The Third Player at the Board

"Professor Weinberg, your lecture today was wonderful!"

"Professor Weinberg, please give us more homework!"

"Professor Weinberg, are you still looking for a boyfriend?"

Hearing the students below chatter noisily,

Weinberg, who was organizing his lecture notes, simply smiled calmly. He quickly packed up his things, waved to the students, and left the classroom.

Once he was outside the teaching building,

Weinberg chose a relatively quiet path, as usual, and headed back to his office to call it a day.

Looking at the sparse leaves on the trees along the path in the cold weather, Weinberg suddenly felt a pang of emotion.

It's been almost a year already.

Last October, he had just become a teaching assistant at Berkeley. He had hardly any academic standing in the world of physics, and he had not even fully settled on his area of specialization.

He had tried studying quantum field theory, pion scattering, and even infrared photons.

By his own estimation,

he would have considered it a considerable success to be promoted from teaching assistant to lecturer within five years.

But he had never expected that

last year, Mr. Zhao Zhongyao of Huaxia would publish a paper on the Proto-hadron Model, proposing a theoretical framework that stunned the global physics community and sent countless physicists into a state of obsession.

Weinberg was one of them.

And his enthusiasm for the research wasn't all. Inspired by the paper, he had also formally settled on his research direction and achieved a pretty good minor result in quantum field theory.

On top of that, when Yang returned to Huaxia, he took four Huaxian physics professors from the Berkeley campus with him. So, on the recommendation of his advisor, the renowned physicist Sam Treiman, Weinberg smoothly became an associate professor at Berkeley.

Just like that, a year