Although he had not even written a word about his character, Chen Muwu still told Kapitsa, who was looking unhappy at this time, about his recommendation to Old Prague that Kapitsa should be the director of the Monds Laboratory.
He is not drawing a pie, because it will take a long time before the Mond Laboratory is completed, so it does not matter whether this pie can be realized in the future.
Chen Muwu really felt that even if he did not recommend it to Old Prague, Kapitsa still had a good chance of becoming the director of this laboratory.
Although the Mond Laboratory was separated from the David Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution, the prefix in front of it was the Royal Institution.
By the time the Mondstadt Laboratory is completed, Rutherford will already be the president of the Royal Society. He will certainly have a considerable say in the selection of the director of the laboratory.
It cannot be said to be nepotism, but no one wants to hand over such an important laboratory to someone who does not know the ins and outs of it.
There are no good candidates under Old Bragg. The only one with talent and experience in laboratory management is his son Little Bragg - but he doesn't want to call Little Bragg to his side.
If Old Prague cannot be found, then he will definitely ask Rutherford for help. After all, as Chen Muwu told him before, the Cavendish Laboratory is the best physics laboratory in the UK, and its reserve of physics talents is also the best. First class.
By Rutherford's side, Chen Muwu had clearly rejected Old Bragg's offer to stay. As Chadwick was the housekeeper of the Cavendish Laboratory, Rutherford would definitely not let him go.
So apart from the two of them, among the students and staff in the laboratory, the only one who ranks third in terms of intelligence and ability is Kapitsa.
If a new experimental genius had not been born in the British physics community during the period before the Mond Laboratory was built, Chen Muwu felt that Kapitsa should be the director. .
After listening to Chen Muwu's extremely candid words, Kapitsa felt that he had just judged a gentleman with a villain's heart.
With such a good opportunity, Chen Muwu can still think about himself. If this is not a friend, then what is a friend?
Moreover, the idea that I had thought of before was not mentioned to Chen Muwu in advance.
He was able to think of it before himself and finally implement it in experiments. It cannot be said that Chen Muwu plagiarized his academic achievements. It can only mean that he is smarter than himself.
Kapitsa didn't think there was anything wrong with the conclusion he finally reached.
The newspaper said that Chen Muwu was smarter than Einstein, not to mention himself!
However, why did Chen Muwu not accept the position of director of Monds Laboratory, but instead recommended him?
Kapitsa couldn't understand this question, and finally asked it with a very tactful question: "Chen, I have been studying magnetism in the Cavendish Laboratory, and I have no experience in low-temperature physics. No, and I am not a genius like you, who can achieve results in new fields in a short period of time, how can I hold the position of director of Mond Laboratory?"
Chen Muwu thought to himself, my brother is helping you.
The Mond Laboratory, which studies low-temperature physics, has already begun construction in advance. If Kapitsa can switch from magnetism to low-temperature physics early, maybe he will discover liquids before he leaves the UK and stays in the Soviet Union. Superfluidity of helium at low temperatures.
In this way, Kapitsa might be able to win the Nobel Prize in Physics before the war begins, instead of waiting for him to be rejected by the Nobel Prize jury due to various ideological issues after he returns to the Soviet Union. Decades later.
This time, Chen Muwu did not intend to interfere with the matter of Kapitsa being left in Sulian during the family vacation like Rutherford did.
After all, it was not as the newspapers said that the Soviet Union government was detaining scientists from leaving the country for no reason, but that the man was affectionate and the concubine was intentional.
The Sulian government hoped that he could stay and help improve the level of physics in the motherland, and Kapitsa was willing to do so.
Moreover, Kapitsa's stay in Sulian can be considered beneficial to Chen Muwu.
In the future, whether he takes a train to return to China by land or for other reasons, he will never be able to avoid this country.
At the top of Sulian's scientific community, it is still necessary to have someone who can speak to them.
Chen Muwu did not want to wait until later when he went to Sulian, and the scientific colleague who received him was not his good friend Kapitsa, but Lysenko, who in the famous fishing post "made the Chinese wear long trousers".
After chatting about the director of Monds Laboratory, Kapitsa couldn't help but ask Chen Muwu how he transferred the magnetic properties from heavy hydrogen to superconducting.
So Chen Muwu told him vividly how he accidentally discovered the phenomenon of floating niobium sheets in front of Wells and Huxley some time ago.
"Chen, you put that niobium and magnet together, was it intentional or was it accidental?"
"It was intentional... No, of course it was put in accidentally!"
Chen Muwu felt that Kapitsa was missing a pair of glasses on his nose and the expression on his face was not gritty enough. The question he asked did not have that flavor.
However, due to his habitual thinking, he almost gave the wrong answer.
"It seems that you are not only a genius, but also have extraordinary luck. With one mistake, you can discover a new phenomenon. Cockcroft and I discussed it for a long time and planned to do this experiment to study it. No. I thought you had already done the experiment before taking any concrete action."
"Who? Who do you mean? Cockcroft?"
"Yes, do you know John? He married James this summer. After the marriage, he was sent by the old crocodile to be my assistant."
In an inadvertent conversation with Kapitsa, Chen Muwu heard an unexpected name, John Cockcroft.
Has this person arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory now?
Excluding the linear accelerator built by Widlow, which could only be regarded as a verification but had no practical effect, then Cockcroft was the first person to create a particle accelerator that could actually be used in the laboratory.
It was said before that Rutherford gritted his teeth and allocated a thousand pounds to research particle accelerators. The destination of this huge sum of money was none other than Cockcroft's research group.
And from Cavendish Laboratory to Mond Laboratory, Cockcroft has always served as Kapitsa's assistant.
After Kapitsa returned to Sulian, it was he who succeeded him as the director of the Monds Laboratory.
Cockcroft is a fellow of Dirac. He graduated from St. John's College, Cambridge University last summer, and then entered the Cavendish Laboratory as a graduate student.
But at the same time, Chen Muwu first prepared for and participated in the Paris Olympics. Shortly after returning to Cambridge, he went north to Denmark and stayed with Bohr for a few months, and by the way won a Nobel Prize from Sweden.
Then at the beginning of this year, he was sent by Rutherford to the David Faraday Laboratory in Old Prague, London. It is only now that he has completely returned to the Cavendish Laboratory.
Therefore, Chen Muwu didn't know much about the personnel changes in the laboratory in the past year, and there were many graduate students every year. He didn't have the time or need to get to know them one by one. He didn't know that Cockcroft had already Entering the Cavendish Laboratory is normal.
However, now that he knew that Cockroft was in the laboratory, he had to take control of him.
Not to mention his theoretical level, just by being able to make a particle accelerator with his bare hands, Cockcroft's hands-on ability is definitely not bad. It is the talent that Chen Muwu is continuing now.
But this person can't ask Kapitsa now. He should wait for an opportunity later and talk to the teacher Rutherford.
Kapitsa lingered in the office for a long time, talking to Chen Muwu in detail about the various major and minor events that had occurred in the Cavendish Laboratory during his absence.
This frustrates Chen Muwu's desire to start scientific research on the first day he returns to the laboratory. He can only wait until tomorrow to make the mini particle accelerator model he promised to provide to Rutherford.
Early accelerators were divided into three schools, two of which were high-pressure accelerators and the other was a cyclotron.
The cyclotron was directly screened out by Chen Muwu because it was too expensive to build. Even if Chen Muwu could build a matchbox-sized model, Rutherford would definitely not pay to implement it into reality. among them.
In 1936, a year before Rutherford's death, the Cavendish Laboratory also began to explore whether a more advanced and higher-energy cyclotron should be built at Cambridge University.
But this proposal was directly rejected by Rutherford because there was no money.
In the end, it was Baron Austin’s donation that allowed the project to proceed smoothly.
Baron Austin, formerly known as Herbert Austin, is a famous British business owner.
Like Henry Ford in the United States, he produced cars with his surname as the brand name.
Baron Austin donated £250,000 to the Cavendish Laboratory for this 36-inch, approximately 910 mm cyclotron!
Rutherford very generously provided Chen Muwu with a particle accelerator fund of 2,500 pounds today, which is one hundredth of Baron Austin's large donation.
The current annual funding of the Cavendish Laboratory is less than 20,000 pounds. Even if we don't spend a penny from January 1 next year and save all the money, we still won't be able to save it until 1936 ten years later. Here comes two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
Since you can't build a cyclotron, you can only choose from the remaining two DC high-voltage accelerators.
The so-called high-voltage accelerator is to generate high voltage first. With the high voltage, there is a potential difference U. By allowing the charged particle e to pass through this huge potential difference, ΔE=eU, it can carry a huge amount of energy.
The key to making such a particle accelerator is how to generate high pressure.
Cockcroft gave a method. He designed a DC circuit using capacitors and diodes. After the low voltage passes through this circuit, it will multiply until it finally reaches the high voltage needed to accelerate particles.
However, Robert Van de Graaf of the United States gave another way to create high voltage, which is to use static electricity.
The machine he developed to create high-voltage static electricity was called a Van de Graaff generator.
This kind of generator can not only provide high voltage to accelerate particles, but because it is cheap, it often appears in popular science to demonstrate the power of static electricity.
If you enter any municipal science and technology museum for primary and secondary school students, there will always be a metal ball inside that can make your hair explode if you touch it. The ball is also a small Van de Graaff generator.
In comparison, Van de Graaf's electrostatic accelerator is cheaper and simpler in structure than Cockcroft's DC accelerator, and its stability and voltage it can provide are also better and higher.
It was this kind of particle accelerator that Chen Muwu planned to build to lobby Rutherford to build at Cambridge University.
However, he asked Cockcroft to help him develop a Van de Graaff particle accelerator. Can this also be considered a kind of NTR?
Speaking of which, in addition to Cockcroft, Chen Muwu’s Chinese compatriot Zhao Zhongyao also has a close relationship with the Van de Graaff electrostatic accelerator.
In 1955, he built the first 700,000 electron volt electrostatic accelerator.
Most of the components in this accelerator were purchased by Zhao Zhongyao from the High Voltage Engineering Company (HVEC) in the United States after visiting the Bikini Island atomic bomb test in 1946.
The company, which Van de Graaf co-founded, specializes in the production of electrostatic accelerators.
But it was not Van de Graaf who sold the accelerator components to Zhao Zhongyao, but one of his partners, John George Trapp.
At that time, the price quoted by HVEC for a complete electrostatic accelerator was at least US$400,000.
The most purchase funds Zhao Zhongyao can get is only fifty thousand US dollars.
With such a huge money gap, he shouldn't have been able to buy an accelerator.
But Lao Qu, who became more and more attached to Zhao Zhongyao, thought of a good way.
He sold an accelerator that was about to be retired and sent to a scrap factory for destruction to Zhao Zhongyao at the scrap price.
Although the old Qu family is far away in the United States on the other side of the ocean, they have produced two patriots in two generations (no). This is really a hymn of loyalty!
There is such a connection between Zhao Zhongyao and the electrostatic accelerator. This time Chen Muwu developed the particle accelerator with Cockcroft, so he cannot be left out.
After deciding on the helper, Chen Muwu finally started to make a model of this electrostatic accelerator.
This model was very simple to make. The only raw materials he asked Oppenheimer to prepare for him were a metal tin can, a small motor and a ribbon with good insulation.
Oppenheimer paid for these things himself, so it was not easy for him to go to Chen Muwu for reimbursement.
Because these three things together did not cost him five shillings.
What does the teacher want with these cheap things?
(End of chapter)
