The Exhibition Ends

At that thought, Wang Tong swallowed hard and said to Li Qingzhao:

"Scholar, was this also a record found in the Yongle Encyclopedia?"

Li Qingzhao nodded.

"That's right. It also came from documents of the Imperial City Department."

As she spoke, a trace of emotion entered Li Qingzhao's voice.

Anyone who had read Walking into the Unscientific should know.

Xu Yun had already discovered traces of these two devices during his Old Su instance, and had logically demonstrated that they were plausible:

The rotating mechanism for the armillary sphere that Old Su had tinkered with, along with the "Tianheng" system, were the prototypes of modern observatory transit clocks and modern mechanical clocks. Joseph Needham had personally assessed Old Su:

"Su Song combined clockwork with an armillary sphere used for observation, achieving complete success in principle. He preceded the European Robert Hooke by six centuries and Fang Hefei by seven."

The balance spring, the very core of a mechanical clock, had been invented by Old Su as well. That was entirely plausible.

But on the other hand.

Only Xu Yun himself knew what he had experienced in the instance. Without physical evidence, no matter how reasonable your theory was, there was no way to gain public acceptance.

Otherwise, inventions wouldn't need physical proof at all. As long as something made logical sense, people could simply declare that it existed—wouldn't that lead to utter chaos in no time?

What Xu Yun could never have expected was this:

The two ancient scientific achievements he had thought he could never prove on Old Su's behalf had both emerged with the discovery of the Yongle Encyclopedia.

Weng Tong and the others had not only found relevant records in documents from the Imperial City Department, but had even discovered complete blueprints for a self-priming pump. It