Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
Five minutes after the class ended, the Jin Ling University’s Wechat news feed exploded because of a physics class.
[F*ck me, God Lu just came to our physics class.]
[Which one?]
[Zhang Zhiongqing’s quantum mechanics class, what else can it be.]
[F*ck me, God Lu’s physics class? Which classroom???]
[The class is over already!]
[Over already? F*ck, why don’t these big names tell us beforehand when they give lectures.]
There were quite a lot of people in the university that just did the bare minimum, but there were also people that knew how to take advantage of an opportunity, and there were quite a lot of genius students here.
As for the students who were interested in going into research, listening to a big name’s lecture was a valuable opportunity.
After all, this kind of opportunity was once in a lifetime.
It didn’t even matter if they couldn’t understand the lecture. As long as they could understand one concept, it would be much more useful than reading a textbook by themselves. Because there were a lot of things that couldn’t be taught from textbooks.
After Lu Zhou walked out of the classroom, he walked toward the mathematics building.
The only thing he wanted to do right now was to write down the inspirational thoughts he just had.
Actually, the evidence of the strong force interacting with the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap had been proved by theoretical physics experiments, and it had been verified by computer simulations.
However, explaining it from a mathematics perspective was still an unsolved mystery.
Simply put, for most mathematicians, this was a complex physics problem. For most physicists, this was a mathematics problem.
Solving this problem would require inventing both mathematics and physics theories.
Lu Zhou wasn’t a hundred percent certain he could solve this problem.
After all, theoretical physics wasn’t his strong suit.
During his time at Princeton, his research was mainly in the field of mathematics. Other than discovering the 750 GeV signal, he didn’t do any other research in the field of theoretical physics.
If he were still at Princeton, he would choose to ask Edward Witten or Dean Goddard for advice since they were all experts in theoretical physics and had a deep understanding of the unified field theory.
But now, he could only communicate with his friends through email, and a lot of problems couldn’t be articulated properly in emails.
As for the domestic academic circle…
Honestly, it would be quite difficult to find someone to talk to about this problem.
Even though Mr. Yang, one of the founders of this field, was happy to discuss this issue with him, at nearly a hundred years old, Lu Zhou didn’t want to bother him.
Especially when he thought about Professor Atiyah’s five-page thesis on the Riemann’s conjecture, he had no expectations for elderly scholars.
After all, age is a curse for scholars…
“Do I have to rely on myself?”
Lu Zhou sat down in his office chair and picked up a pen. He wrote down a line of words and used mathematical language to describe the problem.
[Want to prove: For any compact single group G, there is a quantum Mills field with G as the norm group on R^4, and there are Yang-Mills existence and mass gap of ∆>0]
The tip of the pen gently traveled across the draft paper. As Lu Zhou looked at the line of words on the draft paper, he fell into deep thought.
Even though he wasn’t very confident he could solve this problem, he still had an idea of solving it.
First of all, this huge proposition could be divided into two parts.
The first part could be proven purely by mathematical methods.
Which was, to mathematically prove the existence of the solution to the Yang-Mills equations or find the general solution.
This part wasn’t too useful for physicists. After all, they had obtained the conclusions that they wanted through high-energy experiments and computer simulations. However, for mathematicians, the meaning of a general solution to this system of equations was significant.
Just like Edward Witten once said, if anyone could achieve this task, that person’s accomplishment would become a milestone for the 21st-century mathematics to catch up with the 20th-century theoretical physics…
Of course, Lu Zhou took into account that this was said by a physicist who won a Fields Medal. In his opinion, mathematics had its own development trajectory, and he didn’t think mathematics had to catch up with physics.
If someone really wanted to argue about this, it would be a bit ridiculous.
As for the second part, that was more of the core content.
Which was, the proof of the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap.
Completing this proof would benefit both the mathematics and physics communities. Not only would this proof create new mathematics methods, but it would also clarify the laws of nature that the physicists had not yet fully understood, and physicists could use this to invent an even more advanced theory.
For example, unifying strong interactions and electromagnetic forces…
Doing this would mean the entire theoretical physics community would be one step forward toward the Grand Unified Theory.
Time slowly passed by.
Lu Zhou stared at the mathematical proposition on the draft paper and went into deep thought. He sat in front of his desk with a ballpoint pen in his hand. Other than a trail of ink dots, nothing else was written on the draft paper.
He sat there until six o’clock when he heard the bell ringing from outside his window. He finally wrote down two lines on the paper.
After that, he stood up and left the office.
Inside the office.
Two minutes passed by.
Feng Jin looked at the door, and when he saw that Lu Zhou wasn’t going to come back, he stopped writing and stood up as well.
He noticed Lu Zhou was sitting there “daydreaming” for over half an hour.
Even though he had stayed in this office for some time, this was his first time noticing Lu Zhou with this expression on his face.
He was curious about the problem that was able to trouble his supervisor, and so, he pretended to go to the water dispenser to get some water. He wanted to walk past Lu Zhou’s desk and see what was written on the desk.
He was still a genius student at Jin Ling University. If he could provide some help to Lu Zhou, maybe he would earn some brownie points.
However, the reality was often cruel.
When he looked at the calculations on the paper, he froze.
[HΛ(L)=∑(rows)∑(c)·h^(c,c+1)+∑(columns)∑(r)·h^(r,r+1)+∑(i∈Λ( L))·h(i)]
[…]
Feng Jin: “… ???”
F*ck me, what is this thing?
He Changwen saw that it was getting late. He wanted to go to the cafeteria to get some dinner, so he stood up.
He noticed his friend standing next to Lu Zhou’s desk with a muddled look on his face. As a doctoral student, he tried to discipline the younger student.
“Don’t look at the supervisor’s stuff.”
It seemed like he wasn’t convincing enough, so he added another line.
“You’ll go bald.”
Feng Jin: “…”
Liu Siyuan: “…”
Han Mengqi: “…”
