Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 145: The problem of spheres

　　An office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

　　Orion, sitting in front of his desk, was staring meticulously at the three-dimensional graphs in the computer screen, his right-hand biros occasionally making drafts on the paper, and his left hand resting on the keyboard constantly pressing the zoom button.

　　The data recorded by the scanning gun had already been saved in Cara's server, and what was saved on his laptop was only the part he needed to use.

　　Namely, about the carbon nanosphere underneath the modified PDMS material.

　　The molecular structure of that carbon nanosphere was readily available, but everything beyond that was unknown to Orion.

　　Whether it was the mechanical, electrical and other physical properties, or the method of preparing this carbon nanosphere in the lab, all of these things needed to be figured out on his own.

　　Sequentially, by building a mathematical model, analysing the material's mechanical, electrical and other physical properties, and then inversely predicting the substances that might be used to synthesise the carbon nanospheres, and through a lot of experiments, figuring out a correct method.

　　But Orion had no idea how to prepare it.

　　It's like multiplying two large prime numbers. It's easy to multiply them, if you're bored enough, you can buy a calculator in the supermarket and do it. But on the contrary, the product of two large prime numbers, split into two prime factors, if the number of digits of this number is more than one hundred, even supercomputing may not be able to do.

　　Stopping the pen in his hand, Orion took a deep breath.

　　At first glance, the carbon nanospheres appeared to be similar to C60, C50, and C240, which were clusters of caged carbon atoms with a hollow spherical structure, but if you looked closely, there were indeed fundamental differences between this thing and these fullerene materials.

　　For one thing, it's not a "regular sphere".

　　Some might say that fullerenes are not regular either, with pentagonal and heptagonal rings of carbon atoms in a cluster of six-membered rings.

　　However, this carbon nanosphere is different because of the symmetry of the space group, which cannot even be represented by a conventional Bravais lattice due to the lack of translational symmetry.

　　It is as if two or more carbon nanomaterials have been disassembled and reconstructed with new chemical bonds between the different materials.

　　An image of this particle is that of two balls of wool that have been taken apart and kneaded together again.

　　If this is the case, the possibilities he faces will be more uncertain than the chaotic systems of quantum mechanics, and perhaps only Schrödinger's cat will be able to solve this problem.

　　And that's just the geometry.

　　If he returned to chemistry, the problems he faced were even greater.

　　Sighing, Orion slapped his forehead to calm himself down.

　　The problems still had to be solved one by one.

　　Starting with maths, which was what he was best at.

　　Geometry was not his area of expertise, but he had some knowledge of the field.

　　Abstractly, this was a topological problem, and he needed to disassemble the "cage sphere", which did not have translational symmetry.

　　Standing up, Orion walked to the whiteboard in his office, and after a moment's thought, he drew a composite cage sphere composed of points and lines on it, and marked the known parameters next to each point, while building a simple mathematical model.