A few days later, Chen Muwu came to the scene of his doctoral thesis defense wearing the robe of Trinity College and looking relaxed.
He should be more familiar with this room in the Cavendish Laboratory than many people present.
Because this is no other place, it is the conference room where Chen Muwu used to sit with his typewriter for a whole day from time to time.
But unlike the previous dark and greasy environment, with the graduation season approaching, Rutherford asked Chadwick to barely clean the conference room in advance.
Sitting at the defense review table were two generations of physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory, headed by Thomson Sr. and Rutherford.
The rest are all acquaintances, including Rutherford's son-in-law Fowler, Aston who once lent Chen Muwu the Sprenger pump, and Wilson who invented the cloud chamber. Anyway, everyone sitting on the judging panel, They are all famous big shots.
In the auditorium on one side, Kapitsa, Ye Gongchao, Dirac and others were standing there.
Chen Muwu also saw Best, who came from Gonville and Caius College next door, and another British man he didn't know who was chatting with Best.
In addition to these, there were also several apostles from the Cambridge Apostolic Society who came to the scene secretly.
Because it was a mysterious society, they could not reveal their identity in front of outsiders, so they just nodded to each other and did not say a word.
A few minutes before the scheduled defense time, Chadwick, who was hosting again today, found Chen Muwu and informed him that he could come on stage.
Chen Muwu, who knew what was going on, straightened his collar and walked up to the podium at the front of the conference room.
Even though there were so many celebrities who were already famous or were about to become famous, Chen Muwu’s doctoral thesis defense was completely a defense meeting with “big thunder and small raindrops”.
Unlike de Broglie in history, he stumped the three experts on the review bench with a doctoral thesis.
As a result, his teacher Langevin was forced to go to Germany with his paper to find Einstein to make a decision.
Chen Muwu's graduation this time relied entirely on an experiment, and it was an experiment that had been done by predecessors, but some experimental materials were replaced.
Although Chen Muwu conducted this Stern-Gerlach experiment on ground-state hydrogen atoms, the theory to be verified was very novel.
But an experiment is an experiment, so as long as his experimental results meet expectations, Chen Muwu's paper will easily pass in the Cavendish Laboratory.
The experimental results are just there written on the paper, what else can you ask?
If the doctoral thesis had not gone through such a process before it was approved, then the place where they were sitting now should not be in the Cavendish Laboratory. Instead, they would have walked out of the door and turned left along Free School Lane. , entering the Eagle Bar on Benedict Street!
Therefore, no one took the defense meeting seriously, whether it was at the judging panel or in the auditorium, and some even simply regarded it as a tea party.
There was only one person in the audience who was nervous. This person's surname was Chen.
After standing on the podium, Chen Muwu, who has lived in two generations, felt for the first time that a doctorate degree was so close to him.
Of course, the value of the doctorate from Cambridge University a hundred years ago was much higher than the one he had not yet received a hundred years from now.
Although he was silently chanting "I am not nervous", Chen Muwu felt that his heartbeat was still much faster than before.
Everyone at the review table had already read the paper, so Chen Muwu simply stated how he designed the experiment to verify his theory.
Next, it was time for the judges to ask questions.
To be honest, the judges sitting in front of Chen Muwu couldn't think of any questions to ask.
Chen Muwu's golfing friend during last summer vacation, Old Thomson, is getting old. When he came to the defense meeting this time, he was basically a mascot-like existence.
Regarding the issue of atomic structure, Old Thomson always insisted on the plum pudding model he proposed.
Old Thomson did not even recognize the atomic solar system model proposed by Rutherford, his own student sitting next to him.
How could he accept Chen Muwu's absurd conclusion that the electron not only orbits the nucleus like the earth, but also rotates around its own axis?
The same goes for Aston and Wilson.
As the inventors of the mass spectrometer and the cloud chamber, two commonly used equipment in physics, these two men's research on the microscopic world only stopped at the atomic scale.
However, Chen Muwu's experiment confirmed a characteristic of electrons in atoms through a macroscopic experimental phenomenon, which was beyond the scope of the two people's research.
Moreover, Chen Muwu's appearance out of thin air was a good thing for one of the two, but not so good for the other.
Chen Muwu successfully deceived a large French financier into buying a high-precision vacuum pump. After he completed the ground-state hydrogen atom experiment, he was reciprocated and sent to Aston who had lent him the Sprenger pump. .
The degree of vacuum suddenly increased by several levels, giving Aston's mass spectrometer a lot of room for improvement in accuracy.
But for Wilson, it was not him and Compton in the original space and time who conducted the scattering experiment and found the recoil electrons in the cloud chamber, but Chen Muwu, Kapitsa and Blackett.
Without this achievement, I don’t know if he would have won the Nobel Prize in Physics again?
Rutherford, on the other hand, has been following this series of experiments since Stoner's experiment on electrons in the outermost layer of atoms.
He also listened to Chen Muwu's lecture on the paper at the Solvay Conference, and also urged Kapitsa to help Chen Muwu do this experiment. Therefore, he should be the only person in the Cavendish Laboratory other than Chen Muwu who is interested in this experiment. The second person who has the clearest and most familiar experimental theories and phenomena.
Rutherford didn't have any questions, but it seemed a little unreasonable to not ask any questions at all. He could only pretend to pick questions at random.
Among the judges, Fowler was the only one with a problem.
After the meal at Ye Gongchao's house, Dirac was still curious about what question Chen Muwu would ask him.
He didn't care about the final exam, but the next day, he asked Chen Muwu for the so-called problem and the corresponding direction to solve the problem.
After thinking about it for a while, Dirac found that this topic still seemed a bit difficult for him.
So he found a time to ask this question to his teacher Fowler.
Fowler felt that he should not be able to find the answer to this question in a short period of time.
But today he came to Chen Muwu's defense meeting. Looking at the increasingly confident young man on the stage, Fowler had an inexplicable idea in his mind, that is, the person on the stage must know that factor 2 is How did it come from.
He actually wanted to talk to Chen Muwu about this issue, but under this situation, Fowler also felt it was inappropriate.
Let's wait and see carefully when we get back to see if we can find the answer to this question using the problem-solving ideas that Dirac told him and Chen Muwu told him.
"Gentlemen," Rutherford's loud voice sounded again in this small conference room, "it's almost time. Does anyone have any questions about Chen's paper? If not, we would like to congratulate you. Chen Muwu passed the defense of his thesis and will soon receive his doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University!"
The conference room gradually became quiet, and some people even raised their hands, ready to applaud to pay tribute to today's protagonist.
"Chen, I have another question!"
From the auditorium on the side, an English sentence with a strong Russian accent came from Kapitsa, who claimed to be "Chen Muwu's best friend in Cambridge."
Seeing the undisguised smile on his face, Chen Muwu had already guessed that this happy guy probably wanted to prank himself and take this opportunity to have fun.
"Mr. Kapitsa, please speak."
"Dr. Chen, what I want to ask is, after this defense meeting is over, where will we go to celebrate?"
"Huh - so this is the question?" Chen Muwu also cooperated with Kapitsa's performance and pretended to take a long breath, "I was shocked. I thought you were going to ask me some mysterious question. Celebrate. It's easy to say, after it's over, everyone will go to the Eagle Bar, and all the expenses tonight will be paid for by Mr. Chen!"
"Hooraaaaaaaaay!"
The applause that had been brewing in the conference room for a long time finally sounded like thunder.
Chen Muwu walked to the review table and thanked the senior physics students who came to attend his defense meeting today.
"From now on, I will call you Dr. Chen," Old Thomson said, holding Chen Muwu's hand. "After graduating from Ph.D., what are your plans?"
Intend?
Of course, I can continue to stay in the UK to build my reputation.
Chen Muwu has no plans to return to China now.
He quickly calculated in his mind that it was May.
Even if I have to go back to China, after everything is settled here in Cambridge, whether I go back by train or ship, it will be July or August when I get to Bihai's home.
The autumn of 1924 was truly an eventful year.
Stay in the concession in Sihai. Lu Yongxiang from the province outside the concession and Qi Xieyuan from the Su province, two old warlords belonging to different factions, were fighting ping-pong-pong.
When they arrived in Beijing, the second war broke out between the Zhili and Feng cliques.
He really wanted to see with his own eyes how Feng Huanzhang set up a cannon to bombard his mother's little emperor on Jingshan Mountain.
But it is really unnecessary to return to China and risk one's life just for such a thing.
But now that he had thought about the Soviet War, Chen Muwu fell into thinking, how could he remind his family members in East Asia to keep them away from this disaster of war?
"List?"
Seeing that the young man in front of him suddenly lost his mind and fell into a sluggish state, without responding to himself, Old Thomson tried to call him again.
Old Thomson didn't know what Chen Muwu was thinking. He thought that Chen Muwu didn't know where to go after graduation, so he said again: "If you haven't found a good place to go, then I can find a job for you at Trinity College." Teaching position. Of course, it is somewhat difficult to directly become an academician of the college. According to tradition, seniority may be required. However, if you want to enter Trinity College as a researcher like Kapitsa, then I can give you this right now letter of appointment."
"Then thank you Sir Thomson."
Chen Muwu didn't expect that the old dean would give him a big gift just because he was in a daze.
Rutherford had already talked to him about Chen Muwu's whereabouts after graduation.
Like Kapitsa last year, he also planned to let Chen Muwu stay in the Cavendish Laboratory and be an independent branch leader.
But Chen Muwu, who was about to receive his doctorate, had a rare chance of being tough in front of his teacher.
He said that he was too young and might not be able to convince the public, so he didn't want to be a person in charge, as long as he could do occasional experiments in the laboratory.
Chen Muwu said this just to be lazy.
Instead of doing blind experiments like a headless fly in the laboratory, it is better to choose a leisurely job, so that you can go to work and fish as you like, and write papers at the same time.
Now, old Thomson's words allowed him to receive an additional salary from Trinity College in addition to his work in the Cavendish Laboratory.
Dr. Chen Muwu’s wish to stay in school after graduation finally came true a hundred years ago.
(End of chapter)
