"Peter, I have to say, except for that alligator welded to the top of the radiator, your car is really nice! How much did it cost?"
Sitting in this brand-new convertible, Chen Muwu asked his first question.
He had no specific idea about car prices in this era. Apart from reading in a junior high school history textbook that you could buy a Ford Model T for a few hundred dollars, Chen Muwu only knew about the sales of a Rolls-Royce once. The price is as high as two thousand pounds per unit, which is comparable to dozens of Ford cars.
Although he had never heard of the name of the car in front of him, the workmanship was very good from the inside out. If the price was reasonable, he wondered if he could buy one and become an experienced driver in this era?
But Kapitsa's answer directly shattered Chen Muwu's idea: "This is the latest model of this year's car, so I spent 1,200 pounds."
The price made him speechless.
I can't afford it, I really can't afford it.
What's wrong with 1,200 pounds? Kapitsa is usually a quiet man, but this son of a Russian general is really rich.
After the car started, Chen Muwu's eyes fell on the crocodile sculpture welded on the radiator again. He couldn't help but asked: "Peter, I have always had a question, that is, why do you always talk in private? Did you call the director 'crocodile'?"
Kapitsa smiled and pressed the automatic ignition button next to the steering wheel: "Chen, you must think that crocodiles are very ferocious animals, right?
“But actually, the crocodile is my favorite animal. In our country, the crocodile is also a symbol of the head of the family, which is admirable and awe-inspiring.
"In addition, nearly ten years ago, a children's literature writer named Korney Chukovsky wrote a fairy tale poem titled "The Crocodile", and the image of the crocodile became a household name throughout the country.
"People loved it with awe, the same feeling I had for the director."
In his previous life, before Chen Muwu was born, Su Lian was no longer in this world. He had only read the works of Gorky and Ostrovsky in Chinese textbooks, and had no idea that the crocodile was actually one of Sulian’s well-known literary images:
"I only know that in another fairy tale "Peter Pan", there is also a stupid crocodile who swallowed the alarm clock into its belly.
"I thought you were mocking the director for his loud voice. Every time we do experiments in the laboratory, before we meet him, we can hear his voice from outside the door."
Unexpectedly, after listening to Chen Muwu's joke, Kapitsa did not laugh heartily as usual, but said seriously: "I don't dare to ridicule the teacher. In fact, I admire him very much and admire his uprightness." He is straightforward, tireless, possesses extraordinary abilities, and can discover the deepest secrets of nature through appropriate questioning. I respect Sir Rutherford very much."
Kapitsa certainly respected Rutherford.
Basically no one in the entire Cavendish Laboratory disrespected the majestic bearded director.
Except for Oppenheimer, who was rejected by Rutherford when he applied to enter the laboratory for the first time, and was led into the Cavendish Laboratory by Chen Muwu after finding a relationship with Old Thomson.
He is still a little jealous of this old New Zealand man who cannot discern pearls, but he sees that his teacher Chen Muwu has always shown respect for Rutherford, so he does not dare to show this jealousy too much.
Of course, Rutherford does deserve everyone's respect.
Because he used the limited funds of the Cavendish Laboratory to create unlimited possibilities.
Everyone agrees that without Rutherford's leadership, the Cavendish Laboratory might not be as prosperous as it is today.
Before Chen Muwu arrived at the University of Cambridge in England and entered the Cavendish Laboratory, Kapitsa could be regarded as Rutherford's second favorite student after Bohr.
Although at the very beginning, he rejected this international student from Sulian just like he rejected Oppenheimer.
In 1934, Kapitsa returned to China to visit relatives, and stayed in the country under the persuasion of the Soviet Union government to cultivate talents for the development of physics in the motherland, just like his teacher Yofei.
But Rutherford didn't think so. He had always been skeptical of communism, and always believed that the Soviet government forcibly detained his beloved students in the country, so he wrote many letters to the Soviet Embassy in the UK, It was even sent directly to Sulian.
Although every letter fell silent, Rutherford finally agreed to the Soviet government's request. He transferred the information of the Mond Laboratory under the Cavendish Laboratory (Kapitsa was the director of this laboratory at the time) A copy of all the equipment was made and sold to Su Lian to establish the Institute of Physics, so that his beloved disciple could continue to conduct physics research in his motherland.
"Peter, since you said you respect the director very much, do you really plan to give him such a gift on his birthday?"
Chen Muwu's eyes were still looking at the crocodile in front of him.
"Of course not. I plan to give the teacher a song about crocodiles. I have already composed the song in advance and am still polishing the lyrics."
Chen Muwu always felt that Kapitsa's idea was less reliable than the one just now.
However, when Kapitsa mentioned the song about crocodiles, Chen Muwu couldn't help but think of the devilishly brainwashing children's song from his previous life, "A silly B, and he also wears cool clothes...".
I don’t know if it would be appropriate to sing such a song to Rutherford at his birthday party.
The more Chen Muwu thought about it, the more interesting he found it. After getting the German language bonus after traveling through time, he even began to hum softly, trying to recall what the lyrics of this song were while humming: "Ich bin Schnappi das kleine Krokodil …”
"Chen, what song are you singing?"
Although his voice when humming was very small, it still attracted the attention of Kapitsa next to him.
"Listening to what you just said, I also remembered a children's song about crocodiles."
"That's really good. Are you going to join me and sing to the director?"
"I……"
Chen Muwu originally wanted to agree, but suddenly he realized that the direction of things was a bit strange. He seemed to have fallen into Kapitsa's logic unknowingly.
He didn't want to sing such a shameful song at Rutherford's birthday party.
So Chen Muwu quickly changed the topic: "Peter, you said you would take me for a ride, so where are we going?"
"Well, I haven't thought about it yet. It's just going to be a walk around Cambridgeshire, right?"
"Okay then, take me to the train station outside the city. I suddenly remembered that I have to go to London for a run."
"no problem!"
At first, Chen Muwu was just taken for a ride by Kapitsa.
As a result, he was sent to London by his good friend.
When Chen Muwu went to London, besides buying gifts for Rutherford, what else could he do?
He felt that the Chinese people always pay attention to etiquette, and there is no reason to go to the house to celebrate a birthday with nothing like Kapitsa.
Because this trip was an impromptu trip, Chen Muwu, who was sitting in a third-class carriage for the first time in his life and endured the soot smoke emitted from the locomotive chimney, wanted to buy something for his teacher after arriving in London. Worried about such a gift.
…
But he is not the only one who is suffering in this world.
At the same time, in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, in a conference room in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences building, the Nobel Prize Review Committee in Physics was holding a temporary review committee meeting here.
Since this spring, the review committee has received nomination letters from others one after another.
Receive letters, record nominations, discuss candidates, and finally go through layers of voting to select one or several Nobel Prize winners in physics for that year. Awards are bye.
After all this work, they will report the final results to the Nobel Prize Committee, and the rest of the awarding work has nothing to do with them.
So at first, the members of the review committee didn’t take it seriously. It was just a few nomination letters, but they received quite a few every year.
However, as more and more letters came in from European and American countries, some people on the review committee began to become restless.
Although there are many experts and scholars who are eligible to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics, not everyone exercises their right every year.
In previous years, regarding nomination letters for the Nobel Prize in Physics, the review committee would only receive twenty to thirty letters, so their workload in a year was not much.
But this year, the number of letters they received has skyrocketed. People from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, and even Canada, which has not received a letter for many years, have sent letters of nomination to the review committee.
Most of these letters only nominated one person, Chen Muwu, a Chinese Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
This is the first time in more than 20 years for the physics prize review committee to nominate the same person on such a large scale, which forces them to pay attention to this somewhat strange matter.
The review committee is all physics majors or physics-related majors, so of course they have all heard of Chen Muwu, a young man who has stood out in the physics community in the past year or so.
But after receiving so many nomination letters, the first thing they did was not to review Chen Muwu’s qualifications for the award. Instead, they sent a letter with the same content to everyone who had sent nomination letters to nominate Chen Muwu. In response, he asked whether he had received bribes or bribes from Chen Muwu, so he was nominated to compete for the award this year.
There is no way, who makes Chen Muwu a Chinese, an East Asian, or even an Asian they look down upon?
Soon after, replies from the nominees were sent to Stockholm again.
Not only did they unanimously deny this matter, some people, such as Rutherford, Thomson and Old Prague in Britain, Einstein in Germany, Marie Curie and Langevin in France, and Bohr in Denmark, even He also protested more or less in the letter, accusing the Nobel Prize in Physics review committee of this behavior, which was a serious act of racial discrimination.
However, after receiving this accusation, everyone on the review committee did not feel any psychological burden.
After all, anti-racial discrimination has completely failed to stand on the moral high ground. The Ku Klux Klan party in the United States is very popular. No one thinks that all living beings are equal. The lives of white people are indeed nobler than the lives of other races.
But since Chen Muwu received so many nominations at once, the committee's judges had to consider whether to follow everyone's wishes and award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to this unpopular Chinese.
Therefore, this temporary review committee meeting was held for this matter.
"Gentlemen, what other nominations have we received besides the Chinese guy from Cambridge?"
After the meeting began, Alva Gulstrand, chairman of the Nobel Prize in Physics jury, raised a question.
He was a Swedish ophthalmologist who also served as a professor of optics at Uppsala University. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for constructing an optical model of the human eyeball.
The reason why this person can leave his name in the history is not so glorious, and it means that he will be infamy for eternity.
As a professor of optics, Gulstrand was a true believer in aether theory.
This led to his firm opposition to Einstein's theory of relativity. It was his stubborn resistance that prevented Einstein from receiving a Nobel Prize for this great discovery for more than ten years after the theory of relativity was proposed. Bell Prize in Physics.
In the end, everyone who nominated Einstein had to go through a curve to save the country. The reason why Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 was not because of the theory of relativity, but because of the photoelectric effect.
As a professor of optics and a loyal believer in the wave theory, Gulstrand also strongly does not want to confirm the existence of photons.
But compared to the theory of relativity, which might overturn the absolute view of time and space in classical mechanics, he could barely accept the photoelectric effect.
But in Einstein's award speech, Gulstrand also used a little trick.
He only said that Einstein's theory could explain this experimental phenomenon well, completely ignoring the existence of light quanta.
Now, Chen Muwu has used Chen's scattering experiment as a supplement to the photoelectric effect experiment to clearly point out that light is a particle and named it a photon.
His behavior completely stepped on Gulstrand's pain points.
Therefore, in the heart of the chairman of the judging committee, nothing can be done to allow this Chinese, a Chinese disciple of Einstein, to win the award.
So Gulstrand asked the first question after the meeting began, thinking that as long as there were other nominees who were equally qualified to win, he would never succumb to the power of many nominees. , determined not to award this year’s physics prize to Chen Muwu.
"Sir, in addition to this Chen Muwu, we did receive several nominations for other people."
"Who are they?" Gulstrand asked impatiently after hearing an affirmative answer.
"Professor Henri Le Chatelier from Ecole Polytechnique and Sorbonne University in France, nominated..."
The man gradually lost his voice as he spoke.
"Speak, who did Professor Le Chatelier nominate?"
"Uh, sir, just like in previous years, Professor Le Chatelier still nominated Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière on the grounds that these two people invented cinema."
Le Chatelier, who discovered Le Chatelier's principle about chemical equilibrium shifts, never won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
But this does not prevent him from being a Nobel Prize nominee and has been nominating his French compatriots, the Lumiere brothers, for the Nobel Prize in Physics since 1920.
After three consecutive nominations, Le Chatelier did not send three identical nomination letters to Stockholm in 1923.
Just when the Nobel Prize in Physics review committee felt that the old professor had finally given up and retreated, they did not expect that he would make a comeback.
If the award is not given to Chen Muwu but to the Lumière brothers who invented cinema, Gulstrand feels that once this matter is announced, he will be personally embarrassed.
So he shook his head and said, "Are there any other candidates?"
Another judge then spoke:
"Sir, David Jordan, former president of Stanford University in the United States, has nominated Sir Ernest Rutherford of Cambridge University in the United Kingdom."
"What's the reason?"
"Mr. Jordan gave no reason."
It is true that there is no need to give any reason. It is only reasonable for Rutherford to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. I really don’t know why the early Nobel Prize Committee was so upset that it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Gulstrand was a little confused.
In his impression, after Rutherford succeeded Sir Thomson as the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, he gradually took a back seat and focused on the management of the laboratory.
In addition, Gulstrand himself is an ophthalmologist and is located in remote Northern Europe, so he is not always able to receive first-hand information about physics in a timely manner.
He cursed the nominee named Jordan in his mind, complaining about why he didn't write down the reasons.
But then Gulstrand thought again, Rutherford was also a good candidate for the award.
If he really does something worthy of achievement, it wouldn't be a bad idea to award him this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.
From McGill University in Canada, to the University of Victoria in Manchester, to the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, Rutherford has a lot of talents all over the world, and his ability to win awards is also something that everyone expects.
In this way, you can kill two birds with one stone at the same time. No one will care about why the Chinese did not win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Gulstrand was eager to find a reason to give Rutherford the award.
"In physics, has Sir Rutherford made any other major inventions recently?"
"Sir, Sir Rutherford bombarded nitrogen atoms with alpha particles in 1919 and obtained protons and a new carbon atom. This was the first time in human history that nuclear transmutation was discovered, that is, one chemical element is transformed into another. An element, or the process by which one isotope of a chemical element is converted into another isotope.
"And last winter, a new paper from the Cavendish Laboratory stated that they captured this nuclear reaction phenomenon in a cloud chamber, further confirming that Sir Rutherford's discovery was correct."
To be fair, Gulstrand felt that Rutherford's discovery was not that important. In previous years, he might have tried to compete for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
But this year, with the existence of Chen Muwu who is cheating, Rutherford's nuclear transformation seems to be even more difficult to use.
But he still refused to give up: "Is there any relevant paper? Let me take a look."
After briefly reading the paper, Gulstrand discovered the fallacy in Rutherford's theory.
He initially thought that bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha particles would yield a proton, plus a carbon-13, and then the incident alpha particles would be bounced.
However, the cloud chamber photos provided by the Cavendish Laboratory show that the entire process of nuclear transmutation should be that alpha particles are integrated into the nitrogen nucleus, and then a proton is emitted to obtain a new oxygen atom, oxygen-17.
If you want to award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to Rutherford for the reason of nuclear transmutation, you must bring the author of the last paper from the Cavendish Laboratory.
Then Gulstrand saw a familiar name in the author column of the paper.
Chen Muwu.
Moreover, the first author of that paper especially thanked him, saying that if he had not discovered such a special track in thousands of photos and proposed that the product of the nuclear reaction was not carbon-13, but oxygen-17, The experiment will be stuck, not knowing when it will find the right answer.
Gulstrand never thought that he would see Chen Muwu's name here.
There are many letters from the review committee nominating Chen Muwu, and the reasons given in them are also various.
But there has never been a letter nominating Chen Muwu based on this merit.
Perhaps in the minds of physicists, this small nuclear transmutation is nothing compared with Chen Muwu's other achievements.
It seems that Sir Rutherford can only be discarded and replaced with another nominee.
Gulstrand asked, somewhat hopelessly: "Are there any other nominees?"
"Professor James Frank of the University of Göttingen, Germany, nominates Patrick Blackett of the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK."
"What's the reason?"
"He discovered the first isotope of oxygen, oxygen-17, in the cloud chamber photos he took."
Gulstrand was a little dumbfounded.
Not to mention, the discovery of isotopes should be evaluated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, not the Physics Prize.
Not to mention, the fact that only one oxygen-17 has been discovered is not enough to qualify.
The key is that Gulstrand always felt that he had seen the name Blackett somewhere.
He lowered his head and discovered that the first author of the paper in his hand, the person ranked in front of Chen Muwu, was the new nominee, Blackett.
Gulstrand is now desperate. He feels that Chen Muwu is like a ghost around him, everywhere.
It seems not an easy task to bypass him in selecting this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.
Unexpectedly, I updated it anyway. Please vote!
(End of chapter)
