Chapter 236 - 145: Run It (2)

Chapter 236: Chapter 145: Run It (2)

"Unplug it."

Zhang Yuan’s voice was barely a whisper.

The bespectacled boy silently bent over and yanked the plug from the socket.

The industrial fan’s blades continued to spin from inertia, but the fighting spirit that had sustained everyone in the lab through four sleepless nights was extinguished in that instant.

Chen Zhuo said nothing.

Holding his water cup, he quietly retreated to his workstation.

He sat down in his chair, moved the water cup that was weighing down his books, and took out a hardcover notebook with a deep blue cover.

Flipping it open revealed pages densely packed with equations written in black gel pen.

He was working on an enormous project.

While Zhang Yuan and the others were trying to trick the computer with a big fan and modified physical parameters, Chen Zhuo was using his fundamental understanding of mathematics to perform a brutal amputation on the fluid model.

The reason the continuous partial differential equation was crashing the microcomputer was that it had to calculate the force changes on air molecules within every minuscule spatial grid over an extremely short period.

It required absolute continuity in the process, like drawing a high-definition movie frame by frame.

What Chen Zhuo aimed to do was to cut out this most complex 0.01-second segment directly from the timeline.

He wasn’t going to draw a movie.

He would give the computer one photo as a starting point and another as an endpoint. As for how the air tumbled and compressed in between, he would package it all into an opaque black box using a discrete algebraic matrix.

The input would be the initial kinetic energy, and the output would be the final potential energy and peak pressure.

It sounded simple, but mathematically, it was a massive derivation process.

Chen Zhuo wasn’t a god; he couldn’t just conjure up a matrix that could perfectly connect the physical states before and after.

If just one node’s sign in the matrix was calculated incorrectly, or if the energy conversion coefficient was wrong, the final data would be nothing but a pile of useless paper.

He had to be rigorous.

Chen Zhuo looked at the few lines of the Jacobian matrix variant in his notebook, his brow furrowed slightly.

He was stuck here.

After discarding the time derivative, the error at the boundary conditions began to show a diverging trend.

If the error in the first layer of the grid was one in ten thousand, after one hundred iterations of the matrix, this error would be amplified to five percent.

A five-percent margin of error, when building a high-speed train, would be a disaster.

Chen Zhuo picked up his pen and drew a circle around the divergent term.

He wasn’t agitated, nor did he tear at his hair like Zhang Yuan. He simply, and calmly, went back over the previous three pages of derivations, checking his chain of logic line by line.

He wouldn’t allow himself to present a half-baked solution to fool anyone.

For the past few days, he had been sitting at this remote workstation.

When he was hungry, he went to the cafeteria to eat. When he was tired, he returned to his dorm to sleep. He reported to the lab on time every day, watching his seniors sigh in despair without ever interjecting.

Only when everyone else was staring blankly at their computer screens did the black gel pen in his hand continue to scratch quietly across his draft paper.

He had already gone through two ink refills.

In the evening, Chen Zhuo crossed out a full half-page of equations on his draft paper.

He had discovered that a conversion method borrowed from Euler’s equations wouldn’t work; it would lead to a gap in the conservation of momentum on a microscopic level.

Chen Zhuo closed his notebook, put it in his bag, and stood up.

"Senior, I’m heading back to the dorm," Chen Zhuo said as he passed by Zhang Yuan’s workstation.

Zhang Yuan was slumped over his desk, staring with lifeless eyes at the blue-screened monitor. Hearing the voice, he just gave a listless wave of his hand.

"Yeah, go on. Be careful on your way back."

After leaving the Physics Building, he found the sky outside had already darkened.

The campus streetlights were turning on one by one, casting long and short shadows.

Instead of heading straight back to the dorm, Chen Zhuo detoured to the cafeteria and bought two boxed meals.

When he got back to dorm room 215, Wang Dayong was sitting on the lower bunk, listening to an English tape on a personal cassette player.

Hearing the door open, Wang Dayong took off his headphones and turned his head, his eyes immediately locking onto the plastic bag in Chen Zhuo’s hand.

"Xiaozhuo, you’re finally back! I’m starving to death."

Wang Dayong quickly stood up, unceremoniously took one of the boxed meals, and took a deep breath after opening the lid.

"You’re a true friend. By the way, how did it go in your priority lab today? Did the computer fry itself again?"

Chen Zhuo placed his own meal on the desk and pulled out a chair to sit down.

"It didn’t fry today."

Chen Zhuo snapped apart his disposable chopsticks.

"Oh? Is it fixed?"

Wang Dayong asked indistinctly while shoveling rice into his mouth.

"Not fixed."

Chen Zhuo picked up a mouthful of vegetables, chewed and swallowed slowly, then continued.

"Today, they borrowed an industrial fan from the cafeteria kitchen and aimed it full blast at the open computer case. The computer didn’t fry, but the wind was so strong it almost ripped the ribbon cables right off the motherboard. It just blue-screened and crashed in the end."

Wang Dayong nearly sprayed out the mouthful of rice he had just shoveled in. He pointed at Chen Zhuo, coughing.

"Wait, it crashed, so how can you be acting like nothing happened?"

Chen Zhuo just smiled, lowered his head to eat, and didn’t answer.

The dorm room fell silent.

Chen Zhuo washed his hands and sat back down at his desk. He turned on his desk lamp, and the dim yellow light fell upon the deep blue notebook.

He uncapped his pen and continued the derivations from earlier in the day.

Since the approach using Euler’s equations was a dead end, he had to find another path. He mentally reviewed the papers on the wind tunnel test models for Germany’s ICE trains that Su Wei had found a few days ago.