Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 369 108 Source of Solar Energy

After leaving his seat, Chen Muwu first walked to the staff responsible for operating the slide projector and handed the slides he had prepared with some formulas and schematic diagrams on them to the staff member.

Then he walked onto the podium and nodded to Professor Lorenz who had been waiting for him here.

"Dr. Chen, do your best. Sir Rutherford has already told me. He said that you have made new discoveries in the Cavendish Laboratory. If I have a chance, I will invite you to the stage. Don't let me down." In addition to the expectations of your teacher and me, as well as everyone else here, give us a good start for this meeting."

After whispering encouragement to the junior Chen Muwu who was standing next to him, Professor Lorenz walked off the stage with a smile on his face.

After the applause from the audience ended, Chen Muwu also nodded to the physicists sitting in the audience.

After the applause gradually subsided, he cleared his throat and said:
  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be the first to take the stage and speak at this Solvay Conference.

"The title of my lecture today is "A Conjecture About the Energy Source of the Sun and Stars." This is a question I recently studied with Professor Eddington in the Cavendish Laboratory."

Among the people here, some people often read news reports from newspapers and pay attention to various news happening internationally and domestically.

Some people are not that concerned about news events. What they value more is whether the experiments they are doing can achieve expected good results.

Therefore, these people will not take the rumors that the sun may explode without any scientific basis at all.

They also didn't know that reporters from The Times, who were worried about the world being in chaos, had gone to Cambridge University to interview Chen Muwu. The latter also promised to the other party that he would use experimental phenomena to explain the reason why the sun shines and heats.

When these people saw the title written by Chen Muwu in the center of the first slide, they were shocked by the huge title——

Shouldn't the theme of this Solvay Conference be "Atomic Nuclei and Nuclear Reactions"?

Why did Dr. Chen start talking about the sun and stars as soon as he came up?

Did he attend the wrong meeting and get the wrong speech?

This was the Solvay Conference, where the most advanced physics knowledge was discussed, not the general meeting of the National Astronomical Union.

There were many people present who were surprised, but no one stood up to remind Chen Muwu.

Chen Muwu signaled the staff operating the slideshow to switch to the next slide, and then a photographic film recording the trajectory of the cloud chamber appeared on the projector screen.

"Please see, this is a new reaction experiment involving atomic nuclei that Professor Eddington and I recently conducted using the particle accelerator in the Cavendish Laboratory.

“This experiment uses accelerated deuterium nuclei to bombard hydrogen atoms fixed in the ammonium chloride crystal lattice, and finally obtains the first isotope of the helium element, helium-3 nuclei with a relative atomic mass of 3.

"——This line on the photographic film is the trajectory of the helium-3 atomic nucleus in the cloud chamber.

"The specific process of reaching this conclusion through numerical calculation has been written down on the next slide. Please help me replace it, Mr. Staff.

"Perhaps some of you have seen the newsletter I wrote to the journal editorial office in the first two issues of Nature, and also seen Professor Aston, who is also in the Cavendish Laboratory. The value obtained by measuring the precise atomic mass of this helium-3 isotope.

"——Thanks to Professor Aston for these basic but very useful contributions. With the accurate mass he measured, we can better explore the mysterious and unknown microscopic world.

"Adding the rest masses of these particles before and after the reaction and comparing them with each other, we can conclude that after the nuclear reaction is over, the mass of the helium-3 nucleus is less than the mass of a deuterium nucleus and a hydrogen nucleus, that is, there is Mass loss. According to the mass-energy equation proposed by Professor Einstein——"

Having said this, Chen Muwu deliberately made a long note, and his eyes drifted to the corner where he just sat.

Einstein, who did not listen to Chen Muwu's opening speech and had already quietly discussed the physics and philosophy of quantum mechanics with Wittgenstein, was slightly startled when he heard Chen Muwu call his name on the podium.

He raised his head and looked at the curtain hanging next to the blackboard on the podium, and looked at the formula written by Chen Muwu on it.

He was relieved when he saw "Ｅ=Ｍｃ" that no one knew better than him.

It's just the most ordinary mass-energy equation. I don't know why Dr. Chen always adds his name in front of it every time he mentions this equation.

After confirming that he was not calling himself, Einstein lowered his head again, pointing at the paper with Wittgenstein, and it seemed that he had once again entered into a heated discussion about quantum mechanics.

Although he couldn't know what the fighting situation between the two of them was like, looking at the expressions on both sides' faces, Chen Muwu could easily make a guess.

After smiling knowingly, Chen Muwu continued what he had just said.

“The nuclear reaction in which deuterium nuclei and hydrogen nuclei fuse into a helium-3 nucleus releases energy to the outside world.

"So after this experiment was successfully conducted in the Cavendish Laboratory, it confirmed a conjecture that Professor Eddington put forward a few years ago, that is, the source of energy in the sun should not be like As people have speculated for more than a century, the heat released from the combustion of coal, petroleum, or a mixture of various organic alkanes is likely to provide energy through nuclear fusion, a reaction method that humans have only gained a deeper understanding of in the past decade. of.

“We seem to be able to get the same guess about the Pangu process of the universe.

“At the initial moment when the universe expanded outward from a singularity with infinite energy and mass and infinitely small space, the entire space was filled with only the same element in huge quantities, hydrogen atoms.

"Then just after this initial moment, fusion begins between the hydrogen atoms, creating one and another heavier atom.

“The entire universe expanded and fused to form new elements, gradually becoming what we know today.

"The types of fusion that occurred in the initial stages of the universe are still happening in stars, so the sun above our heads can continue to provide energy for the entire solar system. "In addition to the fusion of deuterium atoms and hydrogen atoms into helium - In addition to the D-H fusion of 3 atoms, Professor Eddington and I established a set of nuclear reaction processes for the interior of the sun based on this nuclear fusion reaction and the fact that there are a large number of hydrogen atoms in the sun through observation of spectra:

“It starts with the fusion of two hydrogen atoms to create a deuterium atom.

"We have also tried to reproduce this drastic reaction in the particle accelerator of the Cavendish Laboratory. However, even if the energy is increased to the maximum effect of the particle accelerator, the protons accelerated to more than one million electron volts can bombard other objects. For a proton, we still cannot find the deuterium nucleus formed by fusion after the reaction is completed.

"That is enough to show that this fusion reaction is not an exothermic reaction but an energy-absorbing reaction. This is actually a very strange thing, because the sum of the masses before and after the reaction cannot explain this. It is obvious that the combined masses of the two hydrogen nuclei would be larger than a helium nucleus.

"But no matter how much energy we provided in the Cavendish Laboratory, this reaction never happened.

"We can't give a reasonable explanation for this, we can only speculate and put forward a hypothesis. That is, this reaction may require energy in other places besides nuclear fusion, but the current academic level of physics is not enough to explore it. Find out where this energy went."

Chen Muwu, who pretended not to know the existence of neutrinos and the decay of beta, naturally could not find a "reasonable" explanation for the energy absorption of this reaction.

"And for the reaction to be successful, the energy required before the reaction is huge, perhaps more than the energy the sun can provide.

“It’s just that if the sun cannot provide energy to fuse two hydrogen atoms into a deuterium atom, then the subsequent reactions will not be able to proceed.

"Since force doesn't work, is there any other way? Coincidentally, quantum mechanics really provides a possibility for this situation.

"As long as we solve the wave function of the hydrogen atom, we can get a very strange phenomenon from a macroscopic perspective, that is, it is obviously an impossible barrier for the hydrogen atom to overcome, but the hydrogen atom can It was as if a tunnel could be drilled through this barrier and magically passed through.

"This effect, which we call the 'quantum tunneling effect,' allows a hydrogen nucleus to easily approach another hydrogen nucleus, so it is not surprising that they undergo a fusion reaction with each other to produce deuterium nuclei.

"As a side note, if this conjecture is finally confirmed, it will mean that quantum mechanics can be used not only in the microscopic world, but also in the sun, which is extremely macroscopic."

Chen Muwu deliberately added an accent to this last sentence, wanting to observe Einstein's reaction to this matter.

But to his disappointment, in the corner of the venue, Einstein and Wittgenstein were having a heated discussion. He didn't even listen to Chen Muwu's speech on the podium, let alone look up at him again.

This was also one of the situations Chen Muwu imagined. He did not take it seriously and continued:
  "Then the deuterium nuclei fuse with the hydrogen nuclei to produce helium-3. A large amount of energy is released in this reaction, which is probably the source of the sun's energy.

"This is just a guess made by Professor Eddington and me about the possible nuclear reactions inside the sun based on the experimental phenomena obtained in the Cavendish Laboratory.

“As for whether this speculation is correct, physicists and astronomers may need to join forces to verify this idea using further experiments and observations.

"As an element that was first observed in the solar spectral lines last century, helium is not the isotope of helium-3 that exists in large quantities in the sun, but helium-4.

"In order to be more consistent with the actual conditions inside the sun, we can also add a new nuclear reaction on top of the two guessed nuclear reactions just now. - Please help me switch to the next slide.

"Two helium-3 nuclei can fuse into a helium-4 nucleus, releasing two protons at the same time.

“Because we only carried out this series of nuclear reactions half a month before the opening of the Solvay Conference, the last reaction has not yet been verified and is just a guess on my part.

“After the conference is over and I return to Cambridge University, this nuclear reaction will be the focus of my next work.

"If the three nuclear reactions mentioned above are combined together, then the nuclear reaction process in the solar system can be comprehensively written as four hydrogen nuclei, which generate a helium nucleus through a series of fusion reactions and release a certain amount of energy.

"This nuclear reaction is exactly a speculation that Professor Eddington put forward in one of his papers a few years ago.

"Now it seems that Professor Eddington's theory is probably not a guess, but a reality."

After speaking all the content on the slides, Chen Muwu bowed cleanly and left the stage without any sloppiness at all.

As for questions, this meeting has a dedicated discussion time, so there will be no question-and-answer session after the speech.

Among the physicists sitting in the audience, some people were discussing quantum mechanics and did not listen at all, some people understood it, and some people were a little confused.

There was another one among them who both understood and looked confused.

Eddington really couldn't understand. Most of these experiments and the conclusions drawn from the experiments were clearly done by Dr. Chen alone, but why did he mention him again and again throughout the speech? Own?
  And he almost took all the credit on himself in the end, which felt like he was forcing himself to be the first person to discover the secret of the sun.

When he was at Cambridge University before coming here, Chen Muwu had never been angry with himself. Is there such a situation?

What happened to him today?

Eddington wanted to stop Chen Muwu, who had just passed by him, and ask him about the specific situation.

But his brain prevented him from doing so. Chen Muwu had just praised him on the stage. Now that he was doing this, it would be easy for the physicists present to misunderstand whether it was Dr. Chen and himself. There was discord.

If this rumor spreads, it will not be the two of them that will be embarrassed, but the entire British physics community.

Chen Muwu didn't know what Eddington was thinking. He strolled back to his seat and happened to look at Einstein who raised his head.

(End of this chapter)