Chapter 1365 - Nobel Prize in Physics

National Day is also a peak season for tourism, a golden week for tourism.

All scenic spots are overcrowded.

There are people everywhere, people squeezed together, and what you see in the scenic spots is not the scenery, but the people!

The Great Wall, a place where you can’t climb the Great Wall, attracts countless people who want to be heroes to climb the Great Wall, and during the National Day holiday, the Great Wall is full of people, like a long dragon.

The Forbidden City is the time when it welcomes the most tourists every year. People from all over the country come to Beijing for tourism and must visit the Forbidden City. Even the special museums formed by the many cultural relics brought back by China from the UK have not affected the flow of people in the Forbidden City.

There is no place where there are no people in any tourist attractions, and the business is cold.

When the statistics came out, this National Day set a record again. The number of people traveling during the National Day reached 782 million, and the tourism income exceeded 700 billion yuan!

This is a shocking number for the world in the midst of the global economic crisis.

And this is still in China!

By now, many people have become accustomed to traveling abroad, and this year's National Day is also the same.

Maldives, the Golden Waterway of the Mekong River, the Golden Waterway of the Chao Phraya River, the Golden Line around the South China Sea, etc., also ushered in the highest peak of the year, even more than the number of tourists during the Spring Festival.

This also promoted the tourism industry in these places, bringing a touch of warmth to the chill of the world economic crisis.

Of course, some people also traveled to Europe, the Middle East, the United States, South America, Australia, New Zealand and other places.

While people were still immersed in the atmosphere of National Day, the Nobel Prizes were also announced.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 6 that the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics would be awarded to Yang Zhenning and Liu Tao.

With the two winning the prize, the "Yang-Mills Theory" and the "Yang-Mills Equation" became widely known.

The three papers published by Liu Tao used mathematical methods to prove the existence of solutions to the Yang-Mills equation; the proof of the general solution of the Yang-Mills equation; and the solution to the mass gap problem of the Yang-Mills theory.

These three papers caused a great shock in the mathematical and physics communities, especially the physics community.

The status of the Yang-Mills equation in the physics community far exceeds its status in the mathematics community.

Because for the mathematics community, the Yang-Mills equation is just a difficult partial differential equation.

But for the physics community, this is the first step to the grand unified theory of physics. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics.

After the world entered the 21st century, an embarrassing situation appeared in the physics community. That is, except for the discovery of some long-predicted particles and the verification of several puzzles on the standard model, there has been no "new things" in the physics community!

This made Yang Zhenning's statement in a speech that "the feast of the large collider is over" constantly mentioned.

Can the large collider still produce great results?

The whole world is skeptical about this!

At that time, China did not carry out the large collider project. Even now, although the large collider project has been mentioned many times, it has never been passed. The large collider in the United States is extremely valuable. As for the European Large Hadron Collider, there are many people who oppose it, and as for great achievements, there is no great achievement in the 21st century.

The Yang-Mills theory has been confirmed, which is definitely a huge and great physical theory.

Its importance, from the middle of the 20th century, there is probably no greater achievement than it!

Even if it is placed in the entire 20th century, this achievement is great enough to rank among the top three in the past 100 years!

It is precisely because of this that even though Yang Zhenning and Liu Tao have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, because this achievement is so great that the Nobel Prize can't wait to award this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to the two again.

The whole of China is in a sensation because this year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Yang Zhenning and Liu Tao, but Liu Tao is very calm. In fact, because of these three papers, he has won many domestic and foreign mathematics and physics awards.

And he has no plan to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony. After all, there are too many people who want his life abroad. In the absence of sufficient security guarantees, he will not leave the country.

The whole world thought he was doing theoretical research, but in fact, they didn't know that this was just the theoretical basis that needed to be solved in the process of controlled nuclear fusion.

After all, if a unified relationship can be established between strong interaction and electromagnetic interaction, it will be more beneficial to deepen the understanding of the conditions of nuclear fusion.

The throne of controlled nuclear fusion needs to be built brick by brick. This process is far from enough for Liu Tao alone. What is needed is a large number of talents, and this process is to cultivate talents.

Only in this way can the reactor of controlled nuclear fusion be done well.

So far, there are two main experimental devices for controlled nuclear fusion in the world. One is the Soviet route, that is, the tokamak device; the other is the European and American route, that is, the stellarator route.

The "tokamak device" is a device that can generate a sufficiently strong toroidal magnetic field developed to achieve magnetic confinement. As early as 1954, the world's first tokamak device was built at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in the former Soviet Union.

It seems that controlled nuclear fusion is about to be achieved? In fact, it is not. In order to be put into practical use, the energy input to the device must be much smaller than the output energy. The Tokamak device at that time was a very unstable thing. After more than ten years, no energy output was obtained. It was not until 1970 that the Soviet Union obtained actual energy output for the first time on the Tokamak device that had been improved many times. However, it had to be measured with the most advanced equipment at that time, and the energy gain factor Q value was about one billionth.

Don’t underestimate this one billionth. This gave the world hope, so the world worked hard under this motivation and built its own large-scale Tokamak device. Europe built the United Torus-JET, the Soviet Union built the T20, Japan’s JT-60 and the United States’ TFTR. These tokamaks have repeatedly set new records for Q values. In 1991, the European Joint Cup achieved the first deuterium-tritium operation experiment in the history of nuclear fusion. Using a 6:1 deuterium-tritium mixed fuel, the controlled nuclear fusion reaction lasted for 2 seconds, and an output power of 1,700 kilowatts was obtained, with a Q value of 0.12.

In 1993, the United States used a 1:1 deuterium-tritium fuel on the TFTR. The fusion energy released in the two experiments was 3,000 kilowatts and 5,600 kilowatts respectively, and the Q value reached 0.28. In September 1997, the Joint European Ring set a world record of 12,900 kilowatts, with a Q value of 0.60, which lasted for 2 seconds. Only 39 days later, the output power was increased to 16,100 kilowatts, and the Q value reached 0.65. Three months later, the deuterium-deuterium reaction experiment was successfully carried out on Japan's JT-60. Converted to deuterium-tritium reaction, the Q value can reach 1. Later, the Q value exceeded 1.25. This was the first time that the Q value was greater than 1. Although the deuterium-deuterium reaction was not practical, the tokamak could theoretically generate energy.

The core of the tokamak device is the magnetic field. To generate a magnetic field, you need to use a coil and turn on the power. With a coil, there is a wire, and with a wire, there is resistance. The closer the tokamak device is to practical use, the stronger the magnetic field needs to be, and the larger the current needs to pass through the wire. At this time, the resistance in the wire appears, which reduces the efficiency of the coil and limits the large current passing through, and cannot generate enough magnetic field. The tokamak seems to have come to an end. Fortunately, the development of superconducting technology has made the tokamak turn around. As long as the coil is made into a superconductor, the problem of large current and loss can be solved in theory. Therefore, the tokamak device using superconducting coils was born, which is the super tokamak.

Another device is the stellarator, which is mainly developed in Europe. This device is a magnetic confinement fusion experimental device with an external spiral winding. It consists of a closed tube and an external coil. The closed tube is straight, "runway" or space curve. Common stellarators have two or three pairs of spiral windings. The former has a magnetic surface shape similar to an ellipse, while the latter is similar to a triangle. When currents of equal magnitude and opposite direction are passed through adjacent spiral windings, the magnetic field generated by the spiral windings and the longitudinal magnetic field are synthesized, and the magnetic lines of force undergo a rotational transformation, thereby constraining plasma without longitudinal current.

At present, tokamaks are recognized by scientists as the device most likely to achieve controlled nuclear fusion, while stellarators have been studied relatively little. However, with the optimization design of stellarators and the progress of high-temperature superconducting technology, advanced stellarators based on high-temperature superconducting strong magnetic field technology are expected to become a strong competitor for the steady-state magnetic confinement fusion technology route.

However, whether it is a tokamak device or a stellarator, the current technical level keeps it at the second level, and it is of laboratory nature, and it is still very far from industrial application.

It is for this reason that some scientists have said: It will always be 50 years before controlled nuclear fusion is realized!

Liu Tao's solution to the Yang-Mills theory seems to help speed up the process of realizing controlled nuclear fusion, but there is still a long way to go from theory to application.

It would take more than a few years for other countries to study the papers thoroughly.

Not to mention applying the theory to practice.

No mistakes, just go to the forum to read the content of the book!

For scientific research projects, the most important thing is often the leader. An outstanding leader can always make the project progress.

Just like Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project and Korolev to the Soviet space program.

Liu Tao doesn't care about winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, but Yang Zhenning and his family and relatives are different.

For a long time, the Yang-Mills equation has been a milestone in the theoretical physics community and a heavy stroke left by the Chinese in the history of theoretical physics. This time, this unsolvable equation has been solved. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Liu Tao and Yang Zhenning, which represents the recognition of the entire academic community and the legendary color of Yang Zhenning.

The Yang-Mills equation is the first step towards the grand unified theory of physics. In the building of the strong electric unified theory completed by Liu Tao, in addition to Liu Tao, Yang Zhenning's name will also be constantly mentioned and recorded on this building.

It can be said that it will completely change the face of physics in the next hundred years.

Yang Zhenning, who is now 87 years old, has never thought that he will win the Nobel Prize in Physics one day. It is not that he is very eager to win the second Nobel Prize in Physics, but because he knows very well that since the 1950s, the Nobel Prize has undergone some subtle changes, that is, unless you can make a much greater achievement than the previous award-winning achievement, otherwise there is no hope of winning the second Nobel Prize.

In the past years, many physicists have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but this does not mean that these physicists who won the Nobel Prize in Physics are of the same level and status. In fact, the status of physicists in the same Nobel Prize in Physics is quite different.

Some people have made Nobel Prize-level achievements, and the award committee can't wait to award him the Nobel Prize. While some people have made achievements, they need to wait in line, and the waiting time may be ten, twenty, thirty years or even longer.

Many scientists who are qualified to win the Nobel Prize eventually queued until they died and still failed to get his turn.

This is the gap.

Yang Zhenning is still very happy to win the Nobel Prize in Physics this time.

He feels that his life has been very complete. In the first half of his life, when he was young, China was facing the most dangerous time. He and his classmates continued to study at Southwest Associated University, and then he went to study in the United States. At a young age, he made outstanding achievements in the field of theoretical physics. At the age of 35, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, which made him famous all over the world. At that time, he was a Chinese citizen. Although he later became an American citizen for various reasons, he still contributed to China in his own way and built a bridge of communication between China and the United States.

In the second half of his life, when the golden years of scientific research ended and he entered the second half of his life, he was invited to return to China to participate in the reconstruction of Southwest Associated University. He personally participated in the construction and creation of a world-class university, helped the development of higher education and theoretical physics in China, and used his influence to influence batches of Chinese and overseas Chinese to return to China to participate in national construction. Faced with the choice of nationality, he decisively chose to give up his American citizenship and return to Chinese nationality.

Even though his health did not allow him to be the head of a school, and he retired to the second line, he still had various honorary titles, such as being the honorary president of Southwest Associated University. However, he no longer participated in the administrative management of Southwest Associated University. Even at Southwest Associated University, he continued to make use of his remaining energy, teaching physics courses to undergraduates and occasionally accepting one or two doctoral students.

His first half of life was brilliant, but his second half was equally great.

Yang Zhenning believed that even if he died now, he would have no regrets.

He would tell his father, his teachers, his classmates and friends that China was already very powerful and China had ushered in a prosperous era, which was unimaginable to the Chinese people at that time.

The greatest hope of the Chinese people who were in misery at that time was to end the war and restore peace to the land of China, so that they would not have to live in fear every day.

It is better to be a dog in peacetime than a person in troubled times. (End of this chapter)