94: From Technological Warfare to Space Empire

Chapter 129 Who is this Lin Yu? (20,000 words today, please vote and subscribe)

At 3 a.m. that night, at the University of Colorado in the United States.

Carl Wieman was woken up by a phone call.

For the past five years, he and his team have been trying to develop BEC.

He is one of the top atomic physicists in the United States.

They burned through tens of millions of dollars and designed countless plans, but they were always one step short.

On the other end of the phone was his partner, Eric Cornell.

The voice on the other end of the phone was trembling terribly.

The words he uttered were fragmented and disjointed, making it difficult for Carl Wieman to understand what he was saying.

"Karl, Karl!"

"Go check out the latest issue of Science!"

By this time, the United States had already developed the Internet.

Carl Wiemann rubbed his eyes, got up, and turned on his computer.

When he saw the first page of the paper on the website, he was completely dumbfounded.

I suspect I'm still dreaming, or rather, it's a terrible nightmare.

After turning a few more pages, his hands began to tremble.

His voice trembled as he spoke to Cornell.

He understood why Cornell was so agitated.

He flipped to the very end, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes vigorously.

After putting on his glasses and looking at it again, he was certain that he wasn't dreaming.

Then he felt as if all his bones had been removed, and he slumped helplessly into the wooden chair.

He couldn't utter a single word.

Cornell was left to keep pressing him on the phone.

"Karl, did you see that?"

"Karl, say something!"

"Karl, what's going to happen to our research?!"

Carl Wiemann remained silent for several minutes before speaking with difficulty.

"What should we do? What can we do?"

"Now we know that BEC is indeed a theoretical concept—"

"Our research progress—has failed, utterly failed."

"I saw it, it was Chinese people, Chinese people made it."

"They're using the rubidium-87, just like we expected."

"But their method was more ingenious than we thought."

"Especially the evaporative cooling RF scanning scheme and the bias magnetic field method."

"Damn it, how could we not have thought of that!"

Cornell's voice on the other end of the phone was low and bitter.

There were also a few faint, weak sobs.

"We've been doing this for five years, how come the Chinese have taken the lead now?"

"Don't they lack advanced laboratories?"

"Their experimental conditions are far worse than ours."

"How long did it take them?"

Carl Wieman straightened up and turned to the author information page of the paper.

"First author Lin Yu, corresponding author Zhou—, and a bunch of others."

"Wait, who is this Lin Yu? I've never heard of this name before?"

Cornell wasn't annoyed that Carl hadn't answered his question. He was completely lost, like a headless fly, and continued talking along with Carl's words.

"I've never heard of it either, but that's not important. What's important is that they made it."

"Our research is completely outdated."

The Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Wolfgang Kotler.

Germany's top laser cooling expert had just reached the door when his assistant called him back.

"Professor, come look at this!"

The assistant handed me the latest issue of Nature.

Kotler took it and casually flipped through it.

Then he stopped walking.

He stood in the corridor between the laboratory and the main entrance.

I can no longer take a step away from leaving.

He stood there, turning the pages of the paper one by one.

Half an hour later, he closed the magazine with trembling hands.

"Chinese?"

"Cancel all plans for tonight; I need to redesign the experimental protocol."

"Since they can publish papers, we can replicate it. We should use their methods to reproduce it!"

Claude Cohen-Tanogi, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.

The founder of laser cooling technology.

He's having breakfast in his office right now.

The phone rang in his office. He answered it, and on the other end was a reporter from Le Monde: "Professor, have you seen today's Science and Nature?"

Cohen-Tanoj didn't expect the question: "No, what's wrong?"

The reporter's voice burst forth urgently: "The Chinese team has achieved Bose-Einstein condensate!"

"Three papers were published simultaneously in Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters!"

Cohen-Tanoj dropped the baguette slices from his hand onto the table: "I'll check right away. Call me back in ten minutes."

After hanging up the phone, he immediately turned on his computer.

Ten minutes later, the reporter called right on time: "Professor, what's your opinion?"

The professor's voice was filled with joy: "This is a milestone. The prediction made by Bose and Einstein 70 years ago has finally been proven!"

"Human understanding of the forms of matter has finally achieved another leap forward!"

The reporter pressed further: "But this achievement was made by a Chinese team, not an American or a European one. Are you surprised?"

Cohen-Tanoj paused for a moment, seemingly surprised by the question at the press conference, then said nonchalantly, "If the Chinese team can do it, they can do it."

"What really surprised me was that someone actually proved this."

"The difficulty of the BEC exam is known worldwide, and many people are guessing that it's just a thought experiment..."

"After all, if Einstein hadn't taken Bohr's paper seriously, nobody would have paid any attention to it."

"China's progress in recent years is evident to all."

He paused for a moment, then said, "That's a good thing. Scientific progress requires competition."

"A monopoly is not a good thing. Now that there are new competitors, the whole field will come alive."

The reporter then asked, "Do you think this achievement deserves a Nobel Prize?"

Cohen-Tanoj laughed: "Of course. If it's not worth it, what is? Sometime in October, the phone will be ringing off the hook with calls from Stockholm to BJ."

Influenced by Victor Hugo's scathing critique of Butler, Claude Cohen-Tanodi is quite friendly towards China.

He even decided that he would like to teach in China if he had the opportunity in the future.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1997.

Later, in 2009, during a speech at Southeast University, he publicly acknowledged that China was fully capable of winning the Nobel Prize.

Japan, University of Tokyo, Department of Physics.

The heads of more than ten laboratories were urgently summoned to a conference room.

On the projection screen at the front of the conference room, scanned copies of the three papers were prominently displayed.

"Can anyone tell me what's going on?"

The speaker was an elderly professor with white hair, a leading figure in the Japanese physics community, Shuzo Ogawa.

His voice was filled with barely suppressed anger.

"Is this Lin Yu the same Lin Yu mentioned in the previous intelligence report?"

"Wasn't he supposed to be working on terahertz technology?"

"Why did they suddenly bring up BEC again?"

Silence fell over the meeting room.

The professor in charge of intelligence liaison lowered his head, not daring to speak.

They did receive intelligence about Lin Yu.