From all-round academic master to chief scientist - Chapter 161 Shock in the world of theoretical chemistry

“Guess whose paper made our boss look like this?”

“Who knows? It seems that the professor has had this expression since ten minutes ago.”

“Ten minutes, and he hasn’t gotten angry yet! I remember the first time I handed my thesis to the professor, he just looked at my abstract and threw it on the table, saying that my writing was a mess. “

“I remember I sent him my paper a few days ago. Oh my God, it couldn’t be mine…”

…

In the office of Professor Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, his graduate students are looking at his solemn expression and whispering.

Professor Omar Yaghi is the winner of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018. Generally speaking, scientists who win the Wolf Prize in Chemistry are very likely to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry later. For Omar Yaghi, Ji Lai created a new field of chemistry called reticular chemistry. This important achievement gave him a good chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry after waiting for decades.

Of course, for his graduate students, they can basically recite the achievements that Professor Yaghi has made in the past, so this is not the point.

The key point was the serious expression on Professor Yaghi’s face when he looked at the paper – in the past, Professor Yaghi would only show this expression when he felt that the paper was nonsense.

Afterwards, he would have a good chat with the unfortunate guy who wrote the paper.

Every graduate student can only pray in his heart: “Oh! I hope God will bless that unlucky guy.”

However, just when they were thinking this, they were surprised to find that the professor leaned back on the chair after a tactic, and then held his head, showing a troubled expression.

The graduate students’ eyes widened immediately.

Looking at this situation, it seems that they are preparing to prepare a farewell party for the unlucky guy?

To be able to make Professor Yaji show such a crazy expression is simply…terrifying!

However, at this moment, Professor Yaji suddenly picked up his cell phone and made a call.

Seeing Professor Yaghi calling, these graduate students thought that Professor Yaghi was going to call the unlucky guy. However, the next moment, they heard Professor Yaghi say: “McBird, I have a problem here. … “Natural Materials” sent me a paper and asked me to review it, but I found that I can’t understand the mathematical formula in it, and I need your help.”

Soon, Yaji hung up the phone, and his graduate students were stunned. What?

It turns out that it’s not some unlucky person, but because their professor can’t understand what’s in the paper?

What’s happening here?

At this time, Yaji turned to look at his graduate students and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Uh, professor, what paper are you reading?”

Yaji smiled and said, “You will know when you come over and take a look.”

So a few graduate students got together and immediately saw a page full of mathematical formulas, which made them feel like they were back in the time when they were dominated by mathematics.

“Professor, why do you need to review a mathematics paper?” a graduate student couldn’t help but ask.

Yaji said helplessly: “This is not a mathematics paper, it is a material chemistry paper, but… its author is a little unusual, so it looks like a mathematics paper.”

“Who is its author?” These graduate students suddenly became curious. Which unusual author could write such a paper?

“Prover of Goldbach’s conjecture.”

For a moment, all the graduate students were stunned.

The prover of Goldbach’s conjecture actually came over to study materials science?

Are you kidding me?

At this time, Professor McBird, whom Professor Yaji called, came over.

McBird was a professor of mathematics at Berkeley and had a good relationship with Professor Yagi. When he heard that Professor Yagi had difficulties and needed help, he naturally did not refuse. Then, the two professors read this somewhat different chemistry paper together. .

Yaji hopes that McBird can help him understand these mathematical formulas. He can’t understand this paper, mainly because of these troublesome mathematical formulas, which are really a headache to read, although there are many in the paper. Graphic explanation, but still seems a bit limited.

However, even with McBird’s help, their progress was still a bit slow. It was because the mathematical methods used by Lin Xiao were too complex, and the amount of calculations involved was also very large.

But no matter what, they finally analyzed the mathematical content.

“Is the bonding mechanism of titanium…actually like this?”

Professor Yaji’s eyes became serious.

Once this result is verified to be true, it will obviously cause a shock to their chemical and materials communities.

Moreover, he himself has done in-depth research on chemical bonds, and he also understands the inspiration that this result can bring to other research, just like the question raised at the end of this paper.

If they can find this bonding mechanism for all atoms, they will get closer to the truth about the formation of matter.

“This result cannot be judged by me alone. It requires the opinions of more people.”

Professor Yaghi is very clear that this result needs to be unanimously reviewed by the academic community and verified through experiments.

In this way, they can determine the authenticity of the paper.

Afterwards, Professor Yaghi told his idea to the editorial department of “Natural Materials”.

After “Nature Materials” received Professor Yaghi’s reply, it immediately looked for more reviewers to review this paper.

Until two months later.

…

A new issue of “Natural Materials” was released, and scientists around the world who subscribed to this issue of “Natural Materials” picked it up in their free time.

The first thing that catches your eye is its cover.

A titanium alloy unit cell appeared on it, and various strange mathematical formulas were written on the chemical bonds of these unit cells.

The content represented on this cover means the achievement considered the most important by the editorial department in this issue of “Natural Materials”, and the upper left corner of the cover also records information about this achievement.

[New mechanism of titanium metal bonding]

Under this information, there was a rare comment from the editor-in-chief of “Natural Materials”.

[Since the existence of chemical bonds was discovered, research on it has never stopped, and until today, we have finally made another major breakthrough]

After seeing this comment, it immediately attracted the attention of every reader.

Achieved a major breakthrough in chemical bonding? !

Everyone who studies chemistry and materials knows the importance of chemical bonds. Now, someone has made another major discovery on the bonding mechanism of chemical bonds?

Although it is only the bonding mechanism of titanium atoms, these bonding mechanisms are all interactions between electrons outside the nucleus, so this also has a very important guiding role in the bonding mechanisms of other elements.

Suddenly, everyone gave up reading the first article and directly found this paper and started reading it.

Probably because the use of mathematical methods in this paper gave all materials researchers a headache, so two days passed and no one expressed their opinions on the Internet.

But until the third day, finally, researchers in all fields of chemistry in the world were boiling.

…

Xiaomu Chong is an academic research forum in China. Many people in the field of domestic chemistry generally prefer to hang out here.

At this time, a post published less than two days ago attracted many people’s discussion, and the topic of this post was: [What do you think of the paper on the bonding mechanism of titanium in “Natural Materials” in October? 】

The post has received more than 100 replies. Obviously, many people are paying close attention to this matter.

“I’ve also read that paper, and it has something to say. In short, in short, to sum up, in summary, in a nutshell, it’s awesome, and I can’t understand it either.”

“Is there anyone as good at word count as you?” 』

“I haven’t read this paper, and I can’t understand it. My supervisor read it (my supervisor is an academician), and he said he couldn’t understand it either. Aren’t those mathematical formulas difficult for those of us who study chemistry? We study structural chemistry. It can be considered that he has relatively high requirements for mathematics, but it turns out that all he is doing is graph theory and the like, and we don’t learn much about these things.』

“I am a PhD student in materials chemistry at MIT. My supervisor said that this paper is likely to guide us to future research hotspots. Only through unanimous recognition by the academic community, the study of chemical bonds will once again become a hot topic in the future. I am already preparing to go there. This aspect has developed

“I have nothing to say, I can only say that Lin Shen is awesome.”

“Lin Shen?” Lin Xiao? What do you have with him?

“He was responsible for this result.”

“Holy shit?” 』

“Oh my god, no wonder so many mathematical formulas belong to God Lin!” 』

…

The discussions on domestic forums are very lively, and the discussions on relevant foreign forums are also very lively. Whether they are experts from all walks of life, or master students, doctoral students from famous universities, etc., they are all enthusiastically expressing their opinions.

Either they complained about the application of mathematics in it, which made them unable to understand it directly, and those who finally understood it a little bit after suffering also complained about the application of mathematics in it, because even if they understood it, there were still big problems. The problem.

Therefore, no one can yet draw a conclusion about this.

London, UK, “Natural Materials” Editorial Office.

At this time, they were holding a meeting, and among the people attending the meeting, in addition to the editor, there were also many editors-in-chief of the main journal of “Nature” and the boss of the Macmillan publishing company behind “Nature”.

In addition, there are professors from Cambridge University and Oxford University.

From mathematics to chemistry, and even physics, big guys from various disciplines are here.