It was noon on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
After sending the email, Sarrot went to a bar and got drunk.
In order to maintain a clear mind during experiments, he never had the habit of drinking at noon, but this time, he made an exception.
He sat next to Sarrot in a bar on the edge of Silicon Valley. His assistant, Paul, looked at him and sighed.
"Be optimistic, it's not necessarily a bad thing that your laboratory was sold to ExxonMobil. Even though Professor Lu is an excellent … great scholar, he can't give you a lot of resources. What's more, ExxonMobil didn't buy us for 50 million just to let us sit on the bench … "
Professor Sarrot didn't respond at all. Pavel knew that his words of comfort were useless, so he shrugged and ended the conversation.
"Anyway, being rich isn't a bad thing."
The corners of Sarrot's mouth curled up.
"You don't understand."
Paul: "… What don't I understand?"
Sarrot didn't explain anything. He raised the bottle and took a few gulps. He then began to talk about other things.
"My dear Paul, I've always believed that academia should be a free thing. As long as it doesn't violate the most basic human morality, even if it's an incorrect point of view, as long as you believe it is right, you should advocate for it. The more people don't believe in you, the more you should prove yourself to them. "
Paul frowned and said, "Isn't it free now?"
"Maybe." Sarrot looked up at the ceiling and sighed. He said, "But when you reach my level, when your research has become a gear that pushes the world forward … your understanding of freedom will probably be different."
Paul didn't say anything. He just looked at Sarrot with a confused expression.
Sarrot didn't speak for a while. He placed the empty bottle next to the chair and picked up another bottle.
Just as Pavel was about to remind him that he had drunk too much, he spoke abruptly.
"After a while, I plan on emigrating."
"Where? Professor Lu's laboratory? "
"I don't know, not China, there's only one Professor Lu there …"
Sarrot thought for a while and scratched his head. "Maybe it's the Netherlands? I heard from my father that my ancestors lived in a small town in Utrecht until the Germans bombed Rotterdam … But I have never been there. A long time ago, Utrecht University sent me an invitation to be a professor there, but the salary they offered was too low, and the resources were not as good as what Cornell University gave me … But now that I think about it, if I had accepted that invitation, maybe the situation wouldn't have been so bad? "
…
The fusion battery research had reached a bottleneck, and the problem of nuclear core heat dissipation seemed to be a difficult problem to solve. Many people in the project team began to doubt the technical route itself.
In the end, could nuclear fusion really be miniaturized like nuclear fission?
Is inertial confinement fusion really feasible for miniaturized controllable fusion?
The most troubling thing was that if the magnetic field was not used to withstand the energy that surpassed the stars, what kind of material would be able to withstand that instant of heat?
However, apart from inertial restraint, they did not seem to have any other choice. After all, on a small spacecraft, there was not enough space to create a closed magnetic cage that could confine the plasma.
No one could answer these questions, and there was no previous research that could be used as a reference.
In order to find inspiration to solve this problem, Lu Zhou had been collecting a large number of papers related to aerospace, fission batteries, and space station heat dissipation technology. He tried to get inspiration from some public research materials.
In fact, these papers did give him some inspiration.
For example, a paper on "First Principle Research on Phonons in α-boron and Its Icosahedral Boron-Rich Compounds" discussed the scattering of phonons by electrons, and it provided an interesting thermoelectric conversion model.
Converting heat into electricity was indeed an interesting idea. In fact, most of the nuclear fission batteries used on spacecraft were generated using this method.
However, this didn't solve the fundamental problem.
Using the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the spacecraft to generate electricity might improve the efficiency of converting heat into electricity to a limited extent, but it couldn't change the fact that heat was difficult to dissipate.
Lu Zhou sat in his office and leaned back in his office chair. He spun a pen in his hand and muttered to himself as he looked at the ceiling.
"It would be great if I could slow down the controllable fusion reaction."
Or, make the area of the pulse ignition small enough …
At this moment, a voice came from the side and interrupted his thoughts.
"Professor, what are you talking about?"
Zhao Huan was standing in front of his desk with a document bag in front of her chest. She looked at him curiously.
Lu Zhou: "Nothing … What's up?"
Zhao Huan nodded and said, "Yeah, it's week 10, your computational materials class is about to begin. This is your timetable."
"I know, just put the timetable here." Lu Zhou stood up from his office chair and sighed. He said, "I'm going out for a walk, call me if you need anything."
"Okay." Zhao Huan nodded.
She didn't know if it was an illusion, but she felt like the professor wasn't in a good mood.
In fact, Assistant Zhao's intuition was correct. Lu Zhou wasn't in a good mood, he was even a bit annoyed.
His intuition told him that his research idea was correct.
However, there seemed to be an invisible barrier blocking the seemingly feasible path in front of him.
Lu Zhou felt like the bottleneck wasn't in the engineering field, but in the theoretical field.
Which was, there wasn't enough theoretical foundation to support his research on the miniaturization of controllable fusion.
Also, this kind of difficulty couldn't be compared to the tokamak that the stellarator was. From an engineering point of view, the magnetic islands and magnetic surface tearing in plasma physics could be avoided, and the theoretical problems could be transferred to the engineering difficulty and cost.
"Is the scientific research efficiency penalty caused by advanced research?"
Lu Zhou was walking on a tree-lined campus path. He suddenly smiled and shook his head.
Around two years ago, when he first started researching controllable nuclear fusion, he encountered a similar situation.
At that time, the topological research methods for the L Manifold and partial differential equations hadn't been proposed yet. The existence and smoothness of the solution to the Navier – Stokes equation, as well as the theoretical model of plasma turbulence, were two of the biggest unsolved mysteries in mathematics and physics.
It was only after these theoretical problems were solved that the realization of controllable fusion technology had a sufficient theoretical foundation.
Without these theoretical foundations, whether it was the German Wendelstein 7-X or the STAR-1 stellarator that he modified, it would have been almost impossible to achieve those results.
However, where was the theoretical bottleneck of the miniaturization of controllable fusion?
If this bottleneck really existed in theory …
Lu Zhou walked through the tree-lined path and unknowingly walked to the lecture hall.
A professor that he didn't know was standing on the podium, and he heard that the professor was talking about physics.
Through the glass on the wall, he could clearly see the students in the classroom listening attentively.
However, just as he was about to leave, he suddenly caught a glimpse of a few key words from the corner of his eye.
An idea flashed through his mind.
Lu Zhou didn't hesitate at all as he walked toward the back door of the classroom.
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