Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 80 28 From Gothenburg to Denmark

Planck didn't know why the Cavendish Laboratory paper appeared in the Acta Scientia Proceedings just after Bohr's paper.

But he knew that he didn’t follow Einstein’s advice and invited Chen Muwu to study abroad at Humboldt University in Berlin. The wonder boy from China who published two papers in one month was the worst thing he had done this year. thing.

Planck can also be regarded as a patriot in science. He once said that "even if the enemy deprives our motherland of its national defense power, even if a crisis is happening before our eyes, or even a more serious crisis is coming, there is one thing that does not matter. What no enemy at home or abroad can take from us is the position of German science in the world. Our first task is to preserve this position and, if necessary, to defend it at all costs" and so on.

So seeing Chen Muwu being preempted by Cambridge University, he felt a little unhappy.

This little unpleasantness is just a small episode in Planck's recent life.

He is currently facing a bigger distress, but after seeing Chen Muwu's name in the Journal of Natural Sciences, Plank seems to have found a solution to the problem.

After thinking about it, he took up a pen and wrote a short message to Chen Muwu, and asked his secretary to put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it to Cambridge University in England.

……

The spring semester is over and midsummer is approaching. Rutherford also left the Cavendish Laboratory where he had been staying for two months, and took his family to the coast of Cornwall, an English resort, to enjoy a leisurely summer vacation. .

Bohr sent his paper on the BKS theory directly to the "Proceedings of Natural Science" of the Royal Society.

Perhaps because of a guilty conscience, he did not write a letter to tell his teacher Rutherford about the thesis.

So when Rutherford, who was far away by the sea, received the journal forwarded from Cambridge University, he discovered that this masterpiece by his most proud disciple had been published on it.

When he saw this paper, it was even a few days later than Planck in Germany.

Rutherford knew that several young people in the Cavendish laboratory had not done their own work some time ago, but were tinkering with the matter of using the cloud chamber to take pictures of recoil electrons.

Because this experiment was proposed by Chen Muwu, Rutherford also turned a blind eye to it.

After all, Chen came to the UK all the way from China, and he wanted to repeat the experiment he designed, which is understandable.

But Rutherford never expected that Bohr bumped into Chen Muwu's muzzle this time, and was hit by the recoil electrons ejected from the gun.

The palms and backs of the hands were full of flesh, and it was really hard for Rutherford to say anything.

After thinking about it, he could only give Boersiu a letter to comfort his beloved disciple who had lost face this time.

……

On the evening of July [-]th, Gothenburg, Sweden.

The celebration meeting for the [-]th anniversary of the founding of Gothenburg is being held in the auditorium of the city hall. The scale of the celebration meeting is so large that even King Gustav V of Sweden rushed to the meeting site in Gothenburg in person from Stockholm.

But today's protagonist is not a citizen of Gothenburg, nor is it the king, the head of state, but a student who has just finished a series of lecture tours in East Asia, Palestine and Spain, and was invited to Gothenburg to participate in the Nordic Naturalists Conference. einstein.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not dare to neglect the world's most famous physicist.

They invited Einstein to the town hall to participate in this event, and decided to award him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics again.

The reason why the King of Sweden rushed to Gothenburg today is to a large extent because he wants to attend the awards ceremony.

It may be because the total solar eclipse observed by the American astronomer Campbell in Australia last year is much more accurate than that of Eddington in 1919, and his result also irrefutably proves that the general theory of relativity predicts that gravity causes the light to deflect. correctness of folding.

So this time, the Nobel Prize jury finally nodded and agreed to let Einstein talk about the theory of relativity in his speech.

So in front of the audience and the King of Sweden, Einstein stepped onto the stage of the city hall and gave a speech entitled "Basic Ideas and Problems of The Theory of Relativity".

Regardless of whether the audience understood or not, they gave Einstein their own applause without hesitation after the speech.

In the next few minutes of free question time, someone mentioned Chen Muwu again.

The craze of time travel may have gradually dissipated in the UK due to the passage of time, but in Sweden, which is located in a remote area of ​​Europe, it is in the ascendant at this time.

The audience in the auditorium of the auditorium came from all walks of life, and the questions they asked were far less professional than the group of reporters who had prepared questions in advance that Einstein faced in Spain.

Therefore, he dealt with this kind of problem very well, until a professor at the University of Gothenburg raised his hand to ask.

"Dr. Einstein, what do you think of the paper published by Professor Bohr in Copenhagen, Denmark in the latest issue of "Proceedings of Natural Sciences?"

No one knows whether the professor's question is sincere or just wants to make a fuss.

Because after all, at last year's Nobel Prize award ceremony, Bohr severely criticized Einstein's light quantum theory.

"Sorry, I haven't read this paper. Could you please briefly explain what is the central idea of ​​this paper?"

Einstein, who came back from the Far East, has recently moved around in various countries on the European continent. Not to mention the latest physics journals, even the copy of the paper that Bohr sent to him after he finished writing the BKS paper, Einstein still has it. Did not receive.

"Professor Bohr said in his paper that he had found a new theory that could explain the scattering effect of gamma rays while denying the existence of photons.

"His new theory believes that the law of conservation of energy and the law of conservation of momentum do not apply at the atomic scale. These two conservation laws in classical physics are just the result of the statistical average of a large number of particles."

absurd.

This was Einstein's first reaction after listening to the brief description of the people in the audience.

In order to maintain the orthodoxy of electrodynamics, he turned his head away and abandoned the conservation of energy and momentum. Einstein wondered whether Bohr was smashed by a football flying at high speed when he was guarding the goal on the football field.

Or was it the gibberish recorded by his assistant while drinking too much Carlsberg beer?

After sorting out his thoughts, Einstein said: "Uh, sir, I think the conclusion proposed by Bohr is quite arbitrary, and even makes me feel a little disgusted. If his theory is proved to be true, then I would rather Go back to your hometown to be a shoemaker, or enter a casino as an employee, and don’t want to be a physicist again!"

"Doctor, very fortunately, the world will not lose a shoe repairer or a casino worker, and the world of physics will not lose a great figure like you, because someone has proved the glass theory with irrefutable experimental phenomena. How ridiculous this theory is."

After the celebration, Einstein received his Nobel prize money.

This huge sum of money is more than 12 Swedish kronor, converted into US dollars, about 3 US dollars, which can basically cover the ten-year salary of an ordinary university professor.

But the complete Nobel prize money was only in his hands for one night, because early the next morning, Einstein remitted all the huge sum of money (some say it was only a part of the prize money) to his ex-wife Mileva In an account opened with a Swiss bank.

Leaving Gothenburg, Einstein turned to sea. After nearly a day of sailing, the ship arrived in the Danish port city of Helsingborg that afternoon.

Einstein abandoned the ship and landed here, and changed to a train at the railway station.

After sitting on the railway tracks for more than an hour, he finally arrived at today's destination, Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.

Copenhagen, located between Gothenburg and Berlin, is the only way for Einstein to go home.

He came here not only to rest and stay, but also to visit an old friend whom he had only met once, but who he had known for a long time.

Bohr arrived outside the train station early, and the stream of people waiting to get off the train poured out from the exit. As a tall man, he saw Einstein with fluffy and curly hair and a signature beard in the crowd at a glance.

"Doctor, here I am!" Bohr waved to Einstein.

Apparently Einstein had seen him too, walking quickly towards Bohr with a smile on his face.

Throughout July, or since he received the July issue of the "Natural Philosophical Transactions", Bohr's life suddenly experienced many ups and downs.

He also didn't expect that the Cavendish Laboratory, which he and his teacher Rutherford was at the helm, would collide with the paper.

Moreover, the thesis of these three juniors just hit the snake seven inches of his BKS theory.

I just proposed in my thesis that the conservation of momentum and energy are not applicable under microscopic conditions, and my juniors have found conclusive evidence that momentum and energy are also conserved in the atomic range.

In this way, not only his thesis became a joke, but also the particle nature of light, which he has been resisting, has become a firm fact!
Like a defeated man, Bohr lowered his always proud head.

He wrote overnight to the Royal Society, whimsically asking whether he could withdraw the paper published in the July issue of the Natural Philosophical Transactions.

However, "the leak in the house happened to rain overnight", perhaps because of the blow, Bohr's assistant, Klemmers, who was overstressed, suffered from depression and was once again admitted to the ward of the University Hospital of Copenhagen.

His wife submitted her husband's resignation to Bohr, the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. As soon as Kramers was discharged from the hospital, the whole family would leave Copenhagen and return to Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Although Bohr was reluctant to part with it on the surface, he was unavoidably slandering in his heart: the Dutchman's ability to resist pressure is really not good, and now he misses his former assistant, Wolfgang Pauli very much.

The down-to-earth and hard-working Germans left a deep impression on Bohr. Taking advantage of the crazy depreciation of the German mark, can you go to Germany to find some smart students and rely on your own reputation and wisdom to fool them? What about Copenhagen?

As for another young man from Harvard, Slater, Bohr had already put him in the cold palace.

Anyway, as soon as the year-long gilding tour of Europe was over, he would be able to return to the United States and get an associate professorship at a good university.

Don't bother me with him, and I won't bother him either. Everyone should stay in this state until the end of time.

(End of this chapter)