Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 366 105 A country that respects knowledge

When a person's status becomes different, the attitude of others towards you will also be different.

This has nothing to do with being snobbish or not. There are only a very small number of people who do not follow the crowd. Most people are willing to make friends with noble people who have high status and power and can be helpful to them.

This is not Chen Muwu’s first visit to Brussels, Belgium. Four years ago, he followed his teacher Rutherford to attend the [-]th Solvay Conference here.

At that time, Chen Muwu had not yet obtained a doctorate from Cambridge University, nor had he won a Nobel Prize or an Olympic championship.

The most famous thing he did at that time was the discovery of the ninth planet in the solar system, Huangdi Star, for which he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Because he did not go to Belgium to study, but only came to Brussels to attend a conference, after getting off the train, Chen Muwu did not go to the Embassy of the Republic of China in Belgium to register.

But the Solvay Conference was, after all, a relatively important meeting for Brussels. The news of the meeting and the list of all participants had been published in major local newspapers early on.

Naturally, Chen Muwu's name was included in the list of participants. Unless none of the staff of the Republic of China Embassy in Belgium read newspapers, they would definitely see Chen Muwu's name in the newspapers.

Anyway, from the opening to the end of that meeting, Chen Muwu never went to the legation, and the legation never sent staff to contact him from beginning to end. Everyone was in peace and harmony.

But three years later, Chen Muwu was still the same Chen Muwu, the Chinese Embassy in Belgium was still the same Legation, and the Solvay Conference was still the same Solvay Conference.

It seems that except for the time difference, nothing else has changed.

But just because three years have passed, Chen Muwu has achieved one result after another in physics during these years. He has also successfully emerged from the circle. His reputation is not limited to the scope of physics, but he often logs in every now and then. Get into newspapers and become a regular feature in news reports.

So when Zhao Zhongyao, who accidentally lost his passport, found the embassy in Belgium and revealed that Chen Muwu was about to arrive in Belgium to attend the Solvay Conference, the staff of the embassy immediately became busy.

Not only did they fulfill their consular duties conscientiously, they helped Zhao Zhongyao get his passport replaced at the speed of light, and they also invited Chen Muwu through Zhao Zhongyao to find time to visit the embassy.

If Chen Muwu agrees to their invitation, everyone will naturally be happy. If not, it is not a shame to send someone to Solvi Palace to visit him.

——After all, politeness is one of the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.

The reason why the embassy in Belgium was reluctant to follow the example was that on the one hand, Chen Muwu's reputation was too great, and on the other hand, there was money to be made in him.

The profiteering mentioned here does not mean knowing that Chen Muwu is rich and wanting to take the opportunity to extort money from him.

Instead, colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have begun to express their anger for a long time. There is a rumor:

Zhu Zhaoxin, the first secretary and charge d'affaires of the embassy in the UK, had not been promoted for so many years.

It was because he was first in line, and kept flirting with Dr. Chen who was also in the UK, that he was able to rise through the ranks and serve as the minister to Italy.

Now that the wealthy Mr. Chen, who has been promoted and made a fortune, has finally arrived in Belgium, it is their turn to be rich and wealthy. If he does not know how to cherish it, he would be a fool.

Chen Muwu didn't take the invitation from the embassy seriously.

First, because the schedule of the Solvay Conference is very tight, I may not be able to spare time.

Second, after all, Belgium will not be his main country of activity in the future. Apart from attending the Solvay Conference every three years, he will basically not have any more interactions with the country he wrote to.

So he was reluctant to deal with these old-style bureaucrats.

Moreover, before leaving London, his eldest brother Chen Muqiao, who was familiar with etiquette, did not specifically inform him that he would have relatives and friends to visit after arriving in Belgium, so Chen Muwu did not take the invitation from the embassy to heart.

"Brother Zongyao, thank you for visiting me tonight and personally informing me of the news. Our time in Brussels is limited, and I don't know if we have time to visit the embassy. I will write a letter to the embassy at some time. Details Just explain this.

"Tell me, you went to Germany this time and Su Lian helped install the particle accelerator. Did everything go well? Did you encounter any difficulties or happy things?"

The topic of the legation was just a small episode in the chat that night, and Chen Muwu quickly changed the topic to serious matters.

Dirac listened with great interest, and from time to time he raised a few questions that he cared about.

When it was almost dinner time and Zhao Zhongyao said goodbye and left, Dirac was still very interested in the content of the chat just now.

"Chen, after listening to what Dr. Zhao said just now, I really think Sulian is a very interesting place. I want to find an opportunity to walk around and see this mysterious country that has been constantly slandered by our newspapers. , what does it really look like.”

What should come will always come.

In the original time and space without Chen Muwu, in order to improve the academic level of the country and break the various blockades imposed on it by European and American countries, the Sulian government also invited a group of people like Chen Muwu to visit the Sulian Academy of Sciences in Lezhigrad. A group of internationally renowned scholars visited Soviet Union.

Although Sulian finally overthrew the rule of Tsarist Russia, he chose a brand new theme that was different from other places in the world.

But its main ethnic group is still the Russians, and the Russians' reverence for knowledge has not changed from beginning to end.

"Teachers teach people, learn from one's work and resolve doubts." All walks of life pay attention to the teacher-instructor relationship, and of course this situation also exists in academic circles.

For something like knowledge, you may be able to discover new content through your own research and exploration. But most of the knowledge a person acquires in his life basically comes from education, from the teachers who impart knowledge to him.

In 1726, Leonhard Euler, a 19-year-old Swiss boy, had just completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Basel and received his Ph.D.

Immediately after graduating with his Ph.D., he received an invitation from the Royal Russian Academy of Sciences—the predecessor of the Soviet Academy of Sciences where Chen Muwu went to Lezhigrad to give lectures—to take up a post at the Institute of Physiology at the Academy. Teaching work.

As a Swiss, Euler did not immediately accept or reject the request for a teaching position after receiving it. He was waiting for a response from the University of Basel, where he had just applied for a teaching position.

The Swiss university was blind in the end and rejected Euler's application for a teaching position. So the twenty-year-old Euler crossed the Baltic Sea and came to the coastal city of St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and entered the Russian Academy of Sciences to work.

Daniel I Bernoulli, the director of the Institute of Mathematics - one of the three more famous Bernoulli family members, the one who proposed Bernoulli's principle, the basic principle of fluid mechanics - because he could not stand the treatment he received in St. Petersburg. After experiencing all kinds of censorship and hostility, he resigned in anger and left Russia to return to Basel. Euler took over his position and became the director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He served twice in his life as a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, planting the seeds of mathematics in what was then a desert land and allowing them to take root, sprout, and spread.

The seed planted by Euler, invited by Catherine, allowed Russia to produce hundreds of mathematical masters in the next few hundred years. Whether it is the number of mathematicians or the quality of their academic research, it is the most outstanding figure in Europe in terms of the number of mathematicians and the quality of their academic research. Even in the world, only Germany and France can compare with it.

French mathematics is strong because they have Cauchy, Lagrange, Laplace and others.

The situation in Germany is similar to that in Russia. The United States has apples and China has pineapples...

No, Russia has Euler and Germany has Gauss.

Euler and the mathematical system he brought, as well as the local mathematician Chebyshev trained by Russia under the influence of Euler, as well as his apprentices Markov and Lyapunov and their disciples, made St. Petersburg University and Oz The University of Science and Technology has become the two largest concentration of mathematicians in Russia.

Gauss single-handedly made the University of Göttingen, a small town in western Germany, the undisputed center of mathematical research in Europe and the world from the early [-]th century to the [-]s.

So much so that by the time Chen Muwu traveled through time, Hilbert, the leader of mathematics at the University of Göttingen, would still be recognized by the mathematics community as the king of mathematics.

Then Mustache came to power in 1933. Mathematicians at the University of Göttingen were tricked into going to Princeton by wealthy and visionary Americans, so that the latter could succeed him after World War II. Tingen University has become the new academic center of mathematics in the world.

The mathematics of Russia, Germany and France is strong, and it is inseparable from one or several mathematicians who gave this country a good start in mathematics research, and then passed it on from generation to generation, making its bloodline continuous.

As for the United Kingdom, which is across the sea from the European continent, as one of the richest countries in Europe at the time, there was once a great mathematician who was incomparable to Euler, Cauchy and Gauss. Inferior, even in the ranking of the four greatest mathematicians in the history of mathematics recognized by the mathematics community, he ranks in front of Euler and Gauss, second only to Archimedes in ancient Greece.

This British math savant was Chen Muwu’s senior student at Trinity College centuries ago, Isaac Newton.

Newton's achievements in mathematics are well known to the world, but the mathematical level of Britain has not reached the same level as that of Russia, France and Germany hundreds of years later.

The reason behind this is that Newton's successors, the British mathematicians in the Royal Society, and Leibniz's students on the European continent fought for the two masters over the right to discover calculus, and they refused to give in to each other. .

Therefore, British mathematicians who were angry with the European mathematics community took advantage of the natural advantages of the English Channel to cut off academic ties with Europe.

There was no academic exchange with macho mathematicians like Euler and Gauss, and no mathematician as great as Lord Niu appeared in the UK. As a result, the inheritance of mathematics was almost interrupted in the UK for more than a hundred years. Newton's subsequent achievements in mathematics have always been inferior to those of the three countries on the European continent.

Around the same time that Euler went to Russia, Euler's master in mathematics, Leibniz, in his later years, was suppressed by the powerful Sir Lord Cow in the UK because of the issue of the right to discover calculus.

After Leibniz invented the binary system, he accidentally saw the Zhouyi diagram given to him by Bai Jin, a missionary who had gone to the Qing Dynasty to preach, and learned about the Bagua system.

He believed that the binary system he invented coincided with the Yin and Yang Bagua studied by the ancient Chinese. From then on, he began to become interested in Chinese culture, and through continuous research, he became a China expert and became a famous Chinese expert on the European continent. blow.

Because he was suppressed by academic circles from the United Kingdom on the European continent, Leibniz in his later years once had the idea of ​​going to his spiritual homeland, China, far away on the other side of the Eurasian continent, to continue his work there. Mathematical research.

After having this idea, Leibniz once wrote a letter to his pen pal Kang Mazi, who he had never met but had been friends with for a long time, and was proficient in mathematics and calculus, proposing that he move to China and establish a business in Beijing. The idea of ​​an academy of science.

However, this idea was ruthlessly rejected by the emperor of the "Celestial Kingdom", so Leibniz and his mathematical ideas failed to come to fruition.

Leibniz's mathematical seeds remained in Europe, while Euler's mathematical seeds were spread in Russia.

It seems that they are just two things that are somewhat similar but with different results. However, a hundred years later, Tsarist Russia, which accepted Euler, used various means to seize and cede a large amount of land in the northern part of the Qing Dynasty again and again.

The Qing Dynasty, which rejected Leibniz, became a piece of meat on the chopping board, ceding land and various interests to various powerful countries, including but not limited to Tsarist Russia, again and again.

Perhaps the reasons for this disparate outcome cannot all be attributed to mathematics.

However, the attitude towards knowledge and science has, to a large extent, determined the different outcomes that the two countries ultimately reached.

Although Sulian was blocked by various European countries due to political reasons.

Their love and attitude towards the pursuit of knowledge has not changed, so last year they invited Chen Muwu, a young physicist who proposed the groundbreaking quantum theory, to visit the Surian Academy of Sciences in Lezhigrad.

In the original space and time without Chen Muwu, the first people they invited were Dirac and Heisenberg.

(End of this chapter)