Chapter 286 - 266: Intuition

Chapter 286: Chapter 266: Intuition

Li Dong honestly didn’t know how to put his intuition into words.

Finally, he forced himself to speak.

"This direction... I don’t think it’s right."

"This approach of working backward with mathematics—it’s the wrong one."

The PhD students in the room were all stunned for a moment.

The results from the "mathematical reverse-engineering" approach were considered the most promising path forward among the dozen or so SX-STM research groups worldwide.

For the past year or two, it had been universally acknowledged as the optimal solution.

And now Li Dong had just dismissed it out of hand.

Lu Heng subconsciously glanced over at Su Yanqing.

Su Yanqing was also taken aback for a second, but she didn’t interject.

Guo Han opened his mouth, but ultimately swallowed whatever he was going to say.

They were all PhDs.

And of course, they had their own judgment.

If anyone else had said it, they probably would have dismissed it as the ramblings of an amateur without a second thought.

But these were Li Dong’s words...

Even if they didn’t believe him, no one dared to challenge him.

They could only look to Wu Kai.

They would see what their professor had to say.

Wu Kai was silent for several seconds.

He didn’t immediately refute Li Dong. Instead, he asked,

"What are your thoughts?"

Li Dong nodded, then shook his head.

"Right now... I can’t explain it clearly."

"It’s just a gut feeling."

He felt a little embarrassed even as he said it.

He looked up at Wu Kai.

"Teacher Wu."

"This reverse-engineering approach using math that we’re on now... who came up with it first?"

The question was a bit sudden.

Wu Kai thought for a moment before replying seriously.

"No single person came up with it."

"It’s the path everyone naturally converged on over time."

"On the chemical synthesis side, we’ve tried every trick in the book."

"Vacuum, cryogenics, shielding, electronics—we’ve pushed everything to the industry’s limits."

"On the engineering side, we’ve switched the tip material from tungsten to PtIr, added an SiO₂ insulation layer, plated it with gold for grounding, and even milled the tip face with a focused ion beam—we’ve tried everything we could think of."

"In the end, everyone realized it seemed like math was the only thing left."

At this point,

Wu Kai paused for a moment before continuing.

"You’ve probably heard the principle our old university president mentioned years ago: ’You can only walk forward if you can see the shoes.’"

"Right now, the only ’shoe’ we can get our hands on is mathematics."

"You say it’s wrong..."

Wu Kai said, looking at Li Dong.

"You have a new idea, but you can’t articulate it right now, and you can’t provide any evidence to back up your judgment."

"That’s the same as having no idea at all. So..."

"We will continue to move forward with the original plan."

"Do you understand what I mean?"

Li Dong nodded. ’I was too hasty today. I spoke up before I’d even sorted out my own thoughts. Of course Wu Kai wasn’t going to scrap this entire path just because of a gut feeling. He’s responsible for nearly a hundred million in research funding, not to mention a whole group of PhDs and postdocs. For me to just say, "This direction is wrong, but I don’t know why, and I don’t know what the right direction is"... It’s a testament to Wu Kai’s good temper that he didn’t just tell me to get lost.’

So, Li Dong stopped talking about his "gut feeling."

"Teacher Wu, I understand."

"Let’s proceed in the current direction for now."

"As for my idea, I’ll work on it more on my own."

"Once I’ve figured it out, I’ll come back and talk to you."

Wu Kai looked at him, his expression softening.

He gave a firm nod.

"Good."

"Now that’s more like it."

Only then did the PhD students in the room quietly breathe a sigh of relief.

Outside.

From the distance came the faint sound of carts from the logistics department.

It was a few boxes of new equipment being moved down from the first floor of the North Building.

Wu Kai clapped Li Dong on the shoulder.

"That’s all for today."

"Go with Xiaosu and the others and run through the equipment inspection process."

"Get acquainted with these chunks of metal in our lab, one by one."

"We’ll talk about everything else later."

Li Dong nodded.

He walked over toward Su Yanqing. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

As he passed by Zhang Yan,

she turned sideways to make room for him and gave him a wink.

Her voice was low, just loud enough for the two of them to hear.

"East God."

"That was really something. To be honest, I also feel like something’s not right with it."

Li Dong was taken aback when he heard this.

When he turned to ask Zhang Yan about it, she was already busy tidying up.

The people in the lab slowly dispersed to their workstations.

Someone pressed the initialization button on an instrument, and its power supply emitted a soft BEEP.

Wu Kai’s research group was officially in motion.

Li Dong stood before one of the newly arrived instruments.

He looked down at the English nameplate on the instrument’s surface, which hadn’t been peeled off yet.

The voice in his head was still speaking.

’The direction is wrong!’