After leaving his seat, Chen Muwu first walked to the staff who was responsible for operating the slide projector, and handed over the slides he had prepared to write some formulas and draw some schematic diagrams.

Then he stepped up to the podium and nodded to Professor Lorenz, who had been waiting for him here.

"Well done, Dr. Chen, Sir Rutherford has already told me, that you have made a new discovery in the Cavendish laboratory, and that I will invite you to the stage if I have the chance. Don't let down your teacher, me, and the expectations of others here, and give us a good start to this meeting. ”

After whispering encouragement to Chen Muwu, a junior standing beside him, Professor Lorenz walked off the podium with a smile on his face.

After the applause ended, Chen Muwu also nodded to the physicists sitting in the audience.

When the applause had subsided, he cleared his throat and spoke:

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honour for me to be the first to take the stage and address this Solvay Conference.

"The title of my lecture today is 'A Conjecture about the Sources of Energy of the Sun and Stars,' a question I recently worked on with Professor Eddington in the Cavendish Laboratory."

Some of you often read news reports from newspapers and are concerned about all kinds of news that happens internationally and domestically.

Some people are not so concerned about news events, they are more concerned about whether the experiments they are doing at hand can achieve an expected good result.

So for this kind of rumor that the sun might explode without any scientific basis, these people simply don't take it to heart.

They didn't know that the Times reporters, who feared that the world would not be chaotic, had gone to Cambridge University to interview Chen Muwu, and the latter promised that they would use experimental phenomena to explain why the sun shines.

When these people saw the title written by Chen Muwu in the center of the first slide, they were taken aback by this topic that couldn't be bigger-

Shouldn't the theme of this Solvay Conference be "Nuclear Nuclei and Nuclear Reactions"?

Why did Dr. Chan start talking about the sun and stars as soon as he came up?

Did he make a mistake at the conference he attended and get the wrong speech for himself?

This is the Solvay Conference, where the most advanced physics is discussed, not the plenary session of the National Astronomical Union.

There were many people present who were surprised, but none of them stood up to remind Chen Muwu.

Chen Muwu motioned to the staff who operated the slide playback, changed to the next slide, and then a photographic negative that recorded the trajectory of the cloud and fog room appeared on the screen of the projector.

"Look, this is a new reaction experiment on the nucleus that Professor Eddington and I have recently done using the particle accelerator in the Cavendish laboratory.

"In this experiment, the accelerated deuterium nucleus was used to bombard the hydrogen atoms fixed in the ammonium chloride lattice, and finally the first isotope of helium was obtained, the helium-3 nucleus with a relative atomic mass of 3.

The line on the photographic disc is the trajectory of the helium-3 nucleus in the cloud chamber.

"Specifically, the process of coming to this conclusion through numerical calculations was written down on the next slide, and I asked the staff to help me change it.

"Some of you may have seen the newsletter I wrote to the editorial office in the first two issues of Nature, and the value of Professor Aston, who is also in the Cavendish lab, measuring the precise atomic mass of this helium-3 isotope.

Thanks to Professor Aston for his basic but useful contributions, with the precise mass he measured, we can better explore the mysterious and unknown microcosm.

"Adding the rest masses of these particles before and after the reaction and comparing them with each other can lead to the conclusion that after the nuclear reaction, the mass of the helium-3 nucleus is less than the mass of one deuterium nucleus and one hydrogen nucleus, that is, there is a mass loss. According to the mass-energy equation proposed by Professor Einstein—"

Having said this, Chen Muwu deliberately made a long sound, and his eyes drifted to the corner where he was just sitting.

Einstein, who had not listened to Chen Muwu's opening speech and had already begun to quietly discuss the physics and philosophy of quantum mechanics with Wittgenstein, was slightly startled when he heard Chen Muwu on the podium call out his name.

He looked up at the curtain hanging next to the blackboard on the podium, and looked at the formula that Chen Muwu had written on it.

He was relieved when he saw the "E=Mc" that no one knew better than himself.

It's just the most ordinary mass-energy equation, and I don't know why Dr. Chen always adds his name to it every time he mentions it.

After confirming that he was not shouting at himself, Einstein lowered his head again and pointed at the paper with Wittgenstein, apparently entering a heated discussion about quantum mechanics again.

Although he couldn't know what the battle situation was between the two of them, looking at the expressions on the faces of both sides, Chen Muwu could also make a simple guess.

After smiling, Chen Muwu continued what he had just said.

"This nuclear reaction of the deuterium nucleus and the hydrogen nucleus fusing into a helium-3 nucleus releases energy externally.

"So the successful experiment in the Cavendish laboratory confirms the conjecture that Professor Eddington had put forward a few years ago, that is, the source of energy in the sun should not be the heat release from the combustion of coal, oil or a mixture of various organic alkanes, as has been speculated for more than a century, but probably through nuclear fusion, a reaction that mankind has only learned about in the last decade.

"We seem to be able to get the same guess about the Pangea process of the universe.

"At the very first moment when the universe expanded outwardly from a singularity with infinite energy mass and infinite spatial scope, the entire universe was filled with only one and huge number of the same element, hydrogen atoms.

"And then just after that initial moment, the hydrogen atoms began to fuse with each other, producing one heavier atom after another.

"The entire universe expanded and fused to form new elements, and it gradually became what we know today.

"The fusions that took place in the early stages of the universe are still happening in the stars, so that the sun above us can continue to provide energy to the entire solar system.

"In addition to this D-H fusion in which deuterium atoms and hydrogen atoms fuse into helium-3 atoms, Professor Eddington and I have established a nuclear reaction process for the interior of the Sun based on this nuclear fusion reaction and the fact that there are a large number of hydrogen atoms in the Sun from observing the spectrum:

"The first is that two hydrogen atoms are fused to produce a deuterium atom.

"We have tried to replicate this upheaval reaction on the particle accelerator at Cavendish Labs, but even if we increase the energy to the maximum effect of the particle accelerator, allowing a proton that has been accelerated to more than one million electron volts to bombard another proton, we still can't find the fusion of deuterium nuclei after the reaction is over.

"That is enough to show that this fusion reaction is not an exergonic reaction but an energy-absorbing reaction. This is actually a very strange thing, because the sum of the masses before and after the reaction does not tell the whole story, and the mass of two hydrogen nuclei together is greater than that of one helium nucleus.

"But no matter how much energy we put in the Cavendish lab, this reaction never happened.

"We can't make a reasonable explanation for this, we can only speculate and put forward a hypothesis. That is, there may be other places that need energy for this reaction outside of nuclear fusion, but the current level of physics is not enough to find out where this energy goes. ”

Chen Muwu, who pretended not to know the existence of neutrinos and the decay of the beta, naturally could not find a "reasonable" explanation for this reaction.

"And for the reaction to be successful, the amount of energy that needs to be input before the reaction is enormous, perhaps more than the sun can provide.

"It's just that if the sun can't provide the energy to fuse two hydrogen atoms into a deuterium atom, then the rest of the reaction can't be carried out.

"If it doesn't work, is there any other way? Coincidentally, quantum mechanics does offer a possible possibility for such a scenario.

"As long as the wave function of the hydrogen atom is solved, you can get a strange phenomenon from a macroscopic perspective, that is, it is a barrier that is impossible for the hydrogen atom to climb, but the hydrogen atom seems to be able to drill a tunnel in this barrier and magically pass through it.

"This effect, which we call the 'quantum tunneling effect', allows hydrogen nuclei to easily approach another hydrogen nucleus, so it's not surprising that they fuse with each other to produce deuterium nuclei.

"As an aside, if this conjecture is ultimately confirmed, it will show that quantum mechanics can be used not only in the microscopic world, but also in the sun, which is no longer macroscopic."

Chen Muwu deliberately added an accent to this last sentence, wanting to observe Einstein's reaction to the incident.

But to his disappointment, in the corner of the room, Einstein and Wittgenstein were discussing hotly, and he didn't even listen to Chen Muwu's speech on the podium, let alone look up at him again.

This is also one of the situations that Chen Muwu envisioned, he didn't take it to heart, and continued to speak:

"Then the deuterium nuclei and hydrogen nuclei fuse to produce helium-3, and in this reaction a large amount of energy is released, which is likely to be the source of the sun's energy.

"This is just a speculation by Professor Eddington and I about the possible nuclear reactions inside the Sun, based on experimental phenomena obtained in the Cavendish laboratory.

Whether this speculation is correct or not may require physicists and astronomers to work together and use further experiments and observations to test the idea.

"Helium is the first element observed in the solar spectrum in the last century, and it is not the isotope helium-3 that exists in large quantities in the sun, but helium-4.

"In order to be more in line with the actual situation inside the sun, we can also add a new nuclear reaction to the two guessed nuclear reactions just now. - Please help me switch to the next slide.

"Two helium-3 nuclei can fuse into one helium-4 nucleus, releasing two protons at the same time.

"Because we did this series of nuclear reactions only half a month before the opening of the Solvay Conference, the last reaction has not yet been verified, and it is just a guess on my part.

"When the conference is over, back at Cambridge University, the nuclear response will be my focus for the rest of my work.

"If the three nuclear reactions mentioned above are combined, then the nuclear reaction process in this solar system can be combined into four hydrogen nuclei, through a series of fusion reactions to form a helium nucleus, and release a certain amount of energy.

This nuclear reaction was a speculation made by Professor Eddington in one of his papers a few years ago.

"It now seems likely that Professor Eddington's theory is not speculation, but a reality."

After finishing all the content on the slide, Chen Muwu bowed and stepped down cleanly, not dragging his feet at all.

As for the questions, the meeting will have a special discussion time, so there will be no question session after the presentation.

Among the physicists sitting in the audience, some of them didn't listen to the discussion of quantum mechanics at all, some of them understood, and some of them were a little confused.

There is another one of them, who both understood and looked confused.

Eddington really couldn't understand why Dr. Chan mentioned himself again and again throughout the whole speech, when most of these experiments and the conclusions concluded through the experiments were made by Dr. Chan alone.

And he almost put the credit on himself in the end, which felt like he was forcibly trying to say that he was the first person to discover the mystery of the sun.

When he was at Cambridge University before he came, Chen Muwu had never been angry with himself, and there was such a situation?

What the hell is going on with him today?

Eddington really wanted to stop Chen Muwu, who had just walked by his side, and ask him about the specific situation.

But his brain prevented him from doing so, Chen Muwu had just praised him on stage, and now he came to such a show, it was easy for the physicists present to misunderstand whether there was a discord between Dr. Chen and himself.

If this rumor spreads, it will not be the two of them who will be embarrassed, but the entire British physics community.

Chen Muwu didn't know what Eddington was thinking, he walked back to his seat, and just glanced at Einstein, who looked up.

(End of chapter)