Chapter 335 - 287: Never Use Petty Cleverness as a Means to Advance Scientific Research

Chapter 335: Chapter 287: Never Use Petty Cleverness as a Means to Advance Scientific Research

Li Dong left the elderly woman’s place and walked all the way back to Yuanpei Building 35.

Her words echoed in his mind: ’They’re gambling.’

After all, it was just a conjecture he had derived by himself on a piece of scratch paper.

His intuition told him the mathematical inversion path was a dead end. It was a guess he’d made after personally working the problem down to the fifth coordination shell, suspecting it would go on forever.

But all of that...

...was still just intuition.

He had to work through this mathematical inversion path himself, step by step, to the very end. Only by proving it was truly a bottomless pit could he dare to confidently tell Wu Kai, "They never solved it."

...

Li Dong pushed open the door to dorm room 404.

The light inside was still on.

The other three in the room heard the door open and looked up in unison.

Liu Qiang was the first to smile at him.

"Brother Dong."

"..."

Li Dong didn’t answer. He just gave the three of them a distracted nod, didn’t even change his shoes, and walked straight to his desk to sit down.

CLICK.

He switched on his desk lamp.

He flung his backpack aside.

Scratch paper was spread across the desk.

Liu Qiang, Chen Nan, and Wang Hao exchanged a look.

They all understood.

Brother Dong was in the zone.

The three of them had seen him like this more than once.

Wang Hao, on the lower bunk, let out a silent sigh.

He mouthed a few words to Liu Qiang and Chen Nan.

"Tomorrow."

"I’ll go."

Liu Qiang understood instantly.

He meant he would bring Brother Dong food tomorrow.

It was practically second nature to the three of them by now.

Ever since their first semester, whenever Li Dong went on one of his study benders, the three of them would take turns leaving a meal on his desk.

Whoever had the lightest workload at the time would take the turn.

Just recently, Wang Hao had finished tackling the final, most challenging problems from the national competition.

He had the most free time.

So this time, it was his turn.

Liu Qiang and Chen Nan quietly gave him a thumbs-up.

The dorm room fell silent once more.

Under the light of the desk lamp, Li Dong started working through the problem from the very beginning.

The kernel of the measurement operator.

Gikhmanov’s cyclic weights.

The variational constraint of the third coordination shell.

The multiplexing of the residual phase.

The fifth shell.

The seventh shell.

...

With every step he derived, the "bottomless pit" in Li Dong’s mind grew a little deeper.

When he used up one stack of scratch paper, he stood up and pulled another from his nightstand.

He didn’t even notice Liu Qiang quietly placing a cup of warm water beside him.

One by one, the lights in the dorm room went out.

Soon, only Li Dong’s desk lamp remained, staying lit until past three in the morning.

By the time he put his pen down, his desk was completely covered in scratch paper.

He had worked his way all the way to the eleventh shell.

The singularity... was still receding.

It receded ever deeper, ever more granularly, but it simply refused to converge.

Li Dong stared at the sheet of scratch paper for a long, long time.

In the blank space on the bottom line, he slowly wrote two words in pencil.

[No bottom].

’Are those Germans really that damn good?’

Li Dong did not sleep soundly that night.

Over the next few days, Li Dong didn’t need his roommates to bring him food.

His time during this period was split in two.

He spent half the day at the School of Chemistry with Wu Kai’s research group, monitoring the progress on the physical path.

The other half, he was at his desk, working his way down the bottomless pit of the mathematical inversion, one shell at a time.

Things with Wu Kai’s group, on the other hand, were going quite smoothly.

The group had been making steady progress on the physical path across the stratified fiber bundle that Li Dong had previously laid out for Lu Mingyuan.

The real representation of the dipole operator was derived, the X-ray polarization was connected as an input condition for the U(1) gauge, and the independent WKB decay constant, κ, for the third coordination shell was starting to slowly take shape in the data.

Su Yanqing seemed to be glued to the equipment these days. Her face had even gotten thinner.

As for Zhang Yan, she spent her days lugging several laptops back and forth between the vacuum chambers.

The students—Cheng Duo, Lu Heng, Shen Ying, and Guo Han—each split off to tackle their own sections of the engineering interface.

But paradoxically, all of this smooth progress only made Li Dong feel more anxious.

...

That afternoon, Li Dong once again pushed open the laboratory door in the North Building of the School of Chemistry.

Something inside the room felt wrong.

Normally, the sound of Zhang Yan complaining about phase-locking parameters filled the room.

Today, however, it was unnervingly quiet.

Li Dong took two steps inside.

Almost everyone was in the room.

Wu Kai was sitting at the main console, and he did not look pleased.

Lu Mingyuan was back from Shanghai as well, sitting in a chair by the whiteboard with his chin in his hand.

No one in the room was speaking.

Li Dong’s heart sank.

He first nodded to Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan.

"Teacher Wu, Teacher Lu."

They both gave a slight nod in return.

Li Dong placed his backpack by the chair he usually sat in and asked Zhang Yan in a low voice,

"Sister Yan?"

"What happened?"

Zhang Yan’s lips moved, but she didn’t get a chance to speak.

Lu Mingyuan, over at the main console, spoke first.

"Li Dong."

"Take a look at this."

He pushed a journal across the desk toward him.

Li Dong walked over and took it.

[Inverse Problems]

Anyone in the field of inverse problems would recognize this journal.

It was the flagship journal for inverse problems, published by the IOP Publishing group.

Ever since the journal’s first issue in 1985, Gikhmanov regularization, the Backus-Gilbert method, the Carleman Estimate, spectral truncation, the evolution of the Mumford-Shah functional in inverse problems...

Nearly all the foundational results in the field over the past forty years had been published in this very journal.

Li Dong had even worked his way through Engl’s three-hundred-plus-page textbook on inverse problems.

Engl himself was on the journal’s editorial board.

For a leading scholar in the field of European applied mathematics, publishing a paper in this journal was an achievement worth highlighting at the very top of their curriculum vitae.