Chapter 648 - 648 Was Proven?
648 Was Proven?
At night time.
Lu Zhou quickly finished his dinner and began walking back to his office. On his way there, he called Chen Yushan and told her about the equipment.
After Chen Yushan heard Lu Zhou’s explanation, she sighed.
“You should have called me, your price is obviously too low.”
Lu Zhou sighed and said, “I thought so too, but I couldn’t go back on my word.”
Chen Yushan was speechless. She said, “Of course you can go back on your word, who cares what an enterprise thinks? Just change your offer.”
Lu Zhou: “Uh, that’s not good, right? I already agreed.”
Chen Yushan: “Okay then, if you want to keep your word, we can use another method.”
Lu Zhou: “What method?”
Chen Yushan smiled mischievously and replied, “A million is just the installation fee, this doesn’t include the service fee and system update fees.”
Lu Zhou was speechless. He said, “You’re way too good at extortion.”
Honestly speaking, even though Lu Zhou didn’t like these two Shenyang Machine Tool executives, he still wanted China to have a spot in the international machine tool industry.
Even though he wasn’t familiar with this field, production and research were closely related. He didn’t want to offend anyone.
He had plans to build a collider and an outer-space laboratory, and all of these exciting high-tech projects needed industrial support. He would have to pay a ton of import taxes if he relied on other countries.
“Why would you care about them?” Chen Yushan said, “I’m telling you, if you really care, then you shouldn’t have offered such a low price! They deserve to pay a higher price. It’s only then that they will try to invent new technology on their own. If you don’t charge them a higher price, they’ll never treat their researchers well. True competitive enterprises all come from high patent licensing fees!”
Lu Zhou felt that Chen Yushan made sense, so he nodded and replied, “I don’t really want to handle this, so we’ll just do what you say.”
Chen Yushan: “You should have made me handle it in the beginning!”
When it came to things that were related to work, Chen Yushan was like a different person. Her mannerisms and actions were almost ferocious.
It was refreshing for Lu Zhou to see this side of her.
After everyone left for the evening, Lu Zhou went back to the institute warehouse. He installed the CNC system that Xiao Ai wrote onto another machine. He didn’t have to worry about this anymore since Star Sky Technology would handle the rest.
The next day, the people from the State Administration for National Defense came over and placed the machine tool into their car.
Lu Zhou happened to see Yang Zhongquan, so he smiled and greeted him.
“Oh, Yang Zhongquan, are you ready to eat?”
Yang Zhongquan thought back to his words and instantly blushed. He turned around and walked away.
Secretary Wu smiled and joked, “Ummm… The machine tool is too expensive. It costs us tens of millions, we can’t let him eat it.”
Lu Zhou smiled and didn’t say anything.
…
The new space launch site was still under examination and approval, but the State Administration for National Defense said that it shouldn’t be a big problem. The space shuttle manufacturing site was approved a week ago. The construction equipment had already been moved to the site, and they had begun the construction.
The construction company that won the bidding wars was a local engineering company based in Jinling. It met the military engineering qualifications, as well as the security and confidentiality conditions. It should be able to easily construct the spacecraft assembly factory.
Since the construction was managed by professionals, Lu Zhou left it alone. He focused on his Yang-Mills existence and mass gap research.
According to the results he discussed with Luo Wenxuan, the most reliable way to find the particle mass m was to introduce a Quantum Yang-Mills Field.
This would require a massless field that could propagate at the speed of light, whereas quantum particles had a positive mass, which was, a positive number ∆. And the energy of any excited particle state must not be less than ∆, thus ensuring that the strong interaction nuclear force was short-ranged.
Lu Zhou exchanged ideas with Professor Fefferman and Professor Witten through email messages, and the advice Lu Zhou received was peculiar.
Witten believed that the method of using a Quantum Yang-Mills Field to solve the Yang-Mills theory wasn’t reliable and that the M theory would be a more reliable way of explaining the mass gap.
However, the problem was that there wasn’t any direct evidence to prove the existence of the M theory, or string theory for that matter. Using a hypothesis to prove another hypothesis was obviously unreliable.
Unlike Witten, Professor Fefferman was optimistic about Lu Zhou’s proposal of a Quantum Yang-Mills Field.
At the end of Fefferman’s email, he mentioned something interesting.
[… When traditional methods fail to solve new problems, the best thing to do is to create new ways to adapt to the ever-changing world of science. You’re creating a quantum field that corresponds to the classical effects described above, to solve a problem that cannot be described on this space-time manifold. I think this method is very interesting, it is at least worth a try.
[If I weren’t busy with my own research project, I would have bought a plane ticket to fly over there and research this problem together with you.]
Other than exchanging emails with Professor Fefferman and Witten, Lu Zhou’s only other partner was Luo Wenxuan.
This was actually quite embarrassing. Even though the Institute for Advanced Study had been established for a long time, there weren’t a lot of big talents. Institute of Computational Materials, on the other hand, had plenty of talents, and their scientific research level was world-class.
However, when it came to the Institute of Mathematics or the Institute of Physics…
They were basically relying on Lu Zhou’s reputation.
He had to admit, cultivating talents and creating an academic environment would take a lot of time.
Institute of Physics.
Director’s office.
Whenever Lu Zhou couldn’t find any inspiration to solve a problem, he would come here. This was his time to exchange new research discoveries with Luo Wenxuan.
When Luo Wenxuan saw Lu Zhou walk into this office, he looked up from his computer and asked, “Did you make any progress on the Quantum Yang-Mills Field?”
“I’m still a bit off, but I think I’m very close to the answer. There’s just a thin layer between me and the answer… Of course, this layer might be made of frosted glass,” Lu Zhou walked to the water dispenser and made himself a cup of instant coffee. “What about you?”
Luo Wenxuan shook his head.
“I think there’s a thick wall between me and the answer.”
Lu Zhou: “You’ll figure it out eventually… Oh yeah, what are you doing?”
Luo Wenxuan: “I’m looking at the theses on Arxiv to see if there are any interesting ideas. Ever since your report, the number of Yang-Mills equations theses has been growing at an exponential rate. However, the average quality of these theses has been declining at an exponential rate.”
Lu Zhou smiled and said, “That’s understandable, everyone wants to find an answer.”
Luo Wenxuan sighed and said, “Yeah, after all, this is the most difficult problem of the century.”
Lu Zhou took a sip of his coffee and said, “Not necessarily. I think the Riemann’s conjecture is more difficult. There has been some progress made on the Yang-Mills theory over the past few decades, but the Riemann’s conjecture is still a mystery.”
“Really, is that what you think?” Luo Wenxuan shrugged and carelessly said, “One might be more difficult than the other, but as long as I am unable to solve the problem, they’re the same to me.”
He said while clicking his mouse.
While staring at the computer screen, he suddenly froze.
Lu Zhou, who was sipping on his coffee, noticed Luo Wenxuan’s expression and asked, “What now?”
Luo Wenxuan looked away from his computer screen. He looked at Lu Zhou as he said with a perplexed expression on his face, “The Yang-Mills existence and mass gap… was proven?”