Li Dong said seriously.
"Neither. This is something I have to do!"
"Professor."
"Let me ask you a question."
"Let’s assume this whole model of mine eventually runs to completion, and it passes every single test."
"In my Letter, what if the final t_onset I give you is a specific date, not a distribution?"
"Not ’a high probability of occurring within the next ten years,’ not ’estimated to be around a certain date, plus or minus three weeks,’ and not a mean value with error bars."
"A date, or no date."
"One or the other."
"Would you believe it?"
Richter’s expression slowly turned cold.
"...You’re insane."
"Why am I insane?"
"Because we don’t talk like that in astrophysics!" Richter slammed a hand onto his knee. He was having trouble staying in his squat.
"Kid, people in our line of work always provide a probability density, an event rate, a confidence interval. Nobody just submits a date!"
"That’s because what was provided before wasn’t a phase."
Li Dong replied instantly.
"Professor, all your previous forecasts were predicting the mean value of some kind of ’intensity’—energy, flux, magnetic fields. That kind of thing naturally comes with error bars."
"I’m not forecasting intensity."
"I’m forecasting the exact moment a phase variable crosses zero."
"A phase-crossing is a mathematical event, not a statistical one."
"It either happens on that day, or it doesn’t."
"There are no error bars to speak of."
"You son of a bitch!"
When Richter let that curse fly, Li Dong laughed inwardly, a little uncharitably.
’Well now... This member of the German National Academy of Sciences, the current President of Division X of the IAU, actually curses in a mix of English and German.’
"Kid."
Richter stared at him.
"And what if nothing happens on the date you submit?"
"Then my entire paper is falsified."
Li Dong said.
"Falsified on the very day. The entire framework will collapse."
"Your entire academic career will be over."
"That’s my own business."
"It is not your own business!" Richter roared.
"Dong, if you hang a date like that in Nature, and all the satellite operators, power grid dispatchers, and subsea cable managers in the world schedule their drills according to that date, and then nothing happens..."
"The next time a real forecast comes out, no one will believe it."
"You’re not just gambling with your own academic career, you’re gambling with the credibility of the entire field of space weather forecasting!"
"That’s because all the previous forecasts had error bars, so they could get away with it!" Li Dong’s voice rose as well.
"Old man, take a look at that sketch."
He pointed to the row of five numbers on the ground.
"2.2, 6.7, 11.2, 14.0, 18.5. The shortest interval between these five points in time is three months, the longest is seven."
"If you state the t_onset in open-ended terms, for example, ’a phase-crossing sometime in the next eighteen months’..."
"The satellite operators won’t know whether to run their safe-mode drills based on the 2.2-month mark or the 18.5-month mark."
"Which month should the power grids schedule their phased islanding for?"
"How many times should the subsea cables be isolated?"
"Old man."
"If you don’t lock this down, the whole goddamn world will be left in confusion!"
Richter said, bracing one hand on his knee.
"I’ve been doing this my whole life, and I’ve never heard anyone talk like this..."
Li Dong didn’t back down an inch.
"That’s because a mathematician has never done this before!"
Both their faces were flushed red in that moment.
Richter was breathing heavily. He was a man in his seventies, and after squatting on the ground shouting at a kid in his early twenties for nearly ten minutes, his body was finally starting to protest.
Li Dong was the same. His legs were numb from squatting, and the stone had left two red marks on his palm.
He raised his hand and threw the stone far away.
The stone clattered as it rolled into a pile of dead leaves at the base of the beech tree.
The two of them remained squatting on the concrete, staring at each other for several seconds.
Then, at almost the same time, they both started to laugh.
Richter was the first to stand, using his knees for support, and let out a long breath.
"Let’s go."
"The data is in my office."
Li Dong stood up as well.
He glanced down at the patch of concrete, which was now a mess of scratches from the stone.
In a way, the first draft of this yet-to-be-written Nature Article, along with its yet-to-be-penned Methods section, had been sketched with a stone on the concrete floor of a winter courtyard in G?ttingen, Germany.
...
The two of them walked back to the main corridor together.
Li Dong followed behind Richter, whose back was still ramrod straight.
In the corridor, they occasionally passed a few researchers hurrying by.
A female postdoc carrying a laptop brushed past them, took three more steps, and then subconsciously glanced back, her expression a little strange.
Another, a lab technician pushing a small cart, stopped in his tracks. His gaze rested on Li Dong for a second, then shifted to Richter, before he silently pushed the cart away.
Li Dong could guess what they were thinking.
’It’s probably been a long time since a young man who looks like an undergrad was personally escorted through the main corridor by the director.’
Richter’s office was at the end of the corridor.
The nameplate simply read Heinrich Richter.
He pushed the door open to reveal a simply furnished office.
A desk, a wall of wooden bookshelves, an old-fashioned coffee machine.
On the windowsill next to the coffee machine sat a yellowed photograph. In the photo, two people in institute work clothes were standing in front of an early-model inversion device.
Li Dong didn’t recognize the younger one, but the older man was clearly a young Richter.
Michael.
Li Dong silently repeated the name in his mind.
Richter walked behind his desk, took a USB drive from a drawer, and tossed it to Li Dong from two meters away.
Li Dong reached out and caught it.
"Don’t let it get out," Richter said. "If it leaks, I’ll be in trouble."
"I know." Li Dong nodded.
In that moment, neither of them, surprisingly, exchanged any more pleasantries.
Li Dong tucked the USB drive into an inner pocket.
...
Li Dong didn’t stay in G?ttingen for long.
He spent one night in a small inn by the beech forest, with Old Zhang and Old Wu in the room next door. Early the next morning, they boarded a flight home together.
He wasn’t racing for a plane ticket; he was racing against time.
...
「Yan University.」
Two days later, Li Dong was sitting in front of the computer in his dorm room.
He first ran an MD5 checksum on the data from the USB drive to confirm it wasn’t corrupted, then split it into two copies.
One copy, the original archives of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center’s extended magnetic classification for beta-gamma and higher active regions, he kept for himself.
The other he packaged and sent to Clara in Zurich via an encrypted channel.
The SDO/HMI high-cadence Doppler intermediate products and the Hinode/SOT level-2 vector magnetograms from Clara’s side arrived even earlier than she had said they would. By the morning of the third day, they started trickling into the small server Li Dong had set up himself.
The line of work with Chang Jin was also progressing more smoothly than expected.
The full-disk vector magnetograms from Huairou, the daily sunspot longitude tables from the Purple Platform, the low-frequency envelopes of the in-orbit proton flux from Fengyun-2 and -3’s SEM, and the geomagnetic H-component from the Meridian Project had all undergone preprocessing by Chang Jin’s team.
The tape archives from Interball had also completed processing at the Russian Side’s IKI and had been sent over, separated into channels by baseline.
The results from the first phase extraction looked clean.
On his computer, Li Dong ran an offset calibration, checking these five independent baselines against the main SDO/HMI data stream.
That sketch he had left on the concrete floor of the courtyard in G?ttingen, from this moment on, began to be filled in, box by box, with real numbers.
The time in the bottom right corner of the screen jumped to 4:00 a.m.
He leaned back in his chair, rubbed his sore eyes, and reached out to turn off the monitor.
Outside the window, the sky had not yet begun to lighten.
He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, but an image he would probably never forget for the rest of his life floated up in his mind.
A bare beech tree.
A sunless German sky.
A seventy-year-old man whose back was always straight.

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