Just seconds after Little Ox knocked on the door, a man's voice came from inside. It was Hooke:
"Come in."
Little Ox took a deep breath and pushed the door open, Xu Yun following behind him.
Hooke's guest room had a bedroom and a living room. This setup, which most hotels in later centuries would call a suite and charge a fortune for, was standard in the seventeenth century.
The bedroom door was already closed. Hooke sat at the desk in the living room, facing the entrance, smoking a pipe with one hand and apparently leafing through a book with the other.
When he saw the two of them, he didn't get up to greet them. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, looking quite comfortable.
"Newton, it's only been... oh, four days, right? Why have you come all the way here already?
Couldn't you get in touch with Barrow? Or did you solve the problem?"
There was unmistakable scorn in Hooke's final question. He looked down on them, his gaze deep and probing.
As far as he was concerned, Little Ox had come to tell him he couldn't get in touch with Barrow.
Four days clearly wasn't enough time for a letter to be sent and delivered, and if Barrow were somewhere around Lincolnshire, he would certainly have come with Little Ox to visit Hooke today.
Hooke knew Barrow fairly well. He had a tiny bit of a sense of responsibility, and even if he couldn't solve the problem, he wouldn't send his student to take the fall for him.
So there was obviously only one possibility:
After returning home and searching around, Little Ox had realized he no longer had his teacher's address. Or perhaps he'd been told that mail delivery had been suspended because of the epidemic. In the end, he had no choice but to come and break the news in person.
That gesture also implied something else:
He'd tried to work out the problem but was powerless to solve it.
As for the possibility that Little Ox had solved it—
Hooke would sooner believe someone had derived the specific formula for Universal Gravitation during his lifetime than believe a young man could solve his problem.
Even if he was the first student in fifteen years to receive reduced tuition at Trinity College, it was still impossible!
Just as Hooke was wondering how best to mock Little Ox, the latter's voice reached his ears, carrying a hint of something hard to place.
"That's right, Mr. Hooke. I solved it."
"I know. It would indeed be difficult for someone with your abilities. Wait?!"
Hooke had been about to keep right on mocking him, but halfway through his sentence, he realized something was wrong. His smile froze, and he stood there, dumbfounded.
He remained stunned for more than ten seconds before suddenly sitting bolt upright and fixing Little Ox with a hard stare.
"What did you just say?"
Little Ox shrugged, pulled out a manuscript he'd already prepared, and held it out to him.
"The solution is here, Mr. Hooke—assuming you can understand it."
"Utter nonsense! That's impossible!"
Hooke swore, then snatched the manuscript from Little Ox with no regard for propriety. He spread it out on the desk and began reading.
"Specific vibration frequencies correspond to specific curves. Differentiate with respect to the coordinates."
"The formula for linear strain in an element: Σa=(Σx+Σy)+(Σx-Σy)cos2α+yxcos2α. Brilliant, brilliant!"
"d(△l)=εxdxcosα+εydysinα-γxydxsinα
εα=d(△l)/ds
=(εx+εy)/2+{(εx-εy)/2}cos2α-{(γxy)/2}sin2α"
"Horizontal displacement S=ε1, and then... hmm?"
As he worked through the calculations, Hooke's pen suddenly stopped at a particular point.
He drew a line beneath "→0" and asked Little Ox:
"What does this mean?"
Since this touched on the core of his current research, Little Ox wasn't about to reveal it casually. Hooke might be narrow-minded and quick-tempered, but he was also very shrewd. Hooke had already been tricked once when they were working out Universal Gravitation.
So Little Ox casually cleared his throat.
"It's just an abbreviation for 'approaches.' You can think of it as a decreasing trend of order minus one.
"Mr. Hooke, you can plot the stress distribution along the centerline at a given height. As displacement approaches the load-bearing edge, you'll find that the three stress fields converge at a point twice the distance from the load boundary."
Little Ox sounded quite relaxed, with a knowing air about him.
But his words actually contained a great deal of crucial information, especially the latter half.
That statement touched on Saint-Venant's Theorem, a foundational theorem proposed by the Gallic scientist Saint-Venant in 1855—almost two hundred years in the future.
But after Xu Yun had dressed it up a bit, it became the work of the all-around genius Han Li.
Saint-Venant had used a great many basic concepts involving infinitesimals when deriving the problems of zero-force systems and strain energy density. As a result, there was a subtle equivalence between the two, which could be used to explain the concept of infinitesimals in terms of measurement.
Anyway, before the generalized Hooke's Law was proposed, no one knew what an equivalent force system was.
They could always attribute the convergence of the stress fields to a positional phenomenon. Little Ox claiming he'd created a new mathematical tool might attract a lot of resentment, but saying he'd observed a phenomenon in an experiment that followed a certain pattern wouldn't raise any objections, not even from Hooke.
Of course,
that was also because Hooke's problem only involved a second-order Taylor expansion.
Apart from some calculations, most of the process didn't require calculus as a mathematical tool. It was enough to understand the concepts.
So, after Little Ox had exploited a loophole two hundred years ahead of its time to conceal the true meaning of infinitesimals, Hooke quickly worked out a new result.
"With ρx and ρy unchanged, is this an elastic force within a logical framework? Wait, no!"
As he worked through the problem, Hooke suddenly looked up.
"What about the stress-strain relationship? How do you derive the linear strain of a medium occupying space?"
Watching Hooke look as if he were about to lose his mind, like someone who'd just seen the author stop a story at a cliffhanger, Little Ox spread his hands and replied innocently:
"Sorry, Mr. Hooke. Professor Barrow only taught me this much.
"If you want to learn what comes next, you can visit Trinity College and ask him yourself once the epidemic is over.
"Given his temperament, I'm sure he'll patiently explain it to you."
"In your dreams!"
As soon as Little Ox finished speaking, Hooke sprang to his feet. His face looked terrifying in the shadowy room.
"Make me ask him for help? Not until the end of the world!
"You little brat, don't think solving this little problem makes you so impressive. One day, you'll regret it!
"You'll regret becoming Barrow's student! You'll regret saying this today!"
Watching Hooke fly into a helpless rage, Xu Yun shook his head slightly.
Good thing this was real life. If they'd been in a game, and he'd sent Hooke a question mark at that point, Hooke would probably have smashed his computer in a fit of rage.
Beside Xu Yun, Little Ox wasn't angry for once. Instead, he pursed his lips in a thoroughly irritating manner.
"Mr. Hooke, think whatever you like. I won't disturb you any longer. Make yourself at home."
With that, he took Xu Yun and left the room.
When they reached the door, Little Ox seemed to suddenly remember something. He gave an exaggerated "Oh!" and said to Xu Yun:
"Fat Fish, do you know where Teacher Barrow is now?"
After spending several days with him, Xu Yun had gotten to know this great forefather a little. Though he didn't understand why Little Ox had brought this up, he played along.
"No idea."
"Ah, Teacher's always been like that. He likes wandering all over the place. But with his wife by his side, I'm sure he's living a very happy life."
"His wife?"
"Yeah. You didn't know? His wife is Eloise Bryce, a great beauty. She was also a famous scholar at Oxford University. One year, she faced Teacher in an exchange competition between Cambridge and Oxford. Teacher came back from being down three to nothing and swept the match. After that, she started pursuing him."
Before Little Ox could finish, a heavy object fell over in the room behind them, followed by a voice, on the verge of tears with frustration:
"Get out!!!!!"
Before you continue