Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 88 36 Rutherford's Loud Voice

The summer is coming to an end, and the autumn semester is coming. Those who left school, or went on vacation or went back to visit relatives in their hometowns have returned to Cambridge and Cavendish Laboratory one after another.

Kapitsa, who still came back by train, brought home-made Russian sausages and distributed them to Chen Muwu, Blackett and colleagues in the laboratory.

Of course, he didn't forget Ye Gongchao's share, after all last semester, Chen Muwu took him and Blackett to Magdalen Academy to eat and drink with his compatriot.

Chen Muwu had only eaten Harbin red sausage in his previous life, and he felt that the taste of the red sausage Kapica brought him was not much different from that one, in short, it was delicious.

The return of Kapitsa also changed Chen Muwu's life a little bit.

Kapitsa, who completed her Ph.D. in the summer and is no longer a student, has moved out of the rented room at Mrs. Brown's house this time.

Cavendish Laboratory appointed him as the assistant head of the Department of Magnetism, and Trinity College also hired Kapitsa as a researcher and arranged a room for him in the college.

Although they could still meet in the laboratory in the future, Chen Muwu had to go home alone after a day of laboratory work.

That's right, the room arrangement of Trinity College is as important as seniority ranking in the workplace. Although Chen Muwu is already well-known and has a good friendship with the dean, Old Thomson, he is theoretically a new student this fall. The freshman graduate student still couldn't be assigned to his own room, so he could only continue to curl up in the small room upstairs in Mrs. Brown's house.

……

When a loud voice that sounded familiar and made people feel a little desperate appeared again in the Cavendish laboratory, it meant that the director of the laboratory, Rutherford, had spent his long vacation by the sea in Cornwall. , and returned to the management position of the laboratory.

After being exposed to the sun for a whole summer, both Rutherford and his son-in-law Fowler's skin became a lot redder.

Like a lion returning to the jungle, the first thing Rutherford did after returning to Cavendish was to inspect his territory from laboratory to laboratory, and to ask himself patiently The staff and students under him, what achievements and progress have they made during the holiday.

After finishing the experiment on visible light scattering, Chen Muwu seldom went to that laboratory.

Soon after, that laboratory was also taken back by Chadwick, who was in charge of the overall arrangement, and used it for other purposes.

These days, Chen Muwu basically stayed in Cavendish's conference room, holding the typewriter in the laboratory, and typed out Chen Statistics' papers and Chen Ninghe's papers word by word. What he is typing now is about matter waves. An article of .

Chen Muwu originally thought that the typewriter in the Cavendish Laboratory was much more advanced than the one he bought when he was in Shanghai.

But in fact, there is no difference between the two. All mathematical formulas and special symbols must be left blank in advance, and then fill in these contents one by one with a pen after typing.

Typewriters that can print mathematical and physical symbols such as integrals, sums, and Laplace operators, as well as Greek letters, may have to wait until the 70s and [-]s to be developed.

Then computer technology became more and more mature, and TeX gradually emerged. With this convenient and quick tool, the papers of mathematicians and physicists will become more and more watery.

"Hey! Chen, long time no see!" Rutherford pushed open the door of the conference room, "What good stuff are you writing?"

"Director," Chen Muwu stood up, he had already heard Rutherford's loud voice through several floors of doors, "It's just a paper on electronics, and I just got a simple idea."

Rutherford had a smile on his face: "When I was on vacation in Cornwall, I read the "On the Spirit of the Chinese" you gave me. I remember a sentence in it, saying that humility is a part of your nation. an excellent character.

"Now I finally believe that Dao Ke is innocent, because although my student Chen Muwu has achieved a lot in physics, he still maintains the low-key attitude when I first met him. and humble!

"Sitting on the beach, looking at the blue sea, I occasionally think about such a question, that is, I am facing the same sea, why can you come up with a novel idea on the ship, and finally Find that bright scattered line from the experiment, and all I can think of is, How many delicious Cornish pasties are we going to have for lunch today?”

The scattered bright line that Rutherford said was actually Chen Muwu's first experiment after he came to Cavendish Laboratory, which was about the Chen scattering of visible light.

The excuse Chen Muwu gave at the time was that when he saw the blue sea when he was on a ship, he thought of Rayleigh scattering, and then he wanted to do further research.

So Rutherford, who also went to the seaside for vacation, only remembered to mention it when he saw the sea.

Rutherford lit his pipe, took a deep breath, and continued: "Later, I saw the experimental paper you published together with Kapitza and Blackett, which beat my favorite student, Bohr, to the ground.

"That's when I realized that you can see the ocean and I can't, not because I'm old, but because you're a rare genius!

"Tell me, Genius Chen, what interesting things have fascinated you recently?"

Rutherford's words made Chen Muwu feel a little embarrassed: "Director, it's still a problem caused by photons.

"I recently came up with a strange idea. Since light with waves can be regarded as a kind of particle, then can things that are particles themselves also be a kind of wave? For example, electrons?
"If according to the current photon theory, the momentum of a photon can be expressed as p=hν/c. Assuming that electrons are also a kind of wave,...

"...

"Bringing this formula into the above one, we can get that the wavelength of the electron wave is equal to Planck's constant divided by the momentum of the electron, λ=h/p.

"The idea is so interesting that I'm going to write it up as a paper."

Chen Muwu talked a lot about the derivation process, but in fact, only the first few sentences are the essence.

Obviously Rutherford also caught the point of his words: "Chen, you mean, electrons are also a kind of wave? My God, fortunately you told me these words first, if your point of view is known by the old director, His glasses will definitely fall to the ground in your anger!"

Old Thomson, former director of the Cavendish Laboratory, first discovered the electron in 1897, broke the curse of the indivisible atom, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for this discovery .

Old Thomson, who is nearly [-] years old now, if he knew that Chen Muwu said that electrons are not only a kind of particle, but also a kind of wave, and if he hadn't been so angry that he had a heart attack on the spot, maybe old Thomson would really wave With a golf club, hit Chen Muwu's head like a giant golf ball.

Rutherford's voice, which was already loud, gradually became louder.

In other words, what he said next was no longer a speech, but more like a lecture from a superior to a subordinate who had messed up his work: "Chen, I think in your mind, don't think about these things every day. Unreal things, the feeling you give me now is that you are more and more like a theoretical physicist who sits and talks.

"But Chen, you should also know that theories are not always so reliable.

"Please think about it carefully, you, Kapitsa, Blackett and the others only used the trajectories of recoil electrons captured in the experiment to make the incomprehensible theory proposed by your brother Bohr, Refutation of the individual is flawless.

"Although his theory is indeed excessive, if there is no clear experimental evidence, maybe many people will believe it.

"Mr. Chen, I hope you don't continue to play games with their symbols like a theorist, but do more hands-on experimental work and return to the experiment.

"After all, in the Cavendish Laboratory, we are the group of people who want to use experiments to prove the true nature of nature!"

Kapitsa, who was doing experiments in the open laboratory, also heard Rutherford's loud voice.

He joked with Blackett on the opposite side of the long table a little gloatingly: "Patrick, look, even a genius like Chen Muwu, who has been the darling of the laboratory for several months, can't escape the crocodile's loud voice after all. .”

Black nodded, apparently agreeing with Kapitsa's point of view.

As Kapitsa said, Chen Muwu had been in Cavendish Laboratory for nearly four months, and this was the first time Rutherford lost his temper with him.

During these four months, as a VIP spectator, he watched countless "live broadcasts" of other students in the Rutherford Lesson Lab at close range.

Chen Muwu knew that the New Zealand brawny man standing in front of him was actually a tender and tough man with a knife mouth and a bean curd heart.

Although Rutherford appeared to be strict on the surface, in fact, everything he did was for the good of his students.

As long as you can convince him with facts and reason, Rutherford will always sincerely apologize to everyone he has criticized recklessly, regardless of his status.

Chen Muwu complained in his heart, Rutherford's temper is really the same as Monkey King's face, it changes as soon as he says it, if he can listen patiently to others, maybe he won't have to apologize so many times in the future, including this time.

Chen Muwu was busy making complaints about others, but he didn't think about it. He himself just said a sentence that was out of the ordinary in the eyes of physicists today.

Electron, is, a kind of, wave?
After hearing such words, who would let him continue to spread this crooked way?

(End of this chapter)