Chapter 69 - 66: Why Don’t You Put Physics Aside for Now?
RING RING RING.
The bell had just rung, signaling the end of class.
While Teacher Wang was still giving his final summary on classical Chinese, Elder Chen appeared at the classroom door.
He completely ignored Teacher Wang’s unfriendly glare. He didn’t speak or interrupt; he just stood there.
"Class dismissed!"
Teacher Wang announced through gritted teeth.
The moment the words left his mouth, Elder Chen strode into the classroom, grabbed Li Dong’s arm, and started dragging him out.
"Hey, hey, hey, Teacher Chen, I haven’t finished taking notes yet..."
Li Dong was still clutching his gel pen.
"Notes? What notes! I’ll go get the lesson plan from Xiaowang for you later!" Elder Chen said.
Teacher Wang: ...
The students: ...
Elder Chen pulled Li Dong to a corner of the hallway before finally asking his question.
"Quick, tell me about that idea you mentioned for the Qiu Prize. What’s the approach?"
Seeing how anxious he was, Li Dong didn’t keep him in suspense.
He organized his thoughts and explained the phenomenon he’d seen in the Cyan Dragon Study Group, where Newton had been complaining about the "sudden jump of the balls in a steam engine governor."
"It’s a simple rotating ring-and-ball dynamical system."
"If we take a ring and rotate it around a vertical axis with a small ball threaded onto it."
"Whenever the system’s rotational speed reaches a certain critical value, the ball’s equilibrium position will suddenly shift away from the bottom due to the competition between centrifugal potential energy and gravitational potential energy.
"In mechanics, this is called rotation-induced spontaneous symmetry breaking."
"But that’s not even the most crucial part," Li Dong paused.
"The most awesome part is, if we intentionally introduce a slight eccentricity to the axis of rotation, breaking its original symmetry, then when we increase and decrease the speed, the critical rotational speeds at which the ball’s state changes will no longer be the same. It forms a Hysteresis Loop!"
"If we use Lagrangian mechanics to construct an effective potential energy model..."
Elder Chen had been listening with great interest. When Li Dong cut himself off mid-sentence, he hadn’t yet processed it and asked with a frown.
"And then?"
"And then... I haven’t done the experiment yet!"
Elder Chen: ...
However, as a gold-medal physics coach, he still grasped the underlying principles and began to extrapolate from Li Dong’s line of thought.
"Using a very intuitive macroscopic mechanical motion to explain the extremely abstract concepts of phase transition and symmetry breaking in condensed matter physics?"
The more Elder Chen thought about it, the more he felt it was right.
"If you can build this system, not only could you publish a high-level paper."
"But the system’s state transition characteristic, combined with the Hysteresis Loop, makes it a naturally excellent signal amplifier!"
"It could absolutely be implemented as a highly sensitive rotation speed sensor or a mechanical threshold switch!"
Elder Chen was now thinking, ’Isn’t using this to compete for the Qiu Prize a bit like bullying the competition?’
’But wouldn’t that be even more satisfying?’
"Let’s go! We’ll get started right now!"
Elder Chen grabbed Li Dong again.
"Whatever you need—high-precision servo motors, angle encoders, high-speed cameras... I’ll apply to the school for them immediately!"
"On second thought, the school probably doesn’t have everything. I’ll go to Jiangcheng University... No, I’ll go borrow them from the Sichuan University School of Physics!"
This kind of mechanics experiment, involving minute fluctuations at a critical threshold, required high precision in the rotational axis’s eccentricity and the motor’s speed stability. Ordinary teaching equipment could never produce that perfect Hysteresis Loop.
However, faced with the excited Elder Chen, Li Dong just shook his head.
"Teacher Chen, there’s no rush."
"I still need to refine the Mathematical Model for this idea, and right now..."
Li Dong said, sounding a little sheepish.
"I have something more important to do."
Elder Chen froze, his face a mask of confusion.
"Something more important? The college entrance exams?"
Elder Chen did a quick calculation in his head.
Li Dong had indeed transferred to Sixth Middle School a bit late. Although his English was already excellent from preparing for the all-English defense for the Qiu Prize, his Chinese... was still lagging far behind.
But in Elder Chen’s eyes, that was a complete non-issue!
As long as Li Dong could win the Qiu Prize with this project—which had potential for engineering applications—not to mention his performance in the Huaxuan Cup, top universities like the Qingbei tier would definitely be fighting to give him a special admission offer next year!
Even if he bombed the Chinese exam this year, at worst he could repeat a year and still get in through the ’Strengthening Foundations Plan’ next year!
’How is Chinese an important matter?’
"It’s not Chinese, and it’s not the college entrance exams."
Li Dong’s voice grew quieter and quieter.
"Teacher Chen, I... I want to look into biology right now."
After saying that, he bolted, leaving Elder Chen standing dumbfounded in the hallway.
’What the hell? Study biology?!’
’I mean, does biology even deserve to be compared to physics?!’
In his eyes, physics was the crown jewel in the quest for the ultimate truths of the universe. And here was a True God of physics, who had already touched that crown’s pearl, now abandoning an international award-winning physics project to go memorize the cellular structures of plants and animals?
Actually, you couldn’t really blame Li Dong for this.
The idea for the Qiu Prize physics project was, in essence, an anomalous phenomenon that Newton had discovered while tinkering with a steam engine in another parallel universe.
Although the great Newton looked down on such trivial, macroscopic mechanics, using it to win the Qiu Prize would be ridiculously easy, so it wouldn’t require much effort at all.
Besides, physics was his strongest subject right now, thanks to the foundation laid by his passive halo and the Newton experience card.
But! Mendel’s century-old regret was still hanging in the air!
The True God of biology was mired in self-doubt. If Li Dong couldn’t help him resolve this, how was he supposed to reap the benefits from Mendel?
Therefore, Li Dong’s current priority was biology, not physics!
Elder Chen naturally couldn’t understand, but he followed along with a grim expression. He wanted to hear just what the hell could make Li Dong give up on physics and take such a huge interest in biology!
Meanwhile, in the teachers’ office, Sun Xiang was sitting at his desk, sighing.
Li Dong’s recent win of one million at the Huaxuan Cup had really shaken up the entire science department at Sixth Middle School.
’We’re all in the competition business, so why does physics get all the attention?’
A few days ago, the biology group had actually produced a promising candidate who competed in the national Qiming Cup Life Science Innovation Challenge. But he only made it to the finals and won third prize, barely making a splash, let alone winning a million in prize money.
"Sigh... As a biologist, am I really doomed to just spin my wheels in the dead-end pit of biochemistry, environmental science, and materials science?"
Just as Sun Xiang was lamenting the unfairness of the heavens, a little monster appeared before him.
"Teacher, I’d like to ask you a few questions."
Sun Xiang looked up and saw it was Li Dong. He smiled and asked,
"Li Dong, what’s on your mind?"
Li Dong mentally summarized his points before speaking.
"Teacher Sun, it’s about Mendel’s famous cross-breeding experiments back in the day."
"He succeeded with peas, but in his later experiments with mountain willow chrysanthemums, he was never able to replicate the 3:1 ratio of trait segregation..."
Sun Xiang nodded. As a biology master’s graduate from a C9 League university, he was of course familiar with this famous unsolved case in the history of science.
"That’s right. Modern cytology has already confirmed that’s because mountain willow chrysanthemums exhibit apomixis—parthenogenesis, in other words. They don’t require meiosis or fertilization."
"Right, but that’s where the problem lies."
Li Dong’s speaking pace began to accelerate.
"The current state of research is that a team in the Netherlands did indeed clone the key gene that regulates parthenogenesis, but the material they used was the medicinal Hairy Mountain Willow Chrysanthemum."
"I feel that’s not rigorous enough. After all, the species Mendel himself grew was the Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum, which belongs to the True Mountain Chrysanthemum genus."
Sun Xiang had a good idea of what Li Dong was getting at, but he asked anyway,
"So you’re saying..."
Li Dong said decisively,
"If we want to provide a truly conclusive answer to Mendel’s historical puzzle, we absolutely cannot just make do with data from the Hairy Mountain Willow Chrysanthemum!"
"So I want to ask, if we could target the Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum that Mendel used, and complete the localization and cloning of its key parthenogenesis gene, the HpPAR Gene..."
"I’m thinking of using the method from that team in the Netherlands, employing CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to perform a targeted knockout of this HpPAR Gene. Wouldn’t that completely turn off the apomixis switch?"
This was the idea Li Dong had after reading that paper.
"Make the Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum resume sexual reproduction? And thus directly confirm the boundary of the universality of Mendel’s laws of inheritance?"
Li Dong stopped speaking.
In the office, only Sun Xiang’s somewhat ragged breathing could be heard.
He felt as if it wasn’t a high school student asking him a question, but his own graduate advisor from back in the day.
As a master’s graduate with a background in research, Sun Xiang understood the significance of this topic all too well!
Few scholars would bother to obsess over the subtle differences between two different genera of mountain willow chrysanthemums, but it was precisely this difference that concealed a scientific homage spanning a century and a functionally complete verification!
Sun Xiang took a deep breath. He glanced at Elder Chen, who had followed them in, but this time, he didn’t back down.
"Li Dong... do you have any idea how difficult this would be?"
Li Dong nodded.
"I know. We don’t have a ready-made reference genome, so we’d need to assemble it from scratch..."
Before Li Dong could finish, Sun Xiang stood up. He looked at Elder Chen, but his words were for Li Dong.
"Li Dong, have you ever considered... putting that physics project of yours aside and using this biology topic to compete in the biology category of the Qiu Prize?"