The evening breeze from Lake Zurich wafted into a small office on the sixth floor of ETH’s main building.
At the end of a hallway in the Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Clara Cadwell sat in front of her computer, tucking a stray lock of light-blonde hair behind her ear.
Her screen was split in two.
On the left was the rejection letter from *Nature*, which had arrived in her inbox half an hour ago.
Her manuscript had been killed, because it was "scooped."
Another team had produced highly overlapping work during the same period, and their method was far more perfect than hers.
As a scholar, she could accept losing to more perfect empirical data.
On the right was Li Dong’s early warning communication and Professor Richter’s comment on it.
She read the comment again. When she got to the last sentence, "You have disappointed me," she felt a tightness in her chest.
’No, this isn’t right.’
As if she’d made up her mind, she began to type.
[Professor Richter, hello.]
[Regarding your comment on Dr. Li Dong’s communication, please allow me, as a colleague, to say a few words.]
[You all say that Dr. Li Dong’s early warning is "correct nonsense."]
[Then I would like to ask you all in return...]
[Can you write "nonsense" of this caliber?]
[Without any precedent, could you take the very ruler used to filter out illusionary peaks and instead use it to retrieve that core sample set from the filtered-out events? Could you then cross-validate them one by one using five independent baselines, making them align simultaneously across four completely separate dimensions: energy bands, amplitude, time series, and tunneling modulation?]
[Could you, based on a 2.8σ sample, build a cross-disciplinary predictive model and clearly write out the physical correlation for every substitution, line by line, in the supplementary materials?]
[You cannot.]
[I cannot either.]
[In the entire field of space weather, you couldn’t even find three people who could accomplish this on their own.]
The sound of Clara’s typing was exceptionally clear in the quiet office.
[Professor Richter, please allow me to bring up your 1987 work on the spectral reconstruction of solar proton events.]
[In that paper, you took the variance expansion method, used in nuclear physics to analyze the angular distribution of fission fragments, and—in a groundbreaking move—applied it in reverse to the energy band fitting of coronal mass ejections.]
[Before you, no one had ever made such an application. Before you published, no other group had performed an independent verification.]
[And the sample you based your work on at the time was a mere six solar proton events from the previous eleven years.]
[Yet Dr. Li Dong’s sample today is the core anomaly filtered from eight full years of data from the Wukong Satellite, supplemented by the cross-validation of five independent baselines: Huairou, Zijin Mountain, Fengyun, Meridian, and INTERBALL.]
[That 1987 paper of yours was the start of a brilliant career that led to you receiving the Haier Prize, being elected to the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences, and eventually serving as the Chairman of the IAU’s 10th commission. That year, you were thirty-two years old.]
[This year, you are seventy.]
[I would like to ask, back when you presented that seminal work—slightly rough, yet filled with genius intuition—to your peers...]
[Did anyone in the entire academic world ever say to the thirty-two-year-old Richter, "You have disappointed us"?]
She typed the final question mark.
Then she thought for a moment, smiled, and clicked send.
The evening breeze blowing in from Lake Zurich made the window rattle softly.
Clara closed her laptop and walked out of her advisor Professor Bruner’s office.
She didn’t return to the master’s student dormitory, but instead walked around the main building and headed outside.
The row of gray granite on the main building’s facade was struck by the slanted rays of the setting sun, making its color appear warmer than it did at noon.
Clara had been here for two years.
In her first year as a master’s student, she had taken a train all the way from E?tv?s Loránd University in Hungary to register, and Professor Bruner had personally driven to the station to pick her up.
In her second year, she produced those two first-author papers.
’My third year...’
She smiled.
’There probably won’t be a third year.’
She walked slowly along the main building’s colonnade, from the relief sculpture at the entrance all the way to the memorial wall on the east side, which was engraved with names.
The wind lifted a lock of light-blonde hair by her ear.
’Goodbye, Zurich,’ she said softly to herself.
「The Master’s Student Dormitory.」
Clara returned to her room, placed her laptop on the desk, and began to pack.
She knew perfectly well that Professor Richter was the Chairman of the IAU’s 10th commission, with former students all over Europe. By posting that comment, she had essentially called out a commission chairman directly.
She had never counted how many of the university leaders at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich were Richter’s students, but she knew the number was definitely not small.
So, she could guess how things would likely play out.
She took a suitcase from the wardrobe, laid it flat on the bed, and began folding and packing the summer clothes from the top of her closet.
She didn’t regret it.
Because those were her true thoughts.
If she couldn’t even speak her mind, then she might as well give up on academia.
Just as she was folding the third shirt, there was a knock on her door.
’They’re here.’
Clara took a deep breath, put the shirt down, and went to open the door.
Professor Bruner was standing outside.
He wasn’t holding any documents, nor did he have a stern expression.
He was just holding a small, square tin box.
Clara froze.
She had imagined all the things Professor Bruner might say when he knocked on her door today, from the mildest, "I can no longer be your advisor," to the harshest, "Look at what a student you’ve become." She had rehearsed it all in her mind.
The only thing she hadn’t rehearsed was this scene.
"Professor..."
Professor Bruner gently pushed the tin box into her arms.
"My wife wanted you to have this."
Clara glanced down.
The lid of the tin box was printed with a familiar design: a thin, round biscuit with an engraved pattern.
A Tirggel, a Zurich honey biscuit.
It was something Zurich locals only baked themselves for holidays, made by pressing a honey-laced batter into a carved wooden mold to create a thin, patterned wafer.
Professor Bruner was a local.
Clara couldn’t remember which district his wife was from, but every year around Christmas, she would bake a large batch to share with his students.
The tin box was still warm.
"...Thank your wife for me."
Clutching the tin box, Clara suddenly felt her eyes sting.
Professor Bruner didn’t look at her. He took a couple of steps into her room and stretched.
"Alright, I’ll be heading back then?"
Just as he was about to turn, his gaze fell upon the half-open suitcase on the bed.
He paused.
"Clara."
He turned back around.
"You’re packing. Where are you going?"
Clara stood there, holding the tin box, her mouth open. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak.
In the end, she told Professor Bruner everything about the comment.
After Professor Bruner heard the story, he burst out laughing.
His laughter baffled Clara.
Before she could react, Professor Bruner pointed to the suitcase on the bed and waved his hand dismissively.
"Put that away."
"Huh?"
"Clara, Clara."
Professor Bruner sighed and pulled over the chair from her desk to sit down.
"Professor Richter isn’t a petty man."
He glanced around as if afraid of being overheard, then lowered his voice.
"Let me tell you something."
"Back when he and I were colleagues..."
"I got into a shouting match with him right in the middle of a conference."
Clara’s eyes widened.
...
’A shouting match?’
’Her own advisor got into a shouting match with an IAU commission chairman?’
Professor Bruner seemed to know what she was thinking and continued cheerfully.
"It was at a Heliophysics conference back in the nineties."
"I disagreed with his group’s statistics on the energy bands of coronal mass ejections, so I got in his face and argued with him."
"By the end, I was calling him paranoid, and he was calling me shallow. The entire hall was staring at us."
Professor Bruner leaned back in his chair, a nostalgic smile spreading across his face as he recalled the memory.
"That evening, he came to find me for a beer."
"He told me he had been wrong about the statistics earlier that day."
"He apologized to me."
Clara stood perfectly still, listening.
"Anyone who’s ever dealt with him knows."
"Richter is stern and academically demanding, but as long as you can make a sound argument..."
"he doesn’t mind you confronting him."
"And if you’re right..."
"he will apologize."
Professor Bruner looked at his student and smiled.
"So, you posting that comment... it’s not a big deal."
Clutching the Tirggel tin, Clara let out a huge sigh of relief.
"Professor... I thought I was going to be pushed out..."
Bruner: ???
’Push you out? Don’t you know your own personality??’
"Alright, don’t overthink it."
Professor Bruner waved his hand dismissively, then seemed to remember something.
"Oh, right."
"How did it go with that manuscript you submitted to *Nature*?"
Clara’s face fell again.
"It was rejected."
Professor Bruner was taken aback.
"That’s impossible."
"I read that manuscript from start to finish."
"Your method for handling that isotope background alone was good enough for *Nature*."
"It couldn’t have been rejected."
Clara could only tell him exactly what the rejection letter said about being "scooped."
Professor Bruner listened and nodded.
Scooped.
In the academic world, the term means that another group has produced highly overlapping work during the same period and either published faster or used a more thorough method.
The rejection letter will only say something like, "We regret to inform you that your manuscript has significant overlap with another manuscript accepted during the same period."
It sounds polite, but for the author on the receiving end, it’s even more painful than being told your work simply isn’t good enough.
After all, if your work isn’t good enough, you can still improve it.
But you can’t recover from being scooped.
This sort of thing isn’t rare in top-tier journals like *Nature*, *Science*, or *Physical Review Letters*. It happens every year, sometimes several times a year.
...
"Clara."
Professor Bruner stood up from the chair and patted her on the shoulder.
"Don’t take being scooped to heart. It happens."
After saying this, he prepared to leave. At the door, he glanced back at Clara one more time.
"Put... the suitcase away."
"Have a couple of the Tirggel from the tin tonight."
"My wife added hazelnut flour. They’re quite fragrant."
The door closed.
Clara stood in her room for a long while, clutching the small, still-warm tin box.

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