I Want to Try Guiding Newton

After evening self-study let out, in the boys' dormitory of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

"Dong, come play a few rounds with me! This marksman is such trash!"

Chen Yue sat on his bed, shouting at Li Dong's bunk in frustration.

Li Dong, however, ignored him, only letting out a silly "Hehehe" at his phone.

Chen Yue turned to Liu Liang, who was working through practice problems beside him.

"What's wrong with Dong? Is he possessed?"

Liu Liang looked up from his English vocabulary notebook.

"No idea. He's been grinning like an idiot ever since he got back after class. It's been nearly half an hour."

Naturally, neither of them knew what Li Dong was laughing about.

Ever since learning that he was certain to receive the twenty-thousand-yuan prize, Li Dong had been in an extremely excited state.

Twenty thousand yuan!

He had never seen that much money in his life.

Though he had yet to receive the enormous sum, Director Zheng had pounded his chest and guaranteed that it would arrive within two weeks!

Li Dong was currently browsing shopping apps for a birthday gift for his mother, Li Qin.

"Huawei's Mate series looks pretty classy, and the battery life is solid too. I just don't know whether I'll be able to get one..."

As he browsed, he mentally calculated how to divide up the money.

In the end, he decided that once the money arrived, he would take his mother to a physical store and let her choose one herself and try it out.

"With the rest... I'll get myself a better laptop too. After all, I need to study Python programming and write that inventory management system. I can't do that without a decent productivity tool."

Li Dong had arranged everything clearly in his mind.

He already liked shopping, and this time he could actually buy things while shopping. Aside from studying, nothing could be faster than that.

Wow! Other than studying, that was simply the happiest thing in the world!

"Hey, Dong, are you coming or not? The ranked team is waiting for you!"

Chen Yue was still urging him.

Li Dong glanced at him and sneered inwardly.

Honor of Kings?

To hell with Honor of Kings. I've defected!

I, Li Dong, will forever be loyal to studying!

"Not playing. I still need to study!"

Li Dong righteously refused Chen Yue.

Thinking of that, Li Dong felt that he owed it all to those lovely big shots in the Azure Dragon Study Group.

"I shouldn't be so stingy. Should I send some red packets in the group to thank them?"

He had never sent red packets in that WeChat group before. He did not even know whether he could send them successfully, so this was the perfect chance to test it out.

So he opened the Azure Dragon Study Group chat.

The moment he entered, his phone lagged.

The screen was filled with unread messages, and the ID [Isaac Newton] was frantically @-mentioning him.

[Isaac Newton]: @Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems, are you there?

[Isaac Newton]: I have a question I'd like to discuss with you.

Li Dong froze for a moment.

Hadn't Newton been busy with his "internal combustion engine" these past few days, trying to set off the Second Industrial Revolution ahead of schedule? Why did he suddenly have a question to discuss with him?

Li Dong quickly scrolled up through the chat history and finally found out what Newton wanted to discuss.

As the internal combustion engine prototype progressed, industrialization in Newton's time and space had begun accelerating, and then they encountered a fatal problem.

Insufficient machining precision.

To manufacture more precise mechanical components, they needed more advanced optical measuring instruments.

That happened to fall right within Newton's field of expertise.

Newton was the founder of geometrical Optics, so he immediately began improving plans for the industrial mass production of optical instruments such as microscopes and telescopes.

[Isaac Newton]: Sir, I have recently gathered the finest glass craftsmen in all of London and attempted to create a refracting microscope suitable for industrial mass production.

I know that white-light dispersion is the root cause of chromatic aberration, and I used reflecting telescopes to solve the chromatic aberration problem in astronomical observation. But close-range microscopic measurement cannot use a reflective structure and can only follow the refractive route.

We have removed nearly all impurities from the glass, ground nearly perfect spherical lenses, and corrected spherical aberration. Yet once the magnification increases, the edges of the image still become blurred, and chromatic aberration cannot be eliminated!

[Isaac Newton]: I have tried countless mineral filters, but the light loss is too great and the monochromaticity is extremely poor. They simply cannot be used for actual factory measurements. I have a faint feeling that perhaps our line of thought was wrong from the very beginning?

The old Li Dong might have immediately started searching for a solution, but now he wanted to give it a try.

Could he truly hold a Dialogue with these big shots?

Li Dong's mind began racing.

He had already worked through college physics. While this knowledge was not particularly profound, it had all grown from the shoulders of giants—and Newton was one of those giants.

The craftsmen were trying to eliminate chromatic and spherical aberration through flawless materials. In classical geometrical Optics, that was indeed one possible path.

But they had overlooked the most fundamental thing.

[Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems]: Sir Newton, you seem overly fixated on the perfection of the medium, while overlooking the nature of light itself.

[Isaac Newton]: The nature of light itself? You mean...

Li Dong swiftly distilled the core concepts of wave Optics from college physics.

[Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems]: Light in nature is polychromatic light, mixed from various wavelengths.

You have conducted prism dispersion experiments yourself, so you should understand clearly that lenses have different refractive indices for light of different wavelengths.

[Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems]: As long as you use polychromatic light, the focal lengths can never be completely identical because of the differing refractive indices, and chromatic aberration will always exist.

Even if the craftsmen polished the lenses into God's own masterpieces, they could not change the physical laws of light itself.

[Isaac Newton]: !!!

It was not that Newton did not know this. He had merely fallen into a habitual pattern of thinking: if the imaging had a problem, the lenses had to be optimized.

[Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems]: So if you truly want to see the details of the microscopic world clearly, what needs to change is not the lenses.

[Currently Grinding Senior-Year Problems]: It is the beam of light entering them.

The group fell silent for a full two minutes.

Then Newton sent a long string of messages.

[Isaac Newton]: A pure monochromatic light source! So that was it! I had been blinded by the laws of refraction in geometrical Optics all along.

Then Newton vanished...

Li Dong: ...

Where was the stuff? Where was the red packet?

How shameless. He had used Newton's own knowledge to guide Newton, and still wanted a red packet.

And he had already forgotten that he had come to send red packets himself.

After waiting for a long time without seeing any response from Newton, Li Dong gave up.

"Though there was no reward..."

The feeling of speaking as an equal with a scientific giant from history—and even standing on a giant's shoulders to point him in the right direction—was simply...

It was like knowledge shooting into his brain, sending a surge of pleasure through his skull.

"That felt incredible!"

Li Dong checked the time in the top-right corner of his phone. Without realizing it, it was almost midnight.

"No, I need to sleep now. I still have to get up early tomorrow to memorize classical texts."

He casually closed the group chat, pulled up his blanket, and closed his eyes.

A few minutes later, he suddenly opened them.

"Eh? Didn't I say I was going to send red packets in the group?"

"Forget it, forget it. I'm too sleepy..."

Li Dong slept soundly and without a care in the world, but that night in Jiangcheng, some people did not sleep so peacefully.

At the home of Liu Limin, the dean of studies at Jiangcheng No. 6 High School.

He was still in front of his computer, looking at the list of students advancing to the Huaxuan Cup semifinals.

"Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, Li Dong..."