Scholar's Advanced Technological System

653 Aging Is Sad

The report ended with a failure.

However, for world-class problems like this, the physics community was relatively tolerant. As long as he could reasonably fix the problems in his thesis, no one would immediately invalidate his thesis. However, this was a huge blow to him personally.

For theses that were new or weren’t full of obvious mistakes, even the best scholars wouldn’t be able to find mistakes during the report conference. Especially since most scholars weren’t in the same research field.

Revision of the thesis, long discussions with the reviewers, these troublesome matters were often carried out in the review section of the journal submission.

However, this was only the report session, yet it ended in such a disastrous way.

He was feeling frustrated and humiliated at the same time.

“Goddamn it!”

Professor Brian threw the pages onto the floor, and he tightened his fist. He was about to punch the table but didn’t want to hurt himself.

Everyone in the office saw how furious Professor Brian was. No one dared to speak.

Even though this old gentleman looked enlightened and wise, he wasn’t always this way. Anyone who had spent a lot of time with him would know that he was quite an emotional person.

If anyone pissed him off when he was angry, that person could forget about spending a good time at the University of Oxford.

After a while, Professor Brian finally calmed down a bit.

His assistant, who was standing next to him, hesitated for a bit before speaking, “This isn’t a deadly mistake. Even though we can’t explain this problem, at least we were able to calculate the mass m in computer spacetime manifold simulations… There might be mistakes in our proof process, but no one can prove that we are wrong.”

Professor Brian felt a little better, but he still wasn’t in a good mood.

“This is meaningless… Computer simulation results aren’t always convincing, especially for problems like this.” Professor Brian pinched his eyebrows and thought for a long time. He said, “But you’re right, no one can prove that we are wrong, we’re just not perfect.”

Professor Brian took a deep breath and tried to cheer himself up. He cleared his throat and said,

“Okay, guys, get ready to work… The Asian professor is correct, this mistake is important. If we can’t prove that the grid step size tends toward zero, our proof won’t work. It’s actually a good thing we discovered this mistake now, as opposed to finding out about it later.”

After everyone in the office heard Professor Brian’s words, they sighed in relief and started to work again.

Professor Brian got up and walked to the coffee machine and made himself a cup of coffee.

He sat back down at his desk. Before he rectified this problem, he set his arXiv thesis status to “In Progress”.

However, when he went on the arXiv website, he found a new thesis posted in his field. It was on the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap; the problem he claimed to have already proved.

Professor Brian was stunned. He wondered who would do such a thing.

He then opened the thesis.

The second he saw the thesis title and author, he was stunned.

Lu Zhou?

WTF?

Without hesitating, he skipped through the abstract and went straight to the main thesis body.

The more he read, the more his eyelids began to twitch.

Especially when he saw the crucial “m=√(2+O(λ^3))” formula. His eyes were filled with rage.

The proof process was exactly the same!

The preprint published by Lu Zhou also referenced Jaffe’s thesis and gave an asymptotic expansion of mass m!

There was a “tiny” deviation in the proof process… But in Brian’s opinion, this was insignificant.

For example, he used a scalar field on a spacetime manifold, which was the method used by Weinberg to establish the unified theory of electroweak interaction. However, Lu Zhou used a quantum corresponding to the Yang-Mills theory, the Quantum Yang-Mills field.

There was a thunderous roar in the office as Professor Brian stood up angrily from his chair.

“This can’t be a coincidence!”

He finally understood.

He understood why Lu Zhou didn’t attend his report.

Why some “nobody” from Jinling appeared instead.

And how this “nobody” was able to point out the weaknesses in his thesis.

In his opinion, this was all premeditated. They planned to destroy his report. Then, they jumped on the opportunity to steal Brian’s proof while Brian was busy changing his thesis.

This kind of scenario wasn’t uncommon in the physics world. Whenever an idea was invented but wasn’t applied to its full potential, it would quickly be taken and used by other scholars, who would implement it in their own research and claim their research was the “first”.

However, he didn’t expect a scholar like Lu Zhou to do something like this!

“Professor…”

The assistant looked at Professor Brian.

The assistant was about to speak but decided not to do so in the end.

Brian was full of anger.

His eyes were filled with malevolence. There was no point in saying anything.

Professor Brian stared straight at his computer screen and said, “Contact BBC for me. I have to let everyone know how despicable this guy is!”

…

At the campus of the University of Oxford…

After the scholars from all over the world left, the campus returned to its peaceful state.

Two theoretical physicist students were holding textbooks while walking down the asphalt road next to the cafe. They just came out of the library and were about to return to their dormitory.

They began to talk about quantum chromodynamics and the latest gauge theory research.

“Have you heard? The strong interaction Yang-Mills existence and mass gap problem has been proved!”

“Are you talking about Professor Brian Caro’s proof? Wasn’t it disproven?”

“No, not him, I’m talking about Professor Lu’s thesis.”

“Lu? From Jin Ling University?”

“Do you not know? Yesterday, he posted a thesis on arXiv at three o’clock in the morning. My professor even tweeted about it. I woke up in the morning and liked his tweet.”

“On arXiv? Alright, see you later, I’m going back to the library!”

“…”

Next to the cafe.

Witten, who was wearing sunglasses, saw the young men walking past and smiled.

“Looks like Professor Lu won the race.”

He wasn’t in a rush to return to CERN. Instead, he talked about solving the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap from a string theory perspective with Goddard. However, it seemed that his past two days of discussions weren’t necessary.

After all, Professor Lu, who had always been known for his rigorous proofs, had released a preprint.

Finding a mistake in Lu Zhou’s mathematics thesis was more difficult than writing a thesis.

Goddard was sitting across from Witten. He took a sip of coffee. It was almost like Goddard knew this was going to happen.

“I knew it.”

“There’s a CERN conference the day after tomorrow.” Witten looked at his watch. He then looked at Goddard as he said, “Now that the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap has been proven, do we still have to discuss our string theory idea?”

Goddard: “Even though the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap has been proven, the strong interaction and electromagnetic force unification haven’t been proven yet. Aren’t you interested in the Nobel Prize?”

He knew that Witten had always been angry about not being able to win the Nobel Prize even though he was one of the pioneers of string theory.

So far, it seemed like Witten wouldn’t be able to win a Nobel Prize on the M theory. After all, there was no chance that this theory would be verified in this century. However, there was more to theoretical physics than just string theory, namely, the Grand Unified Theory.

However…

“Forget about it.” Witten smiled and stood up as he said, “If he is correct, then there is no one in the world closer to the objective truth than him. If someone wanted to surpass him, they would have to surpass him in talent and grit. If I were twenty… or thirty years younger, I would be interested in competing with him. But now…”

Witten looked at Goddard and shrugged.

“Forget about me, are you confident in yourself?”

Goddard didn’t say anything. He just reached out his hand. He grabbed his coffee cup and took a sip.

Aging was a sad thing.

Especially for people who had devoted their lives to academia.

Even though they didn’t care about the extra wrinkles on their faces, their decline in fluid intelligence and critical thinking was inevitable. Both him and Witten used to be able to stay up for days while thinking about a problem. However, that wasn’t possible anymore.

Their time was gone…