Chapter 232 - 142: A Strain

Chapter 232: Chapter 142: A Strain

"That’s not it..."

Zhang Yuan pointed at the pile of all-English academic papers on Chen Zhuo’s desk.

"These are papers from the most recent years of fluid dynamics journals. The technical vocabulary is obscure and dense, and many of the sentences are syntactically convoluted. You’re a sophomore—can you really understand them without any trouble?"

Chen Zhuo thought for a moment.

"There are some parts that are a bit of a struggle, yes."

Zhang Yuan breathed a sigh of relief. ’That’s more like it,’ he thought. ’Otherwise, he’d be some kind of monster.’

"Which part is a struggle? Come on, let your senior help you out. I tackled these same papers a few months ago. Even though I didn’t fully digest them, I got the general gist."

Zhang Yuan pulled over a chair and sat down, putting on the air of a seasoned veteran.

Chen Zhuo pulled a sheet from the pile of paper and handed it to Zhang Yuan.

"Senior, take a look at this."

Chen Zhuo pointed to a derivation process in the middle of the paper.

"When the author was constructing this pressure surge model, he used a variant of the Navier-Stokes equations, but going from the third line to the fourth, he completely skipped the expansion process for a nonlinear term."

Chen Zhuo pointed to two lines of equations he had added in the blank space with a red pen.

"His mathematical leap is too wide. I reverse-engineered his matrix reduction logic based on the initial conditions he provided and found that he actually made an approximation here, ignoring the minute resistance caused by air viscosity."

Chen Zhuo looked at Zhang Yuan, his tone one of pure academic inquiry.

"What I want to ask is, in your practical engineering work, are these kinds of forced mathematical approximations—made to solve an equation—permissible? In a real-world wind tunnel, what order of magnitude would the error be?"

Zhang Yuan stared at the two lines of red-penned equations on the paper, which were incredibly neat and logically flawless.

The expression on his face slowly froze.

He had originally thought that when Chen Zhuo said it was "a struggle," he meant he didn’t recognize some English words or didn’t grasp a physical concept.

But it turned out the "struggle" he was referring to was the original author skipping a step in the mathematical derivation in a top-tier journal, forcing him to manually fill it in himself!

He had even gone a step further, reverse-engineering the author’s logic to find the point of compromise between the physical model and the mathematical model.

’Is this what he calls reading a paper?’

Zhang Yuan felt his throat go dry.

He swallowed hard, staring at Chen Zhuo, speechless for a long moment.

"Is something wrong, Senior?"

Chen Zhuo looked at him, confused.

"Is the mathematical logic in my derivation incorrect?"

"No... It’s not incorrect."

Zhang Yuan snapped back to his senses and gave a dry cough or two, trying to hide his embarrassment.

He pointed at the line of equations.

"In practical engineering, the effect of air viscosity on a shockwave front is minimal. To get a result that the computer can run, this kind of approximation is standard procedure. The error is usually controlled to within five-thousandths, so it’s considered negligible."

Zhang Yuan answered the question quickly, then immediately stood up and picked up his enamel mug.

"Well, uh, you just... keep reading."

Zhang Yuan patted Chen Zhuo’s shoulder, his tone now tinged with an inexplicable sense of awe.

"If there’s anything you don’t understand... never mind. Just keep reading. I’m going to get some water."

Mug in hand, Zhang Yuan practically fled back to his own workstation.

He sat in front of the main control computer, staring at the line of code that had frozen his program. Then he turned to look at Chen Zhuo, who was sitting quietly in the corner, working through derivations from a top-tier, all-English journal paper on a piece of scrap paper.

Zhang Yuan suddenly felt that his supervisor’s comment on the day he brought Chen Zhuo over—that "this kid’s brain is incredibly fast"—had been a hell of an understatement.

This wasn’t some junior who had never set foot in a lab.

This was clearly a monster his supervisor had dug up from who knows where.