Guide to traveling through the Northern Song Dynasty

Chapter 1158 Postscript 14: Return from the Round-the-World Voyage

Kaifeng, Imperial College.

Zhu Shirong finished his lecture and strolled around the campus back to his office.

He is the sixth-generation grandson of Emperor Taizu, and is from the Wangchuan Valley lineage. His grandfather's generation did not have a title. His grandfather was born out of wedlock, his father was also born out of wedlock, and even his great-grandfather was only a low-level title.

To put it nicely, he has the status of a distant relative of the royal family.

To put it bluntly, his bloodline is so distant that no one would gossip about him being the prime minister.

This is good, there is no danger.

Two of the direct royal family members passed down by Taizu were killed during the Dingtai Dynasty, all because they colluded with officials to engage in commercial monopoly, bullying the market and not even wanting to pay taxes.

Of course, the real reason they were punished was that they wanted to get involved in the Shaanxi section of the railway to the Western Regions, and to achieve their goal, they secretly obstructed the official railway construction.

Emperor Dingtai was tolerant enough of them, and the final result was to strip the two of their titles, and their descendants were not allowed to inherit the titles.

Today, Wangchuan Valley is still there, and many untitled clans live there.

But the academic center status of Wangchuan Valley has long been gone.

All the land in the valley and tens of thousands of acres of land outside the valley have been annexed by clans one after another. Those farmers in and outside the valley have all become tenants of many untitled clans.

There is no need to forcibly split them up, because those clans have already separated.

As the number of descendants increases, they will continue to separate in the future, and those lands will be divided into more fragments.

Each of them has no title, and they have become landlords of all sizes, and the court does not need to allocate funds to support them.

There are also a few motivated people who became Jinshi officials and art officials and moved away early, or took their money to do business in other places, anyway, they are unwilling to stay in their hometown and waste their years.

"Sir, a letter from Luoyang." The assistant held a large envelope.

Zhu Shirong took it and opened it. He didn't pay much attention to it at first, but he suddenly sat up straight, put down the letter and picked up the attached paper.

This paper was a copy.

Hydrogen and oxygen were named as early as the time of Taizu, and they were given by Taizu himself.

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen elements, which has long been a consensus in the chemical community. It's just that the hydrogen and oxygen symbols were created by Ming chemists, and H and O were not used.

The content of chemistry textbooks is outdated. Now the two major mainstream schools have already updated their theories.

Let's take water as an example:

One school believes that there are water elements and water atoms, and water atoms are a composite atom composed of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. Composite atoms are not molecules as Taizu said, they are a more complex basic atom.

Real molecules are more complex substances with multiple ratios. For example, copper oxide is a basic atom, and cuprous oxide, which has a multiple ratio with it, is a molecule.

The other school believes that there is no such thing as water element or water atom, and that hydrogen and oxygen atoms directly form water molecules. Only those composed of a single atom are elements, and those composed of more than two atoms are all molecular composite substances.

However, these two schools have a common misunderstanding, that is, the same type of atoms directly form substances.

If we take oxygen as an example, oxygen atoms directly form oxygen, and it is impossible to form any oxygen molecules.

To express it with chemical symbols from another time and space, there is only O, and there cannot be O and O. And the combination of O and O can only appear in complex atoms or molecular complexes.

Why is there such a consensus?

Because most of the experiments to explore and measure atoms are to obtain gas through electrolysis.

Inspired by electrolysis, chemists believe that each atom is charged, and if atoms want to combine, they must attract each other. Two or more atoms of the same type must repel each other, so O and O cannot appear alone.

Therefore, the school that recognizes the existence of water molecules does not recognize the existence of oxygen molecules, and believes that oxygen atoms directly form oxygen.

Zhu Shirong is different from the old man in Luoyang. He belongs to the water molecule school, while the old man belongs to the water atom school.

When he saw the mention of water molecules in Xie Yan's paper, he subconsciously thought that Xie Yan was one of his own people, thus offsetting his resistance to the subsequent content.

It is normal for young people in his own school to make mistakes, and they can correct them later.

Until he saw the oxygen molecule, Zhu Shirong also frowned.

Nonsense!

How could there be oxygen molecules in the world?

Who taught this paper author named Xie Yan to be such a fool?

Today's chemists have not even figured out molecules and atoms, so Xie Yan naturally cannot explain electrons and covalent bonds.

Xie Yan only admitted in the paper that atomic bonding is related to electricity (the current basic consensus), but it does not have to follow the principle of like repels like. The same kind of atoms can also be combined into molecules.

He also proposed the concepts of simple substances, mixtures, and compounds, and redefined elements, molecules, and atoms.

Zhu Shirong felt that it seemed to make some sense when he read this, at least providing a hypothetical system and research direction.

But then, Zhu Shirong frowned again.

Because Xie Yan also proposed a conjecture that at the same temperature and pressure, any gas with the same volume (it can be a single gas or a mixed gas. It can be a simple gas or a compound gas) has the same number of molecules.

This conjecture is counterintuitive. All chemists have always believed that different molecules (molecules are often mistaken for atoms) have different volumes.

Xie Yan did not mention a certain equation and a certain constant because it was too advanced.

Zhu Shirong put down his paper, took out his pipe, shook in the shredded tobacco from Nanyang, lit it and started puffing away the smoke.

Zhu Shirong did not have the heavy academic baggage of the old man in Luoyang.

Because that old man has too many academic achievements and is over sixty years old.

What's the difference between asking such an old man to accept new theories and overturning most of the achievements in the first half of his life, and killing him directly?

After half a pot of tobacco was smoked, Zhu Shirong began to write a letter to a friend.

After writing to my friend, I wrote another letter to Xie Yan, inviting Xie Yan to be a guest in Kaifeng.

He didn't know Xie Yan's age. He thought he was a young man at first, but after reading the paper, he thought he was a middle-aged scholar. Moreover, the address given was the back house of the Tongpan Hall of Huangzhou Prefecture. He guessed that Xie Yan should be the Tongpan of Huangzhou or his family members or teachers.

If Zhu Shirong knew that Xie Yan was still a student, he would definitely try his best to recruit him into Kaifeng Imperial College as a disciple. Even if Xie Yan's theory is wrong, young people like this are still worthy of training.

After all the letters were written, Zhu Shirong walked to the office next door. He wanted to discuss how to increase the accuracy of the balance with his colleagues who studied physics.

Over the past 100 years, the accuracy of laboratory balances has continued to increase.

That is, continuously increasing the arm length of the balance.

This method of improving accuracy has reached its limit, and a new way of thinking is required to achieve a breakthrough.

"It's difficult," Tian Shouyi sighed. "You chemists want to improve the balance, but we physics don't? There are so many physicists across the country, but it has been difficult to make any progress in the past twenty years."

Zhu Shirong said: "Increasing the arm length of the scale has come to an end. Do you have any other ideas?"

Tian Shouyi shook his head.

The two of them were silent, each took out a piece of tobacco and smoked it, and the office soon became like a fairyland.

"Bang bang bang bang..."

There was a hurried knock on the door, and at the same time he shouted: "Two gentlemen, the global navigator is back. He is passing by Kaifeng and is about to enter Beijing. He just stayed at the post station outside Kaifeng!"

Zhu Shirong stood up awkwardly and said with a puzzled expression: "Who is engaged in global navigation?"

"I don't know." Tian Shouyi was also confused.

The Ming Dynasty in this time and space has no need for global sea navigation.

First, the domestic market is huge, secondly, it can rely on Southeast Asia and India to support itself, and thirdly, there are also vast markets in Central Asia, West Asia, and Northeast Africa.

Not to mention sailing around the world, no one even wants to go to America.

Even thirty years ago, when gold and silver mines were discovered one after another in the Americas, very few people went to pan for gold because the Americas were too far away and navigation was extremely risky.

Similarly, the development of firearms in the Ming Dynasty was also extremely slow.

Because there is no demand!

The period when weapons and armor were developing most rapidly was inevitably accompanied by wars all year round. How could the Ming Dynasty fight so many wars? Even if there is a war, the existing weapons are enough.

Firearms technology had spread to West Asia and Eastern Europe decades ago.

But even with firearms, the armies of West Asia and Eastern Europe were still unable to defeat the Ming Dynasty border troops.

Ming's problems are always internal.

Many Taixue teachers and students went out of the city to the inn, wanting to know what they had learned from the global voyager.

But outside the inn, the leader of the global sailing team raised his hands to everyone and said: "Everyone, please understand that I went to sea four years ago on the order of the late emperor. I didn't expect that when I came back, I heard about the late emperor in India. The news of his death cannot be disclosed for the time being. Now we need to go to Luoyang to report back to the new king!"

Someone shouted: "Then just pick up what you can say and say it."

The navigation leader said: "America is very big, even bigger than we imagined. It should be long and narrow, and you have to go around a long way from the south to get across. Under normal navigation, it takes two or three years to complete a circumnavigation of the world, and we are halfway there. The delay only took four years.”

"Can there be a country if the United States goes south?" someone asked again.

The navigation leader said: "We have not had deep contact with the indigenous people, and our language is not clear. We don't know if there are states. But there are definitely tribes, and they know how to weave, make pottery and farm, but they don't seem to know how to smelt iron."

At the end of the development of American civilization, people actually knew how to smelt iron, but it was just not popular yet.

Someone else asked: "After passing the United States, is there any land in the ocean?"

The navigation leader said: "There is an ocean to the east of the United States. After crossing the ocean, we will reach the south of the Western countries (Gold Coast of West Africa). When we arrived there, the ship was seriously damaged and we had to go to the Western countries to repair the ship first."

"I have read "The Chronicles of the Western Kingdoms". Do they still have emperors there?" People continued to inquire.

The sailing leader said: "There are those who arrogantly call themselves emperors, but they cannot convince the public, just like the Emperor of Zhou in the pre-Qin period. Well, that's all I can say. It's better not to gather here."