Walking out of the door, Rutherford lit the tobacco in his pipe, took a deep breath and asked, "Chen, did you think about how to do this verification experiment a long time ago, but didn't say it at the meeting?" ”

Just like Chen Muwu could see at a glance that Rutherford went to smoke outside the court because the drunkard did not mean to drink.

Rutherford, who had been with him for more than a year, also saw that Chen Muwu seemed to be hiding something from the attendees.

Today is the third day of the current Solvay Conference, and in the past few days, whenever Rutherford wants to smoke, he will swallow the smoke directly in his seat, regardless of the fact that there are old men like Lorenz and ladies like Marie Curie next to him.

Because smoking is still a very common thing, there is no concept of second-hand smoke, and I have not understood that smoking is a very harmful behavior to health.

But after he finished speaking, Rutherford suddenly got up and walked straight to the door beside him with his pipe, and Chen Muwu knew that this should obviously be something to say to him.

The teacher's vision is really spicy, and he can see through Chen Muwu's ghost tricks at a glance.

So he no longer hid it, but stood in a position where he couldn't inhale second-hand smoke at the upwind outlet, and then directly told Rutherford the answer: "Director, that's right, I did think about how to do this experiment to verify the existence of electron spins."

"And this experiment has been successfully done, but I think no one noticed this experiment because everyone in the room was thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect.

"I want to repeat the experiment done by Otto Stern and Walter Grach the year before to verify the quantization of space, and it should be a good way to verify that electrons have spins."

In 1922, Stern and Grach conducted an experiment in which silver metal heated in a high-temperature furnace fire released silver atoms outward, and after passing a beam of silver atoms through a non-uniform magnetic field, the discrete magnetic moments were observed, thus confirming the existence of space quantization.

For this, Stern was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943.

However, in the award to Sten, there is no mention of this experiment, which directly led to the concept of electron spin.

This is because the other participant in the experiment at that time, Grach, had already become a swastika scientist, so not only was he not awarded the Nobel Prize, but the experiment named after him was disqualified by the Nobel Prize jury from appearing in the reasons for the award.

Another anecdote about their discovery of discrete magnetic moments is that at first, Grach did not observe silver atoms on the condensed glass disk.

This is because silver, as a white metal, is not very obvious on the screen glass.

However, when Grach handed the glass disc to Stern, the silver atoms on it suddenly appeared.

Because of the significant depreciation of the Deutsche Mark, Stern could not afford to smoke high-quality cigars, so he had to smoke low-quality cigars with sulfur content.

When the sulfur in the smoke meets the silver, a black silver sulfide is formed, which makes the results of the experiment apparent.

It is also thanks to poverty that this experiment can be successful, and if it were De Broglie to do this experiment, it is estimated that it will be difficult to get the correct experimental results.

Hearing him mention this Stern-Grach experiment, Rutherford immediately understood what Chen Muwu meant.

It's just that he doesn't understand, since this experiment has been done a long time ago, what is Chen Muwu still doing hiding in his speech?

After listening to the teacher's question, Chen Muwu smiled and said, "Director, although the silver atom has only one outermost electron, it is a little convincing after all.

"So I'm going to change the experimental material and replace the silver atom with a hydrogen atom in the ground state, because there is no orbital angular momentum in the electrons in the hydrogen atom in the ground state, so if the same result is still the same as in the Stern-Grach experiment, then it can be said that there must be other magnetic moments in the electrons, and the magnetic moment is the angular momentum, that is, the spin of the electron.

"I want to think of this experiment as my graduation thesis, what do you think of this time?"

Ever since he proposed to use the principle of incompatibility when his graduation thesis was rejected by Rutherford, Chen Muwu has been thinking about what to replace it.

Although he had thought of two of them before, he always felt that they were more or less inappropriate.

Then, when he was writing the outline of the electron spin in the past few days, he naturally thought of this experiment, and if he made it and wrote it into a paper, it should be the most appropriate one at present.

Sure enough, after listening to Chen Muwu's thoughts, Rutherford's eyes lit up: "Okay, okay, just do this experiment and write this paper!" As soon as the Solvay meeting is over and we return to the Cavendish lab, I'll ask Kapitsa to arrange it for you at once. ”

Kapitsa has been the assistant head of the Department of Magnetism for a year, and Chen Muwu needs to use magnetic fields in this experiment, and he happens to be a professional counterpart.

"Director," Chen Muwu remembered what Langevin had said to him on the first day, "after the meeting, I would like to take a few days off and take a trip from Belgium to Germany to visit Professor Planck and Dr. Einstein." When my first paper was published, these two seniors were also very helpful to me. ”

Rutherford didn't think about it, so he rejected Chen Muwu's verbal leave note: "No time!" If you want to meet them, there will be more opportunities in the future, but if you don't do this experiment quickly, it is likely that others will take the lead.

"After all, there are already many people in the venue today who have heard Ling's thoughts, although they may not have reacted for a while now, but when they go back, as long as one of them also thinks of your idea and does the experiment first, then you will have lost all your efforts."

He said with emotion, probably thinking of the time when his paper was preemptively published by the Curies and Becquerel more than 20 years ago.

Chen Muwu knew that Rutherford was not arbitrary, but patiently reasoned with himself.

In this way, the plan for this trip to Germany should be in vain.

I don't know when the next time I will meet Planck and Einstein in Germany?

It can't be the next Solvay Conference in three years' time, right?

Chen Muwu, who followed Rutherford back into the conference site and returned to his seat, wrote a letter to Einstein, telling him that he had wanted to visit Berlin, but because of an emergency, he had to rush back to Cavendish Laboratory to do experiments, so he could only wait for the next fate.

Chen Muwu planned to hand over this handwritten letter, which was rarely written on a typewriter, to Lang Zhiwan and ask him to forward it to Einstein on his behalf.

……

After reading the paper at the meeting, Chen Muwu felt that he had completed all the tasks set for this trip.

He simply skipped the fourth day of the all-day meeting, intending to take a stroll around Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

After all, you can't come for nothing, can you?

Of course, before dark that night, Chen Muwu rushed back to the building of the Solvay International Institute of Physical Chemistry.

Because tonight there will be a sumptuous dinner here, as a practical banquet for physicists in advance.

After all, the conference will end tomorrow morning, and if the practice banquet is held that night, it is estimated that many people will already embark on the journey back.

When Chen Muwu arrived at the building, the banquet had already begun.

Belgians are not as old-fashioned as Trinity College dinners, and everyone is not in the banquet hall for eating, but more for socializing and chatting with their peers.

There was also a piano in the corner of the stage, and a girl was sitting on a piano bench, playing a beautiful melody for the banquet.

Teacher Rutherford's side is still very lively, and many people gather around to chat.

Chen Muwu picked up some food casually, and then walked to Blackett and De Broglie again.

After the photo shoot tomorrow, everyone will be separated, and Blackett will follow Langevin to Germany - De Broglie, who loves to join in the fun, will certainly not miss the opportunity to meet Einstein; And Chen Muwu still followed Rutherford back to Cambridge.

Schrödinger also took this opportunity to talk to Chen Muwu with a wine glass.

Hearing the greeting in German-flavored English, Chen Muwu simply talked to him directly in German.

Schrödinger went straight to the point, directly praised the correctness of Chen Muwu's electron wave theory, and congratulated him on verifying this theory with experiments.

Xiao Chen then remembered that since Schrödinger saw de Broglie's paper, he wondered if he could find a wave equation for this wave since matter is a kind of wave.

And when he came up with the wave equation, the electron diffraction experiments were not successful.

Now that I have figured out the theory of matter waves more than half a year ahead of the original space-time, will the Schrödinger equation also come out in advance?

It's really a whole bunch of things, and when I go back to the Cavendish lab and do that experiment to verify the spin of the electron, it seems that we will be going to publish the paper on the wave equation.

Why did Li Zongsheng sing that song? It's really "hard to run around all day long, and you can't be idle for a moment"!

After chatting with Schrödinger for a few more words, Chen Muwu finally held back and asked him abruptly if he liked cats in this question.

……

The next day, Chen Muwu slept lazily, pinched the time, and walked outside the gate of the institute at nine o'clock.

In front of the institute, on a lawn in Leopold Park, a row of chairs with backrests has been set up for the group photo.

At Chen Muwu's level, he didn't dare to expect that he could sit on a chair.

He consciously did the same as he had done last autumn at the Cavendish lab, and then he consciously found Blackett, who was also wandering in the last row, the two tallest men in the room, and stood together again.

Chen Muwu, who was standing in the center of the back row, felt that he had a kind of momentum at a glance.

His gaze swept over like the big guy in the front row, and then he noticed something ridiculous.

Although the sunshine at 90 o'clock in the morning is not very strong, the bare head shells in front of me reflect the sun's rays brightly.

The shutter of the camera on the opposite center bracket sounded mechanically, and Chen Muwu's expression was frozen on the negative, with a smile.

After the group photo, the photographer also provides a separate photo service, and he wants to make a lot of money with this business.

Because the price of taking a photo is not cheap, Chen Muwu only picked a few people who he thought were older to take the photo together.

People like Langevin, who lived until after World War II, were not in his mind at all.

Just when Chen Muwu felt that the photo was almost taken and was about to leave with Rutherford, the brown-haired girl who was playing the piano at the practice banquet yesterday jumped up in front of him and said a few words to him generously.

Chen Muwu only understood the first sentence of "Bonjour", and made sure that the girl spoke French, and then he didn't understand any of the remaining words.

De Broglie, who happened to be standing next to him, translated to him with a smile on his face: "She said that she wanted to take a picture with you." ”

The girl probably saw that Chen Muwu didn't understand, and pointed to the camera in front of the lawn.

(End of chapter)