On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is still noon at the moment.

After the mail was sent, Sarrot went to the bar and got drunk.

In order to maintain a clear mind in the experiment, he never had the habit of drinking at noon, but this time it was an exception.

In a bar on the edge of Silicon Valley, sitting next to him, his assistant Paul looked at him sighed and comforted himself.

“If you want to open it, your lab will be sold to Exxon Mobil may not be a bad thing. Although Lu Professor is a very good…or great Scholar, the resources he can give you are not More, not to mention, Exxon Mobil spent 50 million to buy them, certainly not just to raise us to sit on the bench…”

Looking at the Sarto-Professor, there was no reaction at all. Paul knew that his comfort was not effective, so shrugged, forcibly ended the topic.

“In short, having money is not a bad thing.”

Sarlot snorted.

“You do not understand.”

Paul: “…I don’t know anything?”

Sarnot did not explain anything, just raised the bottle and slammed a few mouthfuls, but he spoke of other things.

“My dear Paul, I always think that academics should be a free thing. As long as it does not violate the most basic human morality, even if it is not so correct, as long as you believe that it is right, you should advocate it. The more people don’t believe you, the more you should prove to them that you are right.”

Paul frowned and asked: “Is it not free now?”

“Maybe it is,” looked up at the ceiling, Sarnot sighed, “but wait until you get to my level, when your research or behavior has become a gear to push this world forward… you Free understanding, there will probably be different feelings.”

Paul did not say anything, but looked at the Sartot Professor inexplicably.

After a while, he did not speak. Sarrot placed the empty bottle next to the stool and picked up another bottle.

Just when Paul intended to remind him that “you have drunk too much”, he said something awkwardly.

“I will plan to immigrate after a while.”

“Where are you going to the laboratory of the Ground Professor?”

“I don’t know, it’s not China, anyway, there is only one land professor…”

Sarnott, holding the bottle, thought for a moment, scratching his hair in a decadent manner. “Maybe it is the Netherlands? Listen to my father saying that our family lived in a small town in the province of Utrecht until the German bombardment of Rotterdam …but I have never been there. A long time ago Utrecht University sent me an invitation, asking me to go there to do Professor, but they paid too low a salary, and the resources were not as good as those given by Cornell University. …but I think about it now, if I accepted the invitation, maybe the situation would not be so bad?”

……

The research on fusion cells has fallen into bottleneck, and the problem of core heat dissipation seems to be an intractable problem, so many people inside the project team have begun to doubt the technical route itself.

After all, can nuclear fusion really be miniaturized like nuclear fission?

Is inertia constrained in the miniaturized controllable fusion, is it really feasible?

The most troublesome thing is, if you don’t use the magnetic field to withstand the energy that transcends the star, what kind of material can you resist the heat of that moment?

However, in addition to inertia constraints, they seem to have no more choices. After all, on a small spacecraft, there is simply not enough room for them to create a closed magnetic cage that is sufficient to constrain those plasmas.

No one can answer these questions, and even no previous studies can be used as a reference.

In order to find inspiration for solving the problem, these days, Lu Zhou collected a large number of thesis related to aerospace, fission battery and space station cooling technology, trying to get inspiration from some public research materials.

In fact, these thesis did have some inspiration for him.

For example, thesis on the first-principles study of phonons in α-boron and its icosahedral boron-rich compounds provides an interesting thermoelectric conversion model while discussing the scattering of electrons into phonons. .

Converting thermal energy into electrical energy is, in a sense, an interesting idea. In fact, most nuclear fission batteries used in spacecraft generate electricity based on this method.

However, this does not solve the problem fundamentally.

Using the temperature difference inside the spacecraft and outside the spacecraft may increase the efficiency of converting thermal energy into electrical energy to a limited extent, but it does not change the fact that heat is difficult to heat up.

Sitting in the office, leaning on the hand in the office chair Lu Zhou turned the pen and whispered to the ceiling.

“If you can make the controlled fusion reaction slow, it will be fine.”

Or, let the area where the pulse is ignited small enough…

At this time, the sound that floated next to him interrupted his thoughts.

“Professor, what are you talking about?”

Holding a paper bag on his chest, Zhao Huan, standing at the desk, was looking at him with a curious look.

Lu Zhou: “Nothing… Is there anything?”

Zhao Huan nodded said: “Well, it is the tenth week, and your calculation materials class is about to start. This is your class schedule.”

“I know, the class schedule is here,” said Lu Zhou, standing up from the office chair, sighed. “…I am going out, if there is something to call me.”

“Yeah.” Zhao Huan nodded.

I don’t know if it is an illusion. She always feels that Professor’s mood is not very good.

In fact, Zhao’s instincts are not wrong. Lu Zhou’s mood is really not so good now, and he can even say that he is a little annoyed.

Intuition tells him that the research ideas he chose are correct.

However, it seems that there is an invisible barrier that blocks the seemingly viable road ahead of him.

In the vagueness, Lu Zhou feels that bottleneck does not seem to be in the engineering field, but in the theoretical field.

That is, there is not enough theoretical foundation to support his research on the controllable fusion miniaturization.

Moreover, this kind of difficulty can’t be like the tokamak, which bypasses the magnetic island and the magnetic surface tear in the plasma physics from the perspective of Engineering, and transfers the theoretical problem to the engineering difficulty and Cost.

“Is the research efficiency penalty caused by advanced research?”

Walking on the tree-lined path of the campus, I thought of Lu Zhou here, and suddenly shook my head with a smile.

Probably the year before, he had encountered similar situations when he was just in contact with the study of controlled nuclear fusion.

At that time, the research methods of the L-manifold and partial differential equations have not been proposed. The existence and smoothness of the solution of the NS equation and the theoretical model of plasma turbulence belong to the two unsolved aspects of the mathematics and the physical world. mystery of.

It is also after these theoretical problems have been solved that the realization of controllable fusion technology has sufficient theoretical basis.

Without these theories as a foundation, whether it is the German spiral stone 7-X or the modified STAR-1 satellite device, it is almost impossible to achieve those proud results.

However, where is the theoretical bottleneck of controllable fusion miniaturization?

If this bottleneck is really in theory…

Lu Zhou, who passed through the tree-lined path and thought about the problem, unconsciously went to the place where he usually lectured.

On the podium, standing on a Professor that he doesn’t know, listening to the content is probably about physics.

Through the glass on the wall, he can clearly see that the students in the classroom are listening to the lessons.

However, just as he was about to leave, the corners of the eyes swept from the blackboard suddenly saw a few key words.

The inspiration in the darkness passed away.

Lu Zhou’s heart moved slightly, without any hesitation, heading toward the back door of the classroom.


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