Li Dong stared at his phone screen, the corner of his mouth twitching involuntarily.
’Couldn’t hold it in any longer?’
He instantly perked up.
Knowing Gamov’s personality, it probably wasn’t going to be anything pleasant.
The first person to reply in the group wasn’t Madam Curie.
It was Mendeleev.
[Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev]: Your Excellency, George.
[Mendeleev]: If you have something to say, please say it plainly.
As soon as that line appeared, Li Dong smiled.
’Mendeleev has been holding it in for long enough, too.’
He’d gone so many rounds back and forth with Madam Curie, having to invoke "Ether" and "atomic weight" in every single one. He was probably exhausted himself.
It was only natural that he’d want to see if this newcomer had any different ideas.
[Gamov]: Then I’ll be direct.
[Gamov]: My two seniors.
[Gamov]: This argument will never end.
[Gamov]: Because both of you have made a mistake.
Li Dong was stunned.
’Huh???’
’Gamov, what are you doing? Offending both sides right off the bat?’
[Mendeleev]: ...?
[Marie Skłodowska Curie]: Your Excellency.
[Madam Curie]: Please make yourself clear.
[Gamov]: Don’t be hasty, you two.
[Gamov]: When I say you’re both mistaken, I don’t mean that what you’re saying is incorrect.
[Gamov]: Rather, the two of you aren’t even arguing about the same thing.
[Gamov]: Mr. Mendeleev insists that the "identity" of an element is immutable.
[Gamov]: Your entire system is built upon the ruler of atomic weight.
[Gamov]: But this ruler measures a group of atoms.
[Gamov]: It has never once stepped through the atom’s door.
There was no response from Mendeleev.
[Gamov]: Madam Mary insists that the "identity" of an element can change.
[Gamov]: Your system is built upon the ruler of the decay curve.
[Gamov]: But this ruler also measures a group of atoms.
[Gamov]: It, too, has never stepped through the atom’s door.
[Gamov]: Therefore, neither of you is entirely wrong, but neither of you is entirely right, either.
[Gamov]: The "irrefutable evidence" that each of you holds was measured from outside the atom’s door.
[Gamov]: You could argue outside that door for a lifetime and never figure out what an atom looks like on the inside.
Li Dong looked at the screen. That old rascal hadn’t exactly been polite in those last few messages.
’But thinking about it carefully... he wasn’t wrong about a single thing.’
Mendeleev’s periodic law of elements was derived from weighing things gram by gram by gram.
Madam Curie’s decay curve was also calculated from counting milligram by milligram by milligram.
Both of these systems were macroscopic systems.
The argument these two titans were having about "whether atoms have an internal structure" was, from the very beginning, conducted from outside the atom’s door.
’But...’
Li Dong couldn’t help but grumble to himself on behalf of the two titans.
’Standing outside the door was a limitation of their era.’
’You can’t blame them for not having a twenty-first-century scanning tunneling microscope, can you?’
Just as he was about to speak up for them, another message from Gamov appeared.
[Gamov]: I went through the same kind of arguments back when I was using the wave equation to calculate alpha particles.
[Gamov]: Why should an alpha particle escape from the atomic nucleus? Was it kicked out by some "mysterious intranuclear repulsive force"?
[Gamov]: I argued about it for many years.
[Gamov]: Until one day, I handed the entire question of "how it gets out" over to the wave function itself to calculate.
[Gamov]: The moment the calculation was finished, I discovered...
[Gamov]: It doesn’t need to be kicked at all.
[Gamov]: It slowly seeps out of the potential barrier on its own.
[Gamov]: The so-called decay constant was written by the process itself, not something I forced into it.
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat.
Gamov had just slammed his proudest trump card onto the table.
1928, the explanation of alpha decay via quantum tunneling.
It took an invisible, intangible "repulsive force" within the nucleus and mathematically proved it to be a quantum mechanical process.
From then on, the question of "why an atomic nucleus spits out an alpha particle" no longer needed to rely on any metaphysical speculation.
[Gamov]: So, you two.
[Gamov]: Instead of arguing outside the door about "whether this gram of radium has changed or not"...
[Gamov]: ...why not let the atom speak for itself?
[Gamov]: Let the physical process itself do the talking.
The instant those words appeared.
Li Dong’s mind went BUZZ.
That voice, which had been repeating endlessly in his mind, appeared once more.
"Wrong direction!"
At the same time, a spot on the wall before him—the very wall Wu Kai, Wang Shen, and the others had been desperately trying to break through—slowly began to light up.
The wall in front of Li Dong was crystal clear.
All the chemical engineering tricks had been exhausted: tip materials, insulation layers, shielding gold plating, focused ion beam milling of the end face... a wall.
All the mathematical inversion tricks had been exhausted: Gikhmanov regularization, spectral methods, variational principles, basis function expansion... another wall.
Two walls, each built as solid as iron.
A dozen teams from across the country, dozens of teams from around the world, were ramming their shoulders against these two walls.
They couldn’t break through.
So they looked up at the ceiling...
’Since we can’t break through the walls on either side, why not drill a hole in the ceiling and go around?’
That’s why they went to get mathematicians.
Wang Shen brought in Levan.
Wu Kai brought in Li Dong.
Everyone was standing in that small room, heads tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
That’s why they never saw...
...that between the two walls, there had always been a door.
And that door didn’t lead to mathematics.

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