Chapter 4
Phillip was one of the lead supervisors at the training camp, and I could tell he was pleased with how I was doing.
"Riley, you were made for this," he said, handing me a bottle of water after an experiment. "If your father could see you, he'd be proud of you."
It sent a warmth through my chest. I never got to meet my father, but I'd read about everything he accomplished more times than I could count. He was a hero. And there was no way I was going to let his name down.
*****
The training days were intense, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.
There was a guy named Henry Lewis, from a wealthy business family, who was openly hostile toward me.
Henry had always ended up on the losing side against me in previous competitions.
This time, he was itching to prove he was better than me.
During a group discussion, we got into a heated argument about an experiment proposal for detecting dark matter particles.
I told Henry his plan was way too safe. The detection rate would be way too low.
Henry shot back that my approach was way too aggressive, insanely risky, and not feasible at all.
By the end of the argument, Henry let out a cold laugh. "Riley, have you spent so much time with the Lynn family that you've started coming up with wild ideas? Science isn't some game you can play dress up for."
Right then, the whole room went dead silent. Everyone knew I'd been kicked out of the Lynn family, but no one ever brought it up to my face. Henry was just rubbing salt in the wound.
I didn't get angry. I just looked at him calmly. "First, I'm not a Lynn. Second, whether a plan works or not isn't decided by talk."
I grabbed a marker and started working out equations on the whiteboard, my hand flying across the surface. Line after line of complex formulas and precise numbers poured out as I wrote.
As I wrote, I said, "The risk you're worried about is mostly the stability of the signal receiver in ultra-low temperatures. But you're missing how quantum tunneling behaves on a larger scale under certain conditions.
"If we build a composite magnetic field, we can bump the tunneling probability up by 37.4%. That means not only can we keep the risk under control, but we can also push the detection efficiency up by another 15% on top of my initial proposal."
The only sound in the room was the marker scratching against the whiteboard.
When I finished the last number and set the marker down, Henry's face was beet red. He stared at the airtight logic on the board, unable to say a single word.
The other students looked at me with awe and respect in their eyes.
From that day on, no one dared to question any of my proposals. Henry backed off and even steered clear of me whenever we crossed paths.
I didn't let that little drama bother me. I had my sights set on bigger things, and anyone who tried to stand in my way would just get left behind.
*****
Six months into the training camp, we faced our midterm challenge. We had to solve a problem that had stumped the physics world for nearly a decade, figuring out how to precisely measure the gravitational constant G.
It was an open-ended question with no standard answer. The more creative and workable your solution, the higher your score.
Everyone was wracking their brains, desperate for a breakthrough.
I spent an entire week holed up in the library, digging through everything I could find, from Newton's era all the way to current research.
In the end, I came up with something completely different. Instead of running measurements on Earth, I would use the microgravity environment on a space station with a high-precision laser interferometer to measure the gravitational pull between two known masses.
In theory, this approach could make the measurements a hundred times more accurate.