"Old Cat, Mai Dong … If you were asked to list the ten scientists who had the most profound impact on human history, which ten would you choose?" Tang Yue sat in front of the desk with a piece of paper under his hand and a pen in his hand.
Since the beginning of the recording of human history, Kunlun Station, which was originally a scientific research station for the study of natural sciences, had almost become a social science research institute.
"Isaac Newton."
Tomcat was rapidly typing on the keyboard. It didn't even look up as it muttered, "… Galois was no doubt a young genius. He could be considered one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, he died young … This warns us not to compete with others in a field we aren't good at. If Galois and that officer had chosen to compete in solving equations instead of shooting each other, we can foresee that not only would Galois have won the beauty, but he would also have died of old age …"
"Albert Einstein!" Mai Dong answered.
"Galileo Galilei," Old Cat continued.
"Nicolas Cage, no, Copernicus!" Mai Dong said again.
"Charles Darwin."
"Doesn't Tesla count?" Tang Yue asked. "Nikola Tesla."
"When you mentioned Tesla, I thought you were referring to Elon Musk, the founder of the Tesla Motors Group."
Old Cat shook his whiskers. "Nikola Tesla may be a unique genius, but he is not enough to be called one of the ten greatest scientists in human history. You can put Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, and a lot of other people in front of him."
"Some people say he is a god."
"There are no gods in academia," Old Cat said. "There are only lunatics."
"And Max Planck!" Mai Dong thought of another famous person.
"Miss Mai Dong, such a ranking is actually meaningless. I don't understand why you all like rankings so much. Why do you have to come up with something like 'Big Ten', 'Big Four', and 'Big Three'? You like to divide everything into the inner and outer circles. The eyes of outsiders forcibly separate the whole. You have to know that separation is the beginning of discrimination."
Old Cat shook his head.
"Max Planck is great, of course, but equally great are Niels Bohr, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Louis de Broglie. You can point out any one of them in the photo taken at the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927, and they are all the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, or even the history of mankind."
Tang Yue scratched his head. Liking the rankings had become his mindset. Not only him, but Mai Dong and the majority of China people also had this mindset.
"We have been ranked since we were young. We have been ranked since we were young."
Tang Yue said, "Old Cat, you've never taken the college entrance exam. We're all ranked among the hundreds of thousands of candidates in the province. Not only are the students ranked, but the schools are also ranked. Tsinghua University is the first, followed by the five schools in Huadong, the C9 Alliance. In the past, there were 985 and 211. Later on, there was something called Double First Class.
"What about you?" Old Cat glanced at him.
"My undergraduate university is very ordinary. It used to be 211, and then it became Double First Class," Tang Yue replied. "I also did my master's at an undergraduate university. It's kind of a diploma."
"Education is really the field with the most serious involution in China."
Tomcat sighed. "When you draw a circle around yourself, thinking that you're different, you're actually isolating yourself and sealing yourself in."
"But this is also a characteristic of China." Mai Dong smiled.
Old Cat did not say anything and continued to bury his head in the history of mathematics.
He had just finished writing about the life of Évariste Galois. Next, he had to record about the founder of group theory, Niels Abel.
There was a long list of glorious names behind Abel.
Henri Poincaré. Without him, there would be no theory of relativity.
Georg Cantor. Yes, the Cantor from the Cantor Collection.
Bernhard Riemann. Riemann's hypothesis had not been solved until the disappearance of the earth.
David Hilbert, the uncrowned king of mathematics.
Hermann Minkowski, Einstein's teacher.
Old Cat did not necessarily record these people in chronological order. It wrote down who it thought of first, so many more famous mathematicians had been recorded and archived. The names of people like Archimedes, Gauss, Euler, Lagrange, Gödel, Neumann, and Hardy had long been lying in the Kunlun Station's hard drive, reflecting the brilliance of the other brilliant stars in human history.
Tang Yue turned on the computer and connected it to the space station's survey telescope.
He continued to observe the comet.
The Kunlun Station and the space station continued to track Comet Old Cat Mai I and collect enough initial data so that the computer could deduce its orbit. The easiest part of this task was the calculation, but the most difficult part was the data collection. In the past, when observational methods were not developed enough, it took decades to deduce the orbit of a comet, and even hundreds of years to find records from ancient books.
The Dawn module of the Joint Space Station was destroyed, and Old Cat Tang Yue had lost most of its long-range observation methods, so it could only drag the time.
The survey telescope took pictures every half an hour, so the brightness changes of Comet Old Cat -Tang Mai I were not visible, but when Tang Yue juxtaposed the many pictures together, he could detect the comet's movement. At this time, it had already taken shape. In the telescope's pictures, he could make out the faintly glowing head and tail of the comet. According to the computer's calculations, the comet had already passed the orbit of Jupiter and was moving towards the orbit of Mars at an extremely high speed.
As Comet Old Cat Mai I continued to approach the sun, the gravitational pull on it would become stronger and stronger, and its speed would increase.
Tang Yue stared at the pictures on the monitor and imagined the celestial body moving rapidly through the void. The evaporated water vapor and carbon dioxide spewing out did not look like a tail, but more like the exhaust of a rocket engine. Behind it was Jupiter, which was so huge that it could not be seen. The red spot on the surface of Jupiter was slowly rotating, and the turbid atmosphere stirred up violent lightning and storms like a giant eye.
"Tang Yue, where is Grothendieck … Tang Yue?"
Tang Yue was startled and woke up from his imagination.
"What?"
"Alexander Grothendieck's information," Old Cat said. "Where did you put it?"
"It's still on this hard drive." Tang Yue took out the hard drive from the drawer, put it on the table, and pushed it to Old Cat.
"Don't be in a daze. What are you looking at?
That comet? "Old Cat glanced at him and then at the monitor.
Tang Yue nodded. "You said that this thing won't hit Mars, right?"
"Of course." Old Cat's expression was a little strange. "The probability of it hitting Mars is basically zero …"
"Ding!" A sound rang out.
A pop-up window suddenly popped up on the monitor, indicating that the calculation task was completed.
Old Cat and Tang Yue turned their heads.
The workstation indicated that it had completed the calculation of the orbit of Comet Old Cat -Tang Mai I, and it showed the results on the monitor.
It was completed so quickly?
Old Cat was a little surprised. It thought that it would take two more days.
The man and the cat saw a blue arc against the dark background. This was the estimated orbit of the comet.
It originated from a white dot, which was obviously the comet.
It ended in a red circle with the words MARS on the side.
There was also a small box.
In the box was bold English in red: WARNING: IMPACT!
Old Cat was stunned. Its face slowly twisted like it was in slow motion. It looked like an old general on a stage full of flags.