I Know What Science Doesn’t

Chapter 009

With the precursor-study calculations and analysis restarted, the entire Applied Electromagnetics Lab became busy from top to bottom.

Daniel Hayes was busy too.

His workstation was no longer the shared doctoral room. Instead, he had been placed with George Monroe in a quieter office where no one would interrupt them casually. Their assignment was specific: handle the calculations involving the third-order Kawahara-type equation.

The workflow quickly settled into a rhythm.

Chris Fly's computation group would send over equations and coupled systems. Daniel Hayes and George Monroe would run the new method on them, complete the relevant analysis, and upload the processed results into the project's dedicated software pipeline.

From there, the School of Information Sciences at Ivystate University, through its Computing and Data Lab, would coordinate large-scale machine coverage calculations. Once those results came back, they would be routed again to Chris Fly's group.

That group would then use the returned data to perform further calculations, which in turn generated new versions of the third-order Kawahara-type equation that came back to Daniel Hayes and George Monroe.

There were also other types of complicated partial differential equations mixed into the process. One reason the project team had specifically invited George Monroe was precisely because they hoped the overall calculations could be made more accurate across the board.

Working alongside George Monroe, Daniel Hayes kept a very clear attitude: this was also a chance to learn.

George Monroe was a real scholar of partial differential equations. Maybe he was not the single greatest authority in the world, but his research was unquestionably deep. When certain application-heavy equations landed in his hands, he could often identify near-optimal numerical substitutions with surprising ease. For others, he could simply push through an analytical treatment directly. In one particularly unusual case, he even extracted an exact solution.

He was generous with instruction too.

As they worked, he explained constantly, talking through how he was thinking, why certain choices were preferable, which structures mattered, and where instinct in advanced mathematics actually came from. That kind of running explanation was worth far more than polite formal teaching, because it exposed the habits behind the skill rather than just the result.

Daniel Hayes benefited from it a great deal.

At the same time, he was not merely standing there as a junior observer. On the analysis and solution of the third-order Kawahara-type equation, he was actually more specialized than George Monroe now. Whenever the workflow reached the approximate substitution-conversion stage, it was often Daniel Hayes who ended up doing the explaining.

The earlier explanation he had given George Monroe involved only two transformation rules.

Now there were two more.

Each time another transformation form was laid out clearly, George Monroe's surprise deepened. The reaction in him was no longer simple admiration. It had started to become something closer to obsession, the kind that serious scholars developed when they sensed an important line of work opening in front of them.

"You absolutely have to publish the paper soon."

"Once your paper is out, I'm starting proof work on this immediately. This is important, deeply important. And if we push it hard enough, it may open up other discoveries too..."

Three days passed.

For most of that time, Daniel Hayes stayed in the office and worked more than ten hours a day. At the start, there had been a genuine thrill to it. Breaking open complex equations with a new method had a freshness of its own, and each successful pass carried a small sense of achievement.

But once the process repeated often enough, novelty gave way to routine.

After that, even the routine began to dull.

By the end, a good portion of the work felt almost numb, like repetitive industrial labor performed with symbols instead of tools.

There was at least one clear benefit. With George Monroe offering corrections, comments, and occasional short lectures whenever the moment called for them, Daniel Hayes could feel his understanding of partial differential equations deepening in a way that was difficult to fake.

The system seemed to agree with him.

[Mental Evaluation +1]

[Mental: 78]

The value had increased.

The instant he realized that one of his personal-attribute scores had actually improved, the fatigue in his body seemed to vanish. Since crossing into this life, this was the first time he had seen one of his own core attributes rise like that.

The wealth score dropping, naturally, did not count.

After finishing the analysis of the last equation, he stretched hard enough to feel the tension crack loose from his back.

"Done."

He handed the finished pages over to George Monroe.

The older man entered the data with steady hands, hit send, and visibly relaxed. Then he got up, walked over to Daniel Hayes, leaned in a little, and lowered his voice.

"Are you really sure you don't want to switch into mathematics?"

"I still think it suits you better. Studying with me would be stronger for you than following Kevin Shaw. Experimental physics doesn't produce breakthroughs easily, not now."

"The Applied Electromagnetics Lab only has this one major project, and metamaterials research is so high-end that producing real results is extremely difficult. Mathematics is different. With your talent, you'd produce work in partial differential equations much more easily..."

"Professor Monroe, thank you."

Daniel Hayes meant it sincerely, but he could only laugh a little and say, "I've been following Professor Shaw this whole time. I came to Ivystate University because of him too."

"Right." George Monroe looked surprised by that reminder. "Speaking of that, there's something I still don't understand. You were already doing a doctorate last year, so why are you starting again now..."

"I was expelled."

"...What?"

So Daniel Hayes gave him a short explanation.

When George Monroe heard it, he did not know what to say for a long moment. At last he let out the exact same kind of bitter amazement Brandon Brooks had shown earlier.

"Frankenston University really is full of talent."

"A student like you, and they just expelled you..."

Their work was finished now, which meant they could finally leave the office for a while and breathe.

Daniel Hayes headed toward the doctoral workspace. At the door he ran into Samuel Lowell, who glared at him before hurrying upstairs to the second floor.

When Daniel Hayes stepped inside, he found Claire Lang still there. She was fiddling with a Rubik's Cube, rotating it absentmindedly, and he pointed back toward the doorway.

"What's with him?"

Without stopping her hands, she answered, "The projected analysis on the experimental data doesn't look good."

Then she looked up. "I just came down from upstairs. Professor Fly said the data looks flat. The rest of the calculations probably won't swing much either."

"So it's almost over?"

"Pretty much."

Daniel Hayes nodded. The calculation work he and George Monroe had been doing was done, and what remained on Chris Fly's side was largely the finishing layer. For the experiment itself, once the incoming numbers reached a certain stage, the team could already estimate the outcome.

What the project group had hoped to see were special numbers, or at least numbers with large deviations. That would have implied the precursor study had truly found something. If the outlook was "not good," then the data was staying inside ordinary fluctuation bands.

Which meant there was no meaningful discovery.

In other words, the precursor study had failed.

Daniel Hayes was not surprised. He had already known the precursor conclusion was wrong. What he had underestimated was the emotional weight of that failure. Even someone as outwardly upbeat as Claire Lang was visibly affected by it.

Before long, Samuel Lowell and Ethan Pike came back into the workspace together.

After entering, both men sat down in a kind of stunned stillness. Occasionally they glanced toward Daniel Hayes, and those looks were loaded with something more complicated than simple dislike.

If the precursor study had failed, then the labor, money, and time poured into it over the past half year had effectively gone straight into the water.

For them personally, the problem was even sharper.

Both Samuel Lowell and Ethan Pike had been preparing to build their doctoral dissertations around the supposed discovery made in the precursor study. If the experiment failed, what exactly were they supposed to write?

Those results were wrong. Any research derived from them was wrong too.

No project progress. No personal progress either.

Maybe none of that should really be blamed on Daniel Hayes. In research, wrong was wrong and right was right. False conclusions would be overturned eventually no matter who did it first.

But still, it had been his arrival that pushed the team into discovering the mistake early.

They had already asked around and learned the broad outline. Daniel Hayes had developed a simplification method for the third-order Kawahara-type equation, and after the transformed form became suitable for coverage-based machine solving, the computational-analysis error had been exposed.

So from their point of view, the picture felt almost absurd.

He had just arrived. He had not even formally enrolled yet, and at the beginning he had not even officially joined the project group, yet he had already declared that the experiment was wrong and then produced an entire mathematical method that helped prove it.

It felt, in the ugliest emotional reading of the event, as if he had come specifically to smash the stage.

Upstairs, in the second-floor office, Chris Fly, Brandon Brooks, and Kevin Shaw were sighing together.

The three men looked at one another and had very little to say.

None of them had wanted the precursor study to be wrong. But whether they liked it or not no longer mattered. The calculation results had made the situation plain enough. The conclusion data lined up almost perfectly with a failed experiment.

It was the kind of blow that landed like lightning from a clear sky.

No one wanted to linger on the precursor study itself, so Chris Fly shifted the topic to Daniel Hayes.

"Kevin Shaw," he said, "you really did train a good student. Too good, maybe."

"He shows up and immediately smashes our signboard."

Brandon Brooks gave a small laugh at that before sighing again. "You can't blame someone else for that. Finding out now is still better. In fact, it's a good thing."

"If this had taken another six months, that would have been the real disaster."

The other two nodded heavily.

Another six months would have meant another half year burned. Worse, by then they might already have published based on the precursor-study conclusion. If another team later proved the result wrong, the whole group would be in a far more humiliating position.

Metamaterials research was a new field drawing strong international attention. The precursor result had looked big enough to reach journals like Nature or Science. If something that important had been published in a top-tier venue only to turn out wrong, the embarrassment would not have stayed local. It would have been repeated everywhere.

At that point, the project itself might not even have survived intact.

Seen from that angle, Daniel Hayes had not ruined their stage or shattered their reputation.

He had helped them save face before it was too late, and possibly saved the project along with it.

As the failure of the precursor-study conclusion spread through the lab, the mood everywhere turned low and drained.

That did not have much to do with Daniel Hayes personally.

He had not participated in the precursor work, so he did not carry the same emotional burden. On the contrary, he had just completed a mathematical result of his own, which was reason enough for satisfaction. That left him badly out of sync with the atmosphere around him. After speaking briefly with Kevin Shaw about enrollment arrangements, he left cleanly to handle his own business.

The first major task was simple.

Moving.

His classmate had already mailed over the luggage from the dorm. Because the past two days had been too busy, everything had remained piled up at the youth hostel. So Daniel Hayes checked out, hauled his belongings over to the shared rental, and began settling in there.

Lily Ann was home.

She warmly helped him carry things in and even cleaned up part of the room for him. Once he had made the bed and found places for the loose items, Daniel Hayes sat down to rest and opened his phone to look for secondhand furniture.

He needed a desk. The room absolutely had to have one. Without it, working would be awkward, and there would not even be a proper place to put a computer.

"There's a table in my room," Lily Ann said. "You can move it over and use it for now."

"You don't need it?"

"It takes up too much space." She shook her head. "My bedroom balcony is higher up, and there's a folding table there that works fine for my laptop."

After thinking it over, Daniel Hayes asked, "How much? I should buy it from you."

"It's a gift." Lily Ann smiled. "You can buy me dinner sometime."

"That's more expensive than secondhand furniture."

She laughed.

They exchanged a few teasing lines, and then Melissa Ken came through the door in a rush.

She was not surprised to see Daniel Hayes there. Instead, she asked immediately, "You did your master's at Frankenston University, right?"

"Right."

"And you were doing a doctorate there too, but didn't finish it..."

That made Daniel Hayes stop. "How do you know that?"

Melissa Ken took a breath and said seriously, "There's a public notice from Frankenston University. It's about you. It says there was experimental-data fraud and an expulsion decision."

Daniel Hayes pressed his lips together, then asked in confusion, "They only posted it today? I hadn't been watching. I thought it was already out a while ago."

This time it was Melissa Ken who froze.

She had hurried back the moment she saw the notice because she was worried.

Being expelled from a doctorate was bad enough. Being named in a public online announcement made it worse. Under normal circumstances, no one should have reacted to that news so calmly.

This really should not have been the response.