The air in the underground machine shop of Keda’s School of Physics felt a bit oppressive.
In a corner of the shop, a high-precision dial indicator was mounted on a cast-iron workbench.
The indicator’s probe was pressed firmly against the core load-bearing surface of a newly machined alloy base.
It was what one might call a beautiful piece of industrial art.
The base’s surface had been lathed and milled to a mirror sheen. Every chamfered curve, every interval between screw holes, exuded a flawless mechanical beauty.
Wang Dayong stood before the workbench, his hands braced on its edge. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his forearms stained with patches of black grease.
His hair was a mess, and dark circles were clearly visible under his eyes.
His gaze was fixed on the face of the dial indicator.
Beside him, Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan also held their breath, their eyes glued to the small red needle.
Wisps of warm air blew out from the central air conditioning vent on the shop wall.
As the warm air drifted by, the temperature around the workbench was undergoing an infinitesimally small change.
"It moved."
Zheng Nan swallowed, his voice a little hoarse.
On the dial indicator’s face, the red needle, which had been pointing at the zero mark, shifted as if nudged by some invisible force.
It moved very slowly, yet with unwavering certainty, deflecting half a tick to the right.
Then, as the airflow from the air conditioner shifted and the temperature dropped ever so slightly, the needle slowly drifted back to the left, even moving past the zero point.
Within a range of plus or minus a few microns, the needle wandered back and forth erratically, like a drunken pendulum.
The precision had drifted again.
Zhao Peng let out a long sigh and rubbed his face.
"Still no good."
Zhao Peng turned to look at Wang Dayong.
"Dayong, this is the third base you’ve machined this week. The precision is still stuck at the fourth decimal place. When you get to the fifth, it just won’t stabilize."
Wang Dayong said nothing.
He slowly straightened up and walked over to another table next to the workbench.
On the table lay a thick, open copy of Mechanics of Materials, its pages worn and fuzzy from use.
Beside the book was a thick stack of scratch paper covered in various calculus formulas, stress tensor matrices, and deformation derivations.
For the past three months, all for the sake of the perfectly stress-distributed base Professor Liu had assigned, Wang Dayong—a man who got a headache just looking at complex math—had forced himself to become a crude machine for deriving mechanical theory.
He spent his days in the workshop with the machine tools, and at night, he’d return to his dorm to pore over the thick textbook under his desk lamp.
While Chen Zhuo was busy calculating abstruse topology, he was calculating the most basic metal yield strengths and thermal stresses.
He had followed the formulas in the book, calculating every inch of stress on the base with perfect clarity.
He had redrawn the blueprints again and again, dispersing the areas of stress concentration with the smoothest possible transition curves.
’He was sure that even if an old mechanical engineering professor from Keda were to judge it, they wouldn’t be able to find a single flaw in the base’s structure.’
But in reality, it just didn’t work.
Wang Dayong reached out with a greasy hand and picked up the top sheet of scratch paper.
On it was the thermal stress deformation compensation formula he had calculated late last night. He had checked every number three times.
"Maybe our boundary conditions are still too idealized?"
Zheng Nan leaned in, looking at the formula on the scratch paper and offering a tentative analysis.
"After all, the real-world stress conditions are much more complex. How about we try adjusting Poisson’s ratio a little? Or we could rerun the mesh model in the finite element analysis software to see if there’s a tiny bit of stress concentration in one of the corners that hasn’t been relieved."
Wang Dayong stared at the paper in his hand.
An image of Chen Zhuo’s relaxed and effortless demeanor back in the dorm suddenly flashed through his mind.
’The things other people figured out in their heads worked perfectly in reality.’
’But the things he, Wang Dayong, calculated by the book, stroke by stroke, turned into a pile of disobedient scrap metal in reality.’
An unprecedented sense of suffocating frustration surged from his chest to his head.
Wang Dayong slowly crumpled the sheet of scratch paper into a ball.
He walked to the workbench, glanced at the dial indicator still wavering back and forth, then at the thick Mechanics of Materials textbook.
He suddenly reached out and grabbed the book.
Relying on memory, Wang Dayong flipped rapidly through the pages, finally stopping at a Chapter near the middle.
The Chapter title was:
Thermal Strain and Material Thermal Expansion.
Wang Dayong stared at the most basic formula on the page.
Deformation equals the coefficient of thermal expansion, multiplied by the original length, multiplied by the change in temperature.
Just a simple multiplication formula.
No complex calculus, no dizzying tensor matrices.
Wang Dayong stared at the Greek letter.
The bold text on the page was very clear.
When the temperature of any solid material rises, the thermal motion of its internal molecules or atoms intensifies, causing the average distance between atoms to increase, which manifests as an expansion in macroscopic volume.
This is an inherent physical property of the material.
Wang Dayong’s eyes slowly narrowed.
At that moment, all the messy stress formulas, geometric chamfers, and structural optimizations in his head were swept clean, as if by a great gust of wind.
SLAM!
Wang Dayong forcefully shut the thick Mechanics of Materials and slammed it down on the table.

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