At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Xu Chuan searched around but couldn't find his mentor Edward Witten, and the phone couldn't get through.

When he finally found his senior brother Lin Feng and asked, he learned that the old professor was not in Princeton now, and he flew to the Euratom laboratory a few days ago.

Xu Chuan couldn't hang up the phone crying and laughing, this old gentleman was really good to himself.

Except for the assignment of a task for himself when they met for the first time, he ignored it, and did not assign him the task of teaching assistant, and the two did not communicate much at all.

So much so that in the end, where the tutor went, he, as a student, didn't know at all.

......

Shaking his head, Xu Chuan was just about to return to his dormitory, when he made a mistake and walked towards Professor Deligne's office.

It's all here, there's no reason not to say hello to this mentor.

knocked on the door, there was a voice from inside, Xu Chuan pushed the door open and walked in.

Compared with the flying Witten, Deligne's whereabouts are much more fixed, and he is often in the office of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Seeing that the person who pushed the door in was Xu Chuan, Deligne put down the ballpoint pen in his hand and asked, "How is your research?" ”

Although he didn't ask what the disciple in front of him was going to do on leave, he could guess that it was not surprising that he was studying the question of the 'proton radius mystery'.

As a tutor, it's normal to care about how your students' research projects are progressing.

Xu Chuan: "It's done. ”

Hearing this, a hint of surprise flashed through Deligne's black-brown children's holes.

If he remembers correctly, the student in front of him has asked him for leave for only a week, right?

Can you get that problem done in a week?

It's impossible to look at it.

"Let me see your new approach."

Deligne spoke, knowing that Xu Chuan must have carried the manuscript with him.

"Wait a minute."

Xu Chuan answered, took off the backpack behind him, took out a stack of manuscript paper from it, and handed it over.

Professor Deligne took the paper and looked down.

He didn't know as much about the proton radius mystery as he had been before, and he had talked to Witten about it some time ago.

This is a problem for the entire physics community, and since 2010, the precise charge radius of protons has not been able to obtain a relatively stable value.

It repeatedly jumps sideways between 0.879± 0.011 fm femtometers and 0.833± 0.00067 femtometers.

The diameters of the same particle, measured by two different methods, are so large that they are beyond the allowable range of errors, and so large that they directly shake the base of the bottom floor of the edifice of particle physics.

Five or six years have passed, and the physics community has not yet found the cause of this disparity.

It is also impossible to determine which of the measured values is more biased towards the correct proton charge radius.

This kind of problem, if put into the mathematical world, is tantamount to a problem at the level of twin prime conjecture.

However, physics is a little more special than mathematics.

Mathematics can rely on a pen, a piece of paper, and a researcher's brain.

Unlike physics, many physics problems can be solved through physical experiments.

Just like the problem of the proton radius mystery, it appears in physical experiments, and the final solution will be completed by physical experiments.

It's just that it takes a long time.

After all, no one can say how long it will take for the physical equipment used for experiments to evolve and iterate.

It may wake up and break through, or it may be that it is still standing still after ten years.

Mathematics, on the other hand, can make physics solve problems in advance when the performance of the equipment is insufficient.

For example, the puzzle of the proton radius, the radius of the proton, theoretically, can be calculated by mathematical first principles.

It's just that no one has been able to do it yet.

First-principles calculations of proton information inside the nucleus are so difficult that they are raised from the twin prime conjecture to the Goldbach conjecture.

Deligne did not think that his pupil could calculate the proton radius from first principles in such a short time, which was impossible, and his mentor Grothendieck could not do it after he was resurrected.

But even a new way to calculate the radius of a proton is a great achievement.

........

In his office, Professor Deligne flipped through the manuscript paper in his hand.

Xu Chuan was not polite, found a cup and made a cup of coffee, and by the way, found a mathematics journal and waited while reading.

The coffee in Professor Deligne's office is of good quality, and it's all hand-ground coffee that is expensive.

But to be honest, he can't drink much difference between this artisanal coffee and instant coffee.

Maybe it's a little more delicate on the palate?

He didn't feel good about coffee anyway, but there wasn't much else to kill the time right now.

.......

Xu Chuan finished a cup of coffee slowly, and Professor Deligne hadn't finished reading the manuscript paper in his hand.

After waiting for a while, he sorted out the manuscript paper and handed it back again.

"Quite sophisticated mathematical, and your mathematical prowess in functional analysis is much deeper than I thought, and it's hard to imagine that these things came from a young man who has not yet reached the age of twenty if he hadn't seen them with his own eyes."

Even in the face of his own students, Deligne did not skimp on his praise.

In fact, the mathematical methods used in this computation are brilliant even for him, especially the Fourier transform of the three-dimensional spatial distribution of proton charges used in the final solution to the problem of charge interference at the interface of atomic elastic scattering.

He got a little inspiration from it, otherwise he wouldn't have been reading and thinking about it for so long.

Moreover, praising this thing may have a bad effect on other students, such as making it swell, such as conceit, but for the disciple in front of him, he has enough qualifications to swell.

Looking at all the mathematicians under the age of thirty in the entire mathematical community, it can be said that no one can compare.

Hearing Deligne's exaggeration, Xu Chuan smiled shyly and said, "Compared with you, teacher, there are still many things I have to learn." ”

Deligne: "This new calculation is very good, although I can't say for sure if it's correct for physics, but the math is pretty subtle, who are you going to vote it for?" ”

Xu Chuan shook his head and said, "This is not clear, I haven't thought about it for the time being, maybe I should let Mentor Witten read it before deciding?" “

Deligne looked at the calendar on the table and said, "Today is the fourth of July, Witten may not be back until close to the tenth, you can sort out the document first, enter it on the computer and send it to him by email, or you can hang it on arxiv first." ”

The ARXIV preprint server was originally used by physicists to communicate.

Although it has now been taken over by computers, it is undeniable that there are still many physicists who share their ideas on it.

Xu Chuan nodded and said, "I'll do this." ”

Deligne smiled and said, "If this method is correct, the physics world will shake because of you." ”

He did not exaggerate this, since the puzzle of the proton radius has caused confusion and pursuit in the entire particle physics community, and even in the basic physics community.

Solving this mystery is important for understanding the laws of physics, not just for the physics community to have a more accurate piece of data.

It has also greatly contributed to the development of physics, such as the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light and matter interact.

.........

Returning to his dormitory from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Xu Chuan sorted out the calculation method of the 'proton radius puzzle' in his hand and entered it into the computer.

It's a very boring job, but it requires 12 minutes of patience and care, and you need to constantly check every character entered into the computer to check if there are no errors.

In this kind of paper, typing a word, or a character, or even a punctuation mark, can have serious consequences.

At the very least, you are considered unprofessional by the review editor, or it may lead to the scrapping of the entire certification process.

Especially in the world of mathematics, it is not uncommon for something like this to happen.

Previously, a mathematician in the United States, when he completed the push of a real number theory with an exponential function, made a mistake when uploading a mathematical symbol.

As a result, when the journal conducted the review, it directly rejected and said that there was a serious error in the core proof process of the paper.

But fortunately, this error was found during the later inspection, and after the modification was completed, it finally passed the review smoothly.

Xu Chuan doesn't want to make this kind of mistake, this will make people laugh and be generous, and it will be embarrassing to say it.

........

It took more than a day for Xu Chuan to enter the calculation method on the manuscript paper into the calculation.

After checking that there were no problems, he uploaded it to the arxiv preprint server, then found the email address of his mentor Witten and sent it over.

】

After thinking about it, Xu Chuan opened his mailbox again, found his mentor Chen Zhengping at NTU from the contacts, and sent him the calculation method of the 'proton radius mystery'.

Nominally, he is still a doctoral student at NTU.

He came to Princeton to study for a Ph.D. in the name of an exchange student, but he did not use the exchange student quota of the school, but his own invitation letter, so there is no limit on the time limit for studying abroad.

As for the rest, it's just a matter of waiting.

Mainly waiting for Professor Witten's reply.

If he is sure that there is no problem, then there is basically no problem with the paper, and then he can choose a journal to submit for publication.

As for which journal to submit the manuscript to, Xu Chuan fell into deep thought.

This is the first time in his life that he has truly shown his ability in physics, and the selection of papers and journals naturally has to choose the most suitable one.

There are many top journals in the physics field, such as Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Nature-Physics, SCE, Physical Review A/B, Advances in Physics, and so on.

But to be honest, if you want to divide these top physics journals into four gods like mathematics journals, I am afraid that it will not be possible to do it in physics journals.

Except for a small number of physics journals, the rest of these physics journals basically have their own side focus, which is a bit of a blooming feeling.

In today's physics world, in terms of the reputation and popularity of the current magazine, Nature and SCE are the highest levels, and the PRL (Physical Review Letters) is relatively low.

Therefore, ordinary researchers usually have a prejudgment about the general research results they have obtained, and if they feel that they are suitable for publication in Nature or SCE, they will generally not submit the manuscript to PRL first.

If you are a Chinese researcher, you will often submit Nature first, and if you are rejected, you will then submit Science SCE, and then choose PRL (Physical Review Letters).

But to be honest, Xu Chuan doesn't like the journal "Nature" very much, although this top journal has a very big reputation and a strong impact factor.

Because it has been exposed many times, there have been 'academic misconduct' in the paper.

The most serious, and well-known to all, is the falsification of two Nobel Prize-level medical papers.

The first was the famous Kojima country Haruko Kobokata's universal cell paper fraud incident.

The other was that there may have been academic misconduct in more than 20 papers published by Sylvain Lesne, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, who would come to light later.

Among them is a seminal paper published by Lesne in Nature in 2006, a seminal paper that has been cited more than 2,300 times.

This seminal paper involves the most cited research on Alzheimer's disease (commonly known as "Alzheimer's") in the 21st century.

In this paper, Lesne describes a substance found in a laboratory, Aβ*56.

The discovery caused a stir in the field of AD research at the time – as a specific Aβ oligomer, there was a link between Aβ*56 and cognitive decline, which pointed the way to drug research in the field of Alzheimer's disease.

Since then, the medical community has devoted a great deal of attention to this.

Since then, NIH support for "amyloid, oligomers and Alzheimer's disease" research has risen from zero to $287 million in 2021.

However, outside of ASHE and Lesne's labs, few subsequent papers have mentioned Aβ*56. Similarly, other scientists who study the Aβ protein have said they can't be sure if Aβ*56 actually exists.

According to Science, many Alzheimer's researchers have tried, but have not been able to replicate these findings on aβ*56.

One of them was Dennis Selkoe of Brigham and Women's Hospital, a leading advocate of the "amyloid hypothesis." In 2008, Selkoe reported that Aβ*56 could not be found in human cortical extracts and brain crest fluid.

Then Nature's old rival for impurities, Science, spent six months investigating the papers, and conducted an in-depth investigation of the papers by renowned independent image analysts and leading Alzheimer's disease researchers.

Eventually, it was found that there were suspicious traces of more than 100 images in these papers.

Molecular biologist and renowned academic counterfeiter Elizabeth Vic said: "These images appear to be synthesized by the author by piecing together parts of different experiments. ”

"Perhaps the authors obtained experimental results that may not have been the expected results, and then changed those data to better match a hypothetical image."

The two serious fraud incidents have caused a huge impact on the medical community, wasting countless financial and material resources, as well as the energy of a large number of scientific researchers.

This made Xu Chuan seriously doubt whether the review of "Nature's" impurities was as good as they said.

Although Nature is indeed one of the oldest scientific impurities in the world, it has made great contributions to the development of science.

But it is undeniable that they have a series of 'dereliction of duty' in the audit work.

.........