In the first second, the pointer trembled slightly. It was the release of surface stress as the base’s outer shell first heated up.
Zhao Peng’s heart was in his throat.
Zhao Peng nodded subconsciously.
A miracle happened.
"This outer steel pipe—I welded it fast at the bottom. When you blast it with the heat gun, it heats up and expands. It has to expand upward, right?"
Looking at Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan, Wang Dayong used the simplest, plainest language to reveal the secret behind his ingenious mechanical contraption.
"Dayong."
He walked over and switched off the heat gun in Zheng Nan’s hand.
"Let’s go!"
"But!"
"They can expand all they want inside, but the outside won’t move by even a single micron!"
"The aluminum rod inside gets hot, too. And aluminum is more temperamental than steel—it expands faster. As it expands, it has to lengthen downward."
The two seniors couldn’t help but exchange a glance.
’It’s determined by the metal itself.’
Wang Dayong dusted off his hands and glanced at the wall clock.
Zhao Peng’s voice was filled with sincere astonishment.
Steady as a rock.
There were no complex mathematical derivations, no expensive special-purpose materials.
No matter how Zheng Nan changed the angle of the heat gun, no matter how sharply the surrounding temperature rose.
He turned to look at Wang Dayong, who was drenched in sweat and whose clothes smelled of scorched welding flux. Zhao Peng’s voice cracked.
It remained firmly at a minuscule position just to the right of the zero mark, locked dead-on to a precision of five decimal places.
’The materials.’
’What if, one day, I didn’t have to scrounge for scrap to piece things together?’
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
"You didn’t even write out a differential equation! You didn’t calculate a compensation matrix for the thermal expansion coefficients! How could you possibly have canceled out their different expansion rates so perfectly with manual cutting?!"
His right hand represented the upward pull of the steel pipe, and his left, the downward stretch of the aluminum rod.
The only sound left in the workshop was the whining roar of the heat gun.
The second second.
Wang Dayong pointed to the outer steel pipe.
He slammed his hands together, mimicking two forces wrestling with each other.
He had muddled through today, solving the problem at hand with a crude method, by making two materials fight each other.
"Let’s go, seniors."
Then, he pointed with his other hand to the aluminum rod hidden inside.
Zhao Peng took a sharp step forward, his face nearly pressing against the glass cover of the dial indicator.
"When I was cutting the aluminum rod, I measured it. The coefficient of expansion for aluminum is about double that of steel. So, I just had to cut the inner aluminum rod to half the length of the outer steel pipe."
"So, no matter how much they swell up or how fiercely they fight in there, the actual load-bearing connection point on the outer frame, right here at the bottom, is locked firmly in place by those two opposing forces."
After that initial, slight tremble, it was as if it had been welded fast to the dial.
Wang Dayong made an upward pulling motion with his hand.
’The ultimate, life-or-death limit of a piece of industrial equipment isn’t determined by how beautifully the blueprints are drawn.’
’What if, one day, I could personally forge a piece of iron in a furnace—a metal that’s inherently stable, that won’t expand, that won’t break no matter how you shake it... how badass would that be?’
Built with pure, brute-force, unadulterated physical intuition.
The seconds ticked by.
The red pointer on the dial indicator.
It was like someone firing a shot from the hip, without a scope, and hitting a fly from eight hundred meters away.
As Wang Dayong finished speaking, Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan stood there for a long time, staring at the ugly, crude, yet utterly dependable nested base.
Wang Dayong looked at the base, a new, more intense craving glittering in his eyes.
Wang Dayong looked at his two dumbfounded seniors.
"This... How is this possible?"
Wang Dayong pulled the towel from around his neck, wiped away his sweat, and broke into a brilliant, unassuming grin.
"One pulls back, the other pushes out."
Wang Dayong scratched his head sheepishly, looking a bit embarrassed.
Wang Dayong pointed to the flange at the bottom of the aluminum rod, the part connected to the dial indicator’s probe.
"What’s there to write an equation for, senior?"
The workshop fell silent.
The third second.
But for the first time, he felt with startling clarity:
Zhao Peng’s jaw slowly dropped.
’I can use two pipes to cancel out thermal expansion today, but what about tomorrow? What if I have to deal with temperatures of several thousand degrees? Or tens of thousands of tons of hydraulic pressure?’
"As it expands upward, it pulls the aluminum rod welded to the top along with it."
"The outer steel pipe expands upward by one millimeter. The inner aluminum rod expands downward by exactly one millimeter."
"It’s time to eat. We’ll let the base cool here and show it to Teacher Liu in the morning. Let’s head to the cafeteria and grab a table. If we’re late, they’ll be out of the stewed pork ribs."
Zhao Peng declared with a grand wave of his hand.
The steel pipe on the outside of the base was too hot to touch.
The thought sparked in Wang Dayong’s mind, then flared into a flame.
Wang Dayong walked over to the still-scalding base, held out his hands, and began gesturing in mid-air.
The heat gun had been blowing continuously for a full minute.
Wang Dayong held his hands in front of his chest.
"The books say it: aluminum expands quickly, steel expands slowly."
"It’s not wired any special way. It’s just... formulas give me a headache. When I can’t figure them out by calculating, all I can do is get my hands dirty and build it."
Using two scrap pipes picked from a junk pile and the most primitive cutting and welding techniques, Wang Dayong had brute-forced a "perfectly" non-expanding structure into existence in the physical world.
"As long as the two materials are fighting each other in there, canceling each other out, the internal stresses form a closed loop."
That pointer didn’t move in the slightest.
Zhao Peng took a deep breath.
In the eyes of a theorist, this was nothing short of an affront to the dignity of physics.
’This kind of structural nesting is ultimately just a clever trick.’
But.
’When that day comes, making a few pipes fight each other won’t be enough.’
He turned and looked at the base, which was already beginning to cool down.
"You really are something else. No wonder you were in the special program for gifted kids. How is your brain even wired?"
Zheng Nan’s hand, still gripping the heat gun, froze in place. He forgot to turn it off.
"The ribs are on me today! Dayong, eat your fill!"

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