Technology invades the modern world

Chapter 2 Hell
Haines felt like he was seeing a ghost.

He chose to come to New York on New Year's Eve, trying to pick up a woman of his dreams by watching a play on Broadway and spend the last day of 1959 on a date with her.

Not only did he fail to find anyone to chat up, but his pager kept calling him early the next morning, asking him to find a place to contact the Redstone Rocket Research and Development Headquarters in Redstone Arsenal.

Let me say a few more words. Pagers, commonly known as BB machines in China, were widely used in Jewish hospitals in New York as early as the 20s. The Detroit Police Department began using the first pager-like system in 40.

These pagers were all provided by Motorola.

As one of NASA's core suppliers, Motorola uses its wireless equipment to transmit sound signals from the moon back to Earth.

So it's only natural that they would provide a complete pager system to NASA employees.

Haynes was already feeling depressed and distressed, and his boss asked him questions that he thought were extremely stupid.

The sound of snowflakes crashing against the brass frame of the telephone booth made Haines' voice tremble as he repeated the rocket launch window calculation formula for the third time.

He held the black receiver on his left shoulder and subconsciously wrote a series of formulas about track calibration on the foggy glass, sorting out the logic of his argument and, by the way, belittling the IQ of his boss on the other end of the phone.

"Listen, Director von Braun's calculation team insists that the error tolerance for the third coefficient..."

A new visual focus suddenly appeared on Haynes's blurred trajectory in the elliptical integral area. The Asian young man outside the glass placed his index finger precisely on the moving path of his fingertip, and the two of them performed strange synchronous calculations across the glass.

"Are you listening? I need you to call Director Feng Brian's team immediately to explain..."

The voice in the receiver was mixed with electromagnetic noise. Haynes watched as the fourth item, which he had just a tiny idea for, was destroyed by the other party's complex domain analysis extension.

My calculations had stopped, but the blurry figure behind the foggy glass continued:

The young man wrote a solution that was even more perfect than anything he knew - the other party's fourth term was even more accurate than the convergence region that the Houston team had approximated after seventeen hours of calculation using an IBM 7090.

His breathing rate quickened as the formula became more refined: while Haines' fingers trembled with excitement, the speed of writing outside the frosted glass increased exponentially.

"No! This is impossible!" Haynes heard a cracking sound in his cervical vertebrae.

The boss's roar in the receiver now merged with the knocking sounds outside the glass.

First of all, what the other party wrote was very logical. What he wrote was Newton's gravitational perturbation correction formula. The number of people in New York who can understand this thing can be counted on two hands.

Haynes has deduced this thing to the third term, and it is precisely because he deduced it to the third term that he was able to get the opportunity to go out and get some fresh air.

As a GS-9 engineer, you have a certain degree of freedom.

As a result, his immediate boss said on the phone that there was something wrong with his calculations.

He only wrote the second item on the window paper-cut, and then he completed the next three, four, and five items directly.

The third item he completed is exactly the same as the result he calculated.

When Haines realized that it was the young Chinese man across the window who helped him complete the equation, he was not only shocked that he could deduce the formula to the fourth and fifth terms, but also that he was standing outside the phone booth, facing him.

Logically speaking, if he simply completed the formula, it should be the opposite, and the current overlap phenomenon would be impossible.

Then there is only one explanation, that is, what the other party did was writing in reverse.

Whether it is reverse writing itself or understanding and completing Newton's gravitational perturbation correction formula, any one of these two points is amazing when taken alone, and the combination of the two is even more incredible.

"Sorry, boss, let's talk about it when I get back." He just turned on the phone and quickly wiped off all the mist on the window grilles with his sleeves. If this formula was seen by someone with ulterior motives and then passed back to the Soviet Union, he would be in big trouble.

Arthur Rudolph, the Redstone rocket's technical director and responsible for propulsion system improvements and the Mercury manned program, growled into the phone: "Damn Haynes, if I were still working in Germany, you would have been thrown into a concentration camp long ago!"

Rudolph couldn't help but be anxious.

Because their biggest competitor, the Soviet Union was ahead of them in the field of space exploration, and NASA's failure was not long ago.

The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite in history in October 1957. In order to help America regain its factory, NASA chose to launch their own artificial satellite, Pioneer TV10, in November of the same year.

In order to boost morale, they chose to broadcast the launch live on television for the entire American people to watch. However, what the people, Washington and the White House saw was the tragic scene of the rocket igniting and taking off, and then crashing to the ground and exploding.

After the failure of America, the Soviet Union soon launched a second artificial satellite.

This puts enormous pressure on NASA.

For someone like Arthur Rudolph, who had worked for the former NAZI and whose hands were stained with the blood of thousands of concentration camp workers during the construction of the NAZI V-2 rocket factory, it would be strange if he was not anxious.

In order to avoid being brought to trial for war, he urgently needed to prove his worth to NASA.

"Hello, sir. I'm Haynes, Ebenezer Haynes. I work for NASA. Can we chat?" Haynes leaned close to Lin Ran's ear and whispered.

We are all smart people who can understand the formula he wrote and can calculate the third term exactly the same as he did.

It never occurred to Haynes to conceal his true identity.

Snow had already begun to fall in the New York sky in January. Before Lin Ran could respond, Haynes continued, "Sir, if you'd like to talk to me, then come with me."

After Haynes finished speaking, he turned around and left without waiting for Lin Ran to answer.

Lin Ran didn't say anything and hurried to follow.

If given a choice, Lin Ran would naturally want to obtain more information and then proceed slowly, rather than exposing his abilities to the white man in front of him who was suspected to be a NASA engineer, as he was doing now.

But here's the thing: he has no choice.

(End of this chapter)