Chapter 58 Patient 2
Chu Wang also understood that these were just hypotheses. It had progressed from strong gamma rays to neutrons and then to fast neutron reactions, spanning Europe and North America, and took countless people and years until the first slow reactor was realized in 1942—a full fourteen years from theory to practice.
From 1942 to the proposal of two detonation technologies, from the initial six physicists to the final thousand scientists, two thousand computer technicians, and three thousand sergeants in 1945, the efforts of tens of thousands of people took three years, and "Thin Man" and "Little Boy" were finally born.
But just thinking about it makes my heart so excited that I can't say anything more.
So when she visited Mr. Saumur and Mrs. Nguyen in Yau Ma Tei, her mind was elsewhere, and she didn't really listen carefully to what Mr. Saumur said to her. She only vaguely remembered him saying, "Mr. Dupont will come to see you specially next month."
Mrs. Ruan and Mr. Saumur didn't take her impoliteness to heart. As they watched her get on the tram, Mrs. Ruan smiled and said, "I've never seen her so happy before. I wonder what's going on?"
“People tend to pay special attention to the things they love.”
"Then she must have met her Mr. Right." Mrs. Ruan giggled.
Chu Wang got off the tram and ran back to Ge Mansion.
Two maids were tending the flower garden. One of them hadn't seen Chu Wang, so they chatted idly, "Madam is so cruel! She said she wouldn't have a party on weekdays, and she really didn't. The Ge Mansion is so big, but they only invited three or five people to play mahjong. It's so quiet and boring—I wonder how long my niece will stay here?"
The other one saw Chu Wang coming in, and the one who was speaking let out an "ouch" because of his elbow.
They both cried out inwardly, "Oh no!" She must have heard what she said. The Madam doted on her so much that even the "Sister Li Qi," whom she had called her for years, had to change her name because of her presence. If she reported them to the Madam, she didn't know how she would punish them.
Thinking of this, the two girls shrank back and stood straight, calling out in a timid voice: "Hello, young lady!"
Unexpectedly, the girl didn't even glance at them, and hurried into the main gate of the Ge Mansion. The two people outside the door looked at each other, thinking, "The girl won't even look at us, she must be very angry. If she goes to the mistress and complains, the mistress will probably sell us off to marry some lame old man from the countryside somewhere..."
The two were terrified by their own imagination. They looked at each other for a while, feeling so worried that they had no way to relieve themselves and were almost about to cry.
——
Chu Wang's mind was preoccupied with her fast and slow neutrons and gamma rays, and she automatically blocked out all the strangers along the way. If a half-naked Takeshi Kaneshiro were placed before her right now, she wouldn't even bother looking. Therefore, whatever the two maids said or did went unnoticed. Besides the two maids, she also ignored the many important figures currently playing mahjong at the Ge Mansion.
After a whole night of playing cards, Xie Zeyi finally won the first hand. He happened to glance at the door and saw Chu Wang quickly kicking off his leather shoes. He didn't even wear slippers. He was only wearing a pair of white socks on his bare feet. He was holding a stack of brown paper file bags carefully in his arms. His face was extremely solemn and happy, and he ran upstairs in one breath.
"..." Xie Zeyi flattened the four six-tube pieces on the white cloth table and said with a smile, "Mrs. Ge, I thought your niece was calm and indifferent, and therefore would never have any emotional fluctuations. It seems I was wrong."
Mrs. Ge was just short of a six-tube to win the hand, so she laughed in anger when he gave her four six-tubes: "Did you see Chu Wang is back?"
"You're back, aren't you? With a look on your face..." Xie Zeyi considered his words, wanting to say 'a young girl in love,' but then felt it wasn't quite right. Suffering from a lack of vocabulary, he pondered for a long time before slowly uttering, "With a smile that resembled 'first love.'"
Mrs. Ge spat at him, "She has a boyfriend, her fiancé, haven't you seen him? What do you mean by first love?" But then Mrs. Ge thought back to the various scenes when Chu Wang was with the young man on the outlying island. They were all calm and considerate with a bit of rational alienation. The feelings between young people are always passionate and straightforward. Every move, every eyebrow and every corner of the eye is full of love. But when it comes to her niece, all of this is not true. She looks like she is just perfunctory with the engagement paper in a serious and sincere manner. Thinking of this, Mrs. Ge asked Xie Zeyi, "Did she really come back with a smile just now? How did she smile? Can you imitate her?"
Xie Zeyi smiled and said, "How do you want me to learn?"
The other two ladies at the mahjong table were also amused by him.
Mrs. Ge was so curious about her niece's romantic life that she even lost interest in playing mahjong. She hurriedly left the mahjong table, away from strangers, and quietly called Mi Qiu, telling her to go upstairs to find out what was going on. After a while, Mi Qiu came down and said, "As soon as the girl returned to her room, she sat at her desk, writing and sketching. I asked the kitchen to make her some steamed snacks and hot milk, and brought them to her desk, but she didn't even notice me... She was so preoccupied, I guess she must have encountered something important."
Mrs. Ge nodded. As long as it wasn't a serious matter, as long as there was no murder or arson, she could handle it. Even if there was murder or arson, she could find a way to protect her.
An important person... Mrs. Ge was really curious about this - she met an important person just by going out, who could it be on Hong Kong Island?
——
After reading Xu Shaoqian's article about the bombardment of light elements by alpha radioactive sources, Chu Wang finally breathed a sigh of relief. Although the Faculty of Science of the University of Hong Kong was young, the UK had made a big investment in building a laboratory with relatively advanced equipment. At least there was a cloud chamber.
A crucial prerequisite for nuclear fission is the fast neutron. Although the existence of the neutron was first proposed in 1920, more than seven years later, it remained a hypothesis, and many scientists, including those at the Cavendish Laboratory, were attempting to confirm its existence. Porter and Becker, who studied alpha-particle bombardment of beryllium, and Marie Curie's daughter and son-in-law, who subsequently tracked Porter's "neutral radiation," also missed the discovery of the neutron in 1930, handing the Nobel Prize back to Rutherford's student, Chadwick.
Xu Shaoqian was only one step away from this discovery.
All it took was a number of attempts at alpha emission sources in the cloud chamber for Xu Shaoqian to realize that "neutral radiation" originated from the "neutron," a particle with no charge and a mass similar to that of a proton, which Rutherford had proposed seven years earlier.
Then prove it!
Chu Wang wrote down many radiation exposure formulas on manuscript paper one by one, and raised some "naive questions" of his own regarding Xu Shaoqian's thesis idea - why is there neutral radiation that is harder than gamma rays, and is it the reason why the atomic mass number is not conserved?
When listing these formulas and questions, Chu Wang had no idea that she and her calculation formula had become what Mrs. Ge thought was a "love relationship."
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