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Join the ServerWhile the mages of the Kingdom of Heinrich were immersed in the wave of electrification, a sense of tranquility pervaded Horace’s Eisenberg Manor.
Horace himself was sitting in his private study, which rivaled the Royal Library.
The flames in the fireplace danced quietly, reflecting off the rows of bookshelves that reached the ceiling.
In his hand was not some ancient magical tome, but a routine experimental report from the Royal Academy of Sciences.
The title of the report was Performance Test of a New Mithril-Nickel Alloy Target under Electron Bombardment.
Horace received a dozen or so such reports every day, most of which were just insignificant data records.
He usually just skimmed through them to confirm that there were no major safety incidents.
However, today’s report made his brow, which was always creased in a gentle smile, furrow tightly.
The author of the report was a Fifth-Circle Mage named Davisson, a diligent but mediocrely talented young man.
Horace had funded his experimental group, hoping they could provide some improved data for the energy focusing system of the magitech cannons.
The first half of the report was much the same as the hundreds of experiments before it.
The electron gun accelerated electrons, bombarded the target, and then the scattering trajectory was recorded on a fluorescent screen.
Everything was in line with the classical particle collision model, dull and tedious.
The turning point occurred in the second half of the report.
Davisson described an accident in the report.
During the experiment, the magic circulation system used to cool the target suddenly overloaded, causing the target’s temperature to drop to an extremely low level in an instant.
This rapid cooling caused the surface of the mithril-nickel alloy to form a perfect crystal lattice with extremely regular atomic arrangement.
When the experiment was restarted and the electrons once again bombarded this “quenched” target, an incredible phenomenon occurred.
On the fluorescent screen, what should have been randomly scattered bright spots were now gathered into clear concentric rings.
It was a standard diffraction pattern.
A phenomenon that only waves would produce.
Horace’s fingers tapped gently on the expensive mahogany desk.
Electrons are particles.
This was a fundamental piece of common knowledge that had been recognized since the birth of physics.
Particle collisions should be like a pile of glass beads colliding, scattering in all directions.
It was absolutely impossible for interference and diffraction, which only occur when water waves are thrown into a lake, to appear.
Davisson detailed his confusion in the report.
He had ruled out all possibilities of instrument malfunction.
When he changed the target, the diffraction rings disappeared.
When he switched back to that special mithril-nickel crystal, the diffraction rings reappeared.
He also found that by changing the accelerating voltage of the electron gun, that is, changing the energy of the electrons, the spacing of the diffraction rings would change regularly.
At the end of the report, Davisson wrote with trepidation that he could not explain this phenomenon, suspecting that the mithril-nickel alloy, under some unknown effect, had excited the “aetheric fluctuations” hidden within the electrons.
“Aetheric fluctuations,” Horace murmured the words, then shook his head.
This theory, which had been thoroughly buried by Klein and Lia, was clearly not the correct answer.
But this experimental result was like a sharp thorn, deeply embedded in his mind.
Particles, exhibiting the characteristics of waves.
This contradictory phenomenon made him feel a long-lost excitement, the thrill of touching upon an unknown truth.
His memory, like a lake into which a stone had been thrown, rippled.
He suddenly remembered something.
About a few weeks ago, a joke had been circulating in the academic circles of the Royal Capital.
A young graduate, ignorant of the immensity of heaven and earth, had published a paper in a third-rate magic journal that could be described as the ravings of a madman.
The core argument of that paper was that all moving material particles were accompanied by a wave.
At the time, almost all professors had dismissed this article as sensationalist nonsense.
Horace had also just smiled and paid it no mind.
But now, Davisson’s experimental results cast this joke in a completely different light.
“Someone,” Horace said to the empty study.
A butler appeared silently behind him and bowed.
“Help me find a journal called Magitech Tidbits, the issue from about three or four weeks ago.”
The butler showed no sign of questioning, bowed again, and quietly retreated.
He was very efficient. In less than half an hour, a small booklet with a simple cover and yellowed paper was delivered to Horace’s hands.
He quickly found the title of the article in the table of contents.
On Matter Waves.
Author, de Broglie.
Horace turned to that page and began to read it carefully.
The article was short, but the derivation process was full of bold imagination.
The author started from the energy formula for photons and the mass-energy equivalence equation, and made a series of amazing analogies.
He hypothesized that since light has both wave and particle properties, this duality might be a universal law for all matter in the universe.
Every moving particle should correspond to a wave.
The wavelength of this wave is inversely proportional to the momentum of the particle.
At the end of the article, a simple and beautiful formula was given.
λ = h / p
Wavelength equals a constant divided by momentum.
In the eyes of all scholars at the time, this formula had no experimental basis whatsoever and was purely a product of wild fantasy.
But now, Horace was holding an experimental report that might just prove it.
He immediately ordered the butler to bring him paper and pen.
He retrieved the accelerating voltage data of the electron gun from Davisson’s report.
From the voltage, he could easily calculate the kinetic energy of the electrons, and thus derive their momentum.
Planck’s constant had already been published in Lia’s papers.
He substituted these two values into de Broglie’s wavelength formula.
The quill scratched across the parchment, making a rustling sound.
A value representing the theoretical wavelength was calculated.
Next, Horace picked up another sheet of paper.
Using the theory of optical diffraction, he used the diameter of the diffraction rings and the crystal lattice spacing from Davisson’s report to reverse-calculate the wavelength that the incident “wave” must have to form such a diffraction pattern.
This was a wavelength derived from experimental data.
When the two final calculation results were laid out side by side in front of him.
Horace, the Ninth-Circle Archmage who had seen it all, couldn’t help but hold his breath for a moment.
The two values, within the allowable range of experimental error, were almost completely identical.
Theory and experiment had perfectly coincided at this moment.
The quill slipped from his fingers and fell onto the carpet without a sound.
In the study, there was only the crackling sound of the fire burning in the fireplace.
Horace leaned back in his chair, his gaze passing through the floor-to-ceiling window of the study and looking out at the deep night sky.
“The universe…”
He murmured to himself in a voice only he could hear.
“So this is how it is…”
That young man who was ridiculed by everyone, de Broglie, might be right.
What he had touched upon might be a more fundamental law that constitutes the world, even more fundamental than spacetime transformation.
A storm far more violent than the “Day of Collapse” was about to quietly gather over the magic world.
You’ve got to see this next! The Boy Who Bit Moma's Leaf will keep you on the edge of your seat. Start reading today!
Read : The Boy Who Bit Moma's Leaf
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