only write a short paper on the idea that electrons are a wave, instead of de Broglie's more than seventy-page doctoral thesis version, and sent it again to the German "Annals of Physics" .
Counting this paper, he has published five papers in the journal this year, one more than Einstein published in 1905 (his fifth paper was published in 1906).
Put into the mailbox at the same time as the paper, there was also a letter of inquiry sent to the United States, and a personal letter sent to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.
In a previous reprimand, Rutherford had inadvertently revealed the high-vacuum vacuum pump recently developed by General Electric.
Chen Muwu keenly captured this information at the time, but Rutherford did not disclose the price to him.
So he thought about sending a letter to General Electric Company to ask how much the vacuum pump was quoted for.
What Chen Muwu was thinking was that before leaving Bihai, his second brother had given him a huge sum of two thousand pounds.
Because the scholarships at home and abroad combined cannot be spent, so until now, the money has been sitting in his own bank account and gathering dust.
If GE's asking price is reasonable, or even a little higher, as long as it's around eight hundred to one thousand pounds, can he bite the bullet and buy a vacuum pump and do his own experiments?
…
More than a week later, Chen Muwu received a reply from GE.
Perhaps because of this vacuum pump, General Electric has no plans to mass-produce it as a product, so they didn't even print an advertising brochure.
When General Electric built a vacuum pump with such high precision, it didn't intend to use it to pump out incandescent light bulbs.
Decades ago, the practice of evacuating light bulbs to reduce filament oxidation had been replaced by injecting chemically inert gases such as argon and nitrogen.
They wanted to create vacuum tubes with higher vacuum levels and then make a lot of money on them.
I just sent a black and white photo of the appearance of the pump body and a piece of paper with specific parameters written on it.
The definition of current photos is not high, and GE is afraid that others will imitate it based on its appearance, so it deliberately takes photos that are very blurry.
On the other hand, it was written in black and white on the parameter paper that under the extreme state, this pump can make the vacuum reach a high vacuum state of 10Pa.
But the words in the advertisements should not be believed at all. Chen Muwu estimated that the actual effect of this vacuum pump may not be as high as written, but as long as the vacuum degree can reach seven pascals after the decimal point, it is enough to meet the needs of his electron diffraction experiment.
Because it has mastered the core technology, GE is also very open to the price of this high-precision equipment.
In the price column of this piece of paper, the high price of eight thousand US dollars was specially marked in bold letters. When converted, it is almost two thousand pounds.
In 1923, what was eight thousand dollars?
A Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom is about the same price.
If you switch to a Ford Model T, you should be able to buy a dozen of them!
As for the German mark, it has almost reached the order of trillions.
In this regard, Chen Muwu said that GE could obviously grab it directly, but it still sent you a letter telling you the price. It was really too unreasonable.
He really made me cry to death.
This reply from General Electric completely put an end to Chen Muwu's idea of buying a vacuum pump out of his own pocket.
It seems that he can only wait until Davidson publishes the experimental results in an American journal before he can act accordingly.
When he was a child, Chen Muwu had read many short stories about famous people in the history of science, and knew that many scientists had the support of big donors, so they were able to focus solely on scientific research without having to worry about the trivial matters in life.
For example, King Frederic II of Denmark not only gave away an island, but also gave more than a ton of gold to build an observatory for Tycho, and Emperor Shinra built another observatory for him in Prague after the death of the King of Denmark. Rudolf II.
Another example is Ferdinando II de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who gave Galileo enough support to let Galileo specifically name the four satellites of Jupiter he discovered as "Medici Stars". strange.
In addition, the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who was behind Gauss, and great scientists such as Boyle, Lavoisier, Darwin and Cavendish co-starred in "My Fathers and Me".
When Chen Muwu was reading the story at the beginning, he just regarded these as small episodes of celebrity anecdotes and did not take it seriously at all.
But now, he is extremely eager to have such a big benefactor behind him. If there is no such big benefactor, a small benefactor will do.
At the very least, we should help him settle the debt for the vacuum pump first, so that he can settle down and do this electron diffraction experiment.
(End of chapter)
