On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it's still noon.

After sending the email, Sarot went to the bar and got drunk.

In order to keep a clear head during the experiment, he had never been in the habit of drinking at noon, but this time he made an exception.

In a bar on the edge of Silicon Valley, sitting next to him, his assistant Paul looked at him and sighed and comforted.

"If you want to open up, it's not necessarily a bad thing that your lab was sold to ExxonMobil. Although Professor Lu is a very good ...... Or a great scholar, but he doesn't really have many resources to give you. What's more, ExxonMobil spent 50 million to buy us, and it definitely won't be just to keep us on the cold bench......"

Seeing that Professor Sarot didn't react at all, Paul knew that his reassurance was most likely ineffective, so he shrugged his shoulders and forcibly ended the topic.

"In short, being rich is not a bad thing."

Sarot grinned.

"You don't understand."

Paul: "...... What do I not understand? ”

Sarot didn't explain anything, just raised the bottle and took a few puffs, but talked about other things to himself.

"My dear Paul, I have always believed that scholarship should be a free thing. As long as it does not violate the most basic human ethics, even if it is not so correct, as long as you believe it is right, you should assert it. The more people don't believe you, the more you should prove to them that you're right. ”

Paul frowned and asked, "Isn't it free now?" ”

"Perhaps," Sarot sighed, looking up at the ceiling, "but when you get to my point, when your research or behavior has become a cog that moves the world forward...... You will probably have different feelings about freedom. ”

Paul didn't say anything, just looked at Professor Sarot in bewilderment.

After not speaking for a moment, Sarot placed the empty bottle next to the stool and picked up another one.

Just as Paul was about to remind him that "you drank too much", he said a little abruptly.

"After a while, I plan to emigrate."

"Where to go? Professor Luk's laboratory? ”

"I don't know, it's not Huaguo anyway, there's only one Professor Lu there......"

Sarot, who was carrying the wine bottle, thought for a moment and scratched his hair decadently, "Maybe it's Holland?" My father told me that our ancestors lived in a small town in Utrecht until the Germans bombed Rotterdam...... I've never been there, though. A long time ago, Utrecht University sent me an invitation to be a professor there, but the salary was too low and the resources were not as good as what Cornell gave me...... But now that I think about it, maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I had accepted that invitation in the first place? ”

……

The research on fusion batteries has fallen into a bottleneck, and the problem of core heat dissipation seems to have become an intractable problem, so that many people in the project team have begun to doubt the technical route itself.

After all, can nuclear fusion really be as miniaturized as nuclear fission?

Is the route of inertial restraint really feasible on miniaturized and controllable fusion?

The most troubling thing is, if you don't use a magnetic field to withstand the energy that surpasses the stars, what kind of materials do you have to withstand the heat of that moment?

However, they don't seem to have any more options than inertial constraints. After all, there is simply not enough space on a small spacecraft to make them a closed magnetic cage that is enough to restrain those plasmas.

No one can answer these questions, and there is not even any previous research to refer to.

In order to seek inspiration to solve the problem, Lu Zhou has collected a large number of papers related to aerospace, fission batteries, and space station heat dissipation technology in the past few days, trying to get inspiration from some publicly available research materials.

In fact, these papers did inspire him a little.

For example, a paper on "First-principles studies of phonons in α-boron and its icosahedral boron-rich compounds" provides an interesting model of thermoelectric conversion while discussing the scattering of phonons by electrons.

Converting heat into electricity is an interesting idea in the sense that most of the nuclear fission batteries used in spacecraft generate electricity in this way.

However, this does not solve the problem at the root.

The use of the temperature difference between inside and outside the spacecraft for power generation may improve the efficiency of heat energy conversion into electricity to a limited extent, but it does not change the fact that heat is difficult to dissipate.

Sitting in the office, Lu Zhou, who was leaning on the office chair, turned the pen in his hand and muttered to himself to the ceiling.

"It would be nice if we could let the controlled fusion reaction slowly exothermy."

Or, let the area where the pulse ignite small enough......

At this time, a voice floating from the side interrupted his thoughts.

"What are you talking about, Professor?"

Zhao Huan, who was standing at the desk with a document bag on his chest, was looking at him with curiosity.

Lu Zhou: "It's nothing...... What's the matter? ”

Zhao Huan nodded and said, "Well, it's the tenth week soon, and your calculation materials class is about to start, and this is your class schedule." ”

"I know, the timetable is here," Lu Zhou said as he stood up from his office chair and sighed, "...... I go out for a walk and call me if something happens. ”

"Hmm." Zhao Huan nodded.

I don't know if it's an illusion, but she always feels that the professor's mood doesn't seem to be good.

In fact, Assistant Zhao's intuition was not wrong, Lu Zhou's current mood was indeed not very good, and he could even be said to be a little irritable.

His intuition told him that he had chosen the right research idea.

However, it was as if there was an invisible barrier blocking the seemingly feasible path in front of him.

Vaguely, Lu Zhou felt that the bottleneck did not seem to be in the field of engineering, but in the field of theory.

That is, there is no longer enough theoretical basis to support his research on the miniaturization of controlled fusion.

Moreover, this kind of difficulty cannot bypass the phenomena of magnetic islands and magnetic plane tearing in plasma physics from the perspective of engineering, as stellarumers do for tokamaks, and transfer the theoretical problems to engineering difficulties and costs.

"Is there a penalty for scientific research efficiency due to advanced research?"

Walking on the tree-lined path of the campus, thinking of Lu Zhou here, he suddenly smiled and shook his head.

Probably the year before last, when he was first introduced to the research of controlled nuclear fusion, he encountered a similar situation.

At that time, the topological research methods of L manifolds and partial differential equations had not yet been proposed, and the existence and smoothness of the solution of NS equations and the theoretical model of plasma turbulence were two unsolved mysteries in mathematics and physics.

It is precisely after these theoretical problems have been solved that the realization of controlled fusion technology has a sufficient theoretical basis.

And without these theories as a foreshadowing, it would have been almost impossible for either the German Spiral 7-X or the STAR-1 stellarator device that he had modified.

However, where are the theoretical bottlenecks of controlled fusion miniaturization?

If this bottleneck is really theoretical......

After crossing the tree-lined path, Lu Zhou, who was thinking about the problem, unconsciously walked to the place where he usually lectures.

On the podium, there was a professor he didn't know, and he was listening to a presumptuous lecture on physics.

Through the glass on the wall, he could clearly see that the students in the classroom were listening attentively.

However, just as he was about to leave here, out of the corner of his eye that swept from the blackboard, he suddenly caught a glimpse of a few key words.

Inspiration flashes away.

Lu Zhou's heart moved slightly, and without any hesitation, he walked towards the back door of the classroom.