Chapter 143 Antares (Part 2)
Excessive curiosity can easily lead to paranoia, and excessive focus can easily lead to madness.
He seemed to have none of the common problems of intelligent people.
He is self-disciplined.
Self-discipline often enables him to easily control most things - his own joys and sorrows, emotions and forbearance, even curiosity, even concentration - which makes him look like an extraordinary, elegant and ordinary gentleman.
He always keeps his promises and is self-disciplined to the point of being almost paranoid.
Caring for his wife is one thing, wearing white clothes is another, and rarely showing too much emotion.
If you exercise too much restraint, you can easily become addicted.
He forced himself to be self-disciplined, moral, clean, loving, self-disciplined, and loyal like an addiction... As a result, when he was just over ten years old, he had his own unique opinions and views, which were more powerful than many adults. Therefore, no teacher or elder could go against his ideas.
For example, his family members wrote to him many times to persuade him to take a concubine for the sake of having children, but all of them ended in failure;
For example, he decided to leave Cavendish, abandon his bright future and return to the mainland.
If there was anyone who came closest to understanding him, it was perhaps only Liang Zhang.
Most of the modern men who study abroad are young men with a fiery heart, easily ignited. For those who are unmarried and whose families stay in China and only see them once every few years, who wouldn't yearn for a British Madame Butterfly-style affair in a foreign land?
If you can remain calm when others want something but cannot get it, it will seem very suspicious.
At first, Liang Zhang's curiosity and doubts about his personality overcame everything.
By then, he had graduated from New England and was invited to study at a European university for a year. His Chinese community was small, and he had received a lot of financial support from him. He also often heard stories about this upright man from others.
One night, I saw Xu Shaoqian standing alone on the top of the River Cam Bridge, so I quietly followed him. Following his gaze, I saw a Chinese woman standing on a boat and kissing a tall and handsome British man in the evening breeze.
The woman's long black gauze skirt was blown up by the night wind, revealing her white ankles, graceful neck and back lines; she let the tall man hold her slender waist tightly, raised her head and was intoxicated by the cool evening breeze and passionate kiss.
Liang Zhang almost exclaimed - wasn't that the sixteen-year-old girl who was rumored to have been madly infatuated with Xu Shaoqian?
Thinking he had caught the iron tree blossoming, he half sighed and half tentatively said, "This immortal moment is truly fascinating. If I could experience it myself, it would be worth my life."
At that time, Xu Shaoqian did not look away, nor did he answer, he just smiled.
It was a long time before Liang Zhang understood the meaning of this smile, which was also many years later.
Soon after, Xu Shaoqian wrote letters inviting many of his former friends from Cambridge to come to Hong Kong, but in the end he only invited back one person, Liang Zhang.
At first, he just returned to the University of Hong Kong in the Far East with a strong curiosity about this person.
Then, one summer night in 1928, the astronomy laboratory recorded an extremely brief burst of gamma rays, its brightness within a few seconds equal to the total gamma-ray output of the entire sky—nearly the first gamma-ray burst ever observed—and the entire adjacent nuclear physics laboratory was shaken to its core by the usually calm astronomers. The observatory doors opened, and the startled crowd of people from the nuclear physics lab rushed in; the noise was deafening, the chattering, the whispers… Amidst the commotion, only Xu Shaoqian stood apart from the crowd, scribbling something in his notebook with a pen.
Liang Zhang happened to see him circle the gravitational curvature and orientation factors he had already calculated, and write in Chinese next to it: "On the 19th, it was confirmed that the star collapsed, and the outward radiation was concentrated in the energy range of 1-80 MeV, which may kill DNA within a certain range."
This is a very significant event in the history of astronomy. In terms of the biological process of the universe, it is even more significant than the mass extinction event at the end of the Mesozoic Cretaceous.
Yet, he casually recorded it in his notebook, just like he did every day in his observation diary. Then, turning around, he smiled and said, "It will eventually collapse one day, tens of millions of years ago, or tens of millions of years from now. It's just that it appeared today, so we can see it."
We are so lucky to have witnessed a great moment of this vast universe in the fleeting years like mayflies.
But this three billion year old star is so fortunate that people can see the day when it dies.
His tone was calm, as if he was telling him, "The flowers my neighbor grew are dead."
The smile on his face was exactly the same as the one he had on Cambridge many years ago.
Liang Zhang suddenly understood what Xu Shaoqian saw at that time - he saw that time flies by, everyone will eventually grow old, one day become hunched, sloppy, and with dim eyesight, like a star whose fuel is exhausted, like celestial fragments falling, and what can remain in the world is just a tiny moment in the vast ocean.
It was not until this moment that he realized how terrifying this person was.
He thought that in addition to this notebook, Xu Shaoqian must have many other notebooks, somewhere else, or in his heart; all of them recorded countless people and countless moments within the range of his observation.
He wondered if those notebooks would contain something like, "On a certain day in a certain year, Liang Zhang was in his prime, with a bad temper and a bad temper, and he had never had a girlfriend, so he was still considered a half-perfect young man; on a certain day in a certain year, Liang Zhang was old and staggering, his spine was bent from the third section, and his leg muscles were necrotic and could no longer be cured."
Perhaps his interest in himself was not worth such a record.
But he thought he must have carefully observed Lin Zhi. Xu Shaoqian treated this exceptionally intelligent young girl with exceptional care and attention, a meticulous attention that was as if he were measuring the immense nuclear energy contained within a star.
He couldn't guess what he was thinking, but he was sure that Xu Shaoqian must have said something like "Let me see your radiance."
He even didn't mind having an invisible companion star, using up all his fuel for her operation, and finally collapsing into a white dwarf, just to pave the way for her.
Therefore, as an unarmed scholar, he took the huge risk of becoming a spy and became the target of public criticism when the encirclement and suppression in Hubei and Hubei was at its peak. He did almost everything by himself to maintain the normal operation of the Shanghai Institute. As a result, he escaped death many times. When many countries were coveting the institute, he relied on the power of Jiangxi to contact the French and Communist parties to send one team after another to the northwest. When Japan's warnings with threatening words were intercepted many times and all the staff of the observatory dared not go to the top of Taiping Mountain again, he went there alone and was destroyed in one foot and the hearing in his right ear by the Type 91 rpg 2011.
This news truly proved Liang Zhang's previous guess.
Only then did he sigh; if the people who spread the rumors about him and Lin Zhi could understand him even 20%... they would understand that all the anecdotes about him were just nonsense.
Because this man doesn't know how to love.
Just because he is a careful researcher, a builder, observer and contributor in the dark, he is a well-deserved "Antares".
He treats everyone and everything, including his own feelings, as if he were recording the flowers carefully cultivated in a greenhouse.
Look how loyal he is to his wife, making others envious.
But if you understand, you will know that it is not love, it is just his hard work, a delicate flower that he has carefully cared for for many years and has grown with difficulty in the desert.
It is not easy for it to survive until now.
If one day it finally dies, he will definitely cry bitterly.
Because... the flowers are dead.
Unfortunately, flowers will eventually die.
But it must have had a brilliant moment, just like what I witnessed with my own eyes in Cambridge that year.
There have been moments like this before.
For example, when he was fifteen, he finally got a chance to talk to his fiancée through a curtain. That day, she threw the seal and the seal-carving knife outside the curtain to vent her anger. Without saying a word, he went to pick them up, carved the unfinished name for her, and placed it on the table outside the curtain.
Seeing that she was curious, the nurse took it in for her.
A small sound of surprise came from inside. So he whispered from behind the curtain, "These words are not pretty enough. If you like, I have better words for you."
For example, on the wedding night, he held the bride's hand and placed the small bronze medal in her palm.
It’s the character “Xu”.
She was wearing a veil and gently stroked her face with her clean fingers, then immediately lowered her head in shyness.
He didn't even need to remove the veil with his own hands. The bride was in his arms, her cheeks rosy and her body temperature almost touching him.
So he carried her delicate body into the tent.
Of course, those moments will make people feel like an immortal on the pillow, forgetting the joy of life, and walking with light steps as if in a dream.
He will see the joy of others as he sees a star that has not yet died and has shrunk into a compact star.
The day it falls will come.
He is one of them.
I just wonder who will be lucky enough to see the fleeting light of that moment when this α star falls.
That spectrum is all he is.
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