[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-technology-invades-the-modern-world":3,"chapter-technology-invades-the-modern-world-technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-18":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Technology Invades the Modern World",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2269502,4430,"Chapter 18: Five Divisions? No, Five Hundred Divisions!","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-18",18,"\u003Cp>It was indeed 1000 U.S. dollars—4V really pulled out all the stops, carrying vast amounts of gold and cultural relics from the mainland and sparing no effort to attract China’s brightest talents in America.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After Zhou Shukai left, Lin Ran took the dollars out of the envelope and thought to himself.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>One thousand U.S. dollars in 1960 had a real purchasing power equivalent to roughly 12,000 U.S. dollars in 2020.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Along with the dollars, the envelope contained a letter of appointment inviting him to serve as a specially appointed professor at 4V Tsinghua University.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>It was as if the heavens had delivered a pillow just as he was about to fall asleep.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Had he not gone to the island, Lin Ran truly would not have known how to establish contact with China in this era.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In 1960, China and America had not yet established formal diplomatic relations; there wasn’t even an office here.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The only way to establish contact with China was to find a chamber of commerce sympathetic to China.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Chinese communities in America had countless chambers of commerce of all sizes, and some among them were certainly sympathetic to China.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But the problem was, if he reached out to such chambers of commerce, while they were friendly toward China, there was no guarantee that all their staff could keep secrets.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even if Lin Ran merely solved one equation for China, he might be investigated.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At this time, establishing contact with China was extremely difficult.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But with 4V as a stepping stone, the situation changed completely.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>China’s personnel at 4V must far outnumber those in America.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>More importantly, Lin Ran was going to 4V as a specially appointed professor—to give lectures.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When lecturing there, students ask questions, and as a professor, answering them is perfectly normal, isn’t it?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>They asked about an equation related to ballistic calculations—how was I supposed to know?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>What? You’re saying the students who came to consult me at 4V Tsinghua University passed on what I taught them back to mainland China, and it was used in ICBM design?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This is perturbation theory related to ICBM launches, this is a simplified Navier-Stokes model for aerodynamic heating, and this optimized finite difference method, if applied to trajectory simulation, could save eighty percent of the time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The problem was, I thought it was just a simple partial differential equation.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When investigators asked whether it was simple, Lin Ran, as the prover of Fermat’s Last Theorem and the youngest Fields Medalist, naturally found it absurdly simple.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As for precisely selecting from among 4V’s many students those who would transmit information back to mainland China, that would naturally rely on future declassified information.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Lin Ran also sincerely hoped to offer this era’s China a “small” amount of help while ensuring his own safety.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Even an ICBM capable of directly threatening America’s homeland would be enough.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Dongfeng-1 had a range of only a few hundred kilometers, and it wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the Dongfeng-5, with a range exceeding ten thousand kilometers, would be successfully developed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With my help, it could be done in the 1960s.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As for investigation, as long as I fully prove my value and strongly align with the Jewish community, it won’t be a problem.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>I could even drag the Jewish community down with me.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>If things really turn dire, with the Gate, I won’t be trapped.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After Columbia University offered him a professorship and he received one thousand U.S. dollars in startup funds from Zhou Shukai, Lin Ran rented a house next to the Horkheimer residence and moved in.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>With a place of his own, Lin Ran finally felt a sense of security and belonging in this era.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Next, I need to build my reputation in mathematics through Fermat’s Last Theorem and the extended Langlands Program, then wait for Kennedy’s election at the end of this year and the Soviet Union’s first manned spaceflight next year, and find an opportunity to infiltrate NASA,” Lin Ran thought.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After carefully studying the Gate’s ability, Lin Ran realized that his greatest asset in time-jumping was technological data.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A single 18-gram USB drive could carry over a hundred gigabytes of technological data—its value was immeasurable and utterly incomparable to 18 grams of gold.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The most valuable thing he could bring from 1960 to 2020 was technological data alone.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Who says abandoned or neglected technological pathways in the past were necessarily wrong? Who says they couldn’t develop into valuable technologies?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The range-extended engine now popular in new energy vehicles can be traced back to 1900, and it lay forgotten in the archives until Chinese automakers revived it and breathed new life into it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Technological evolution is never a one-way process of “elimination-progress,” but a spiral ascent—many abandoned pathways have been revitalized by new materials, new demands, or interdisciplinary fusion.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He chose NASA as his starting point partly due to his personal interest in aerospace, but more importantly because NASA controlled the greatest concentration of scientific resources at the time—roughly two percent of America’s GDP in annual research funding flowed through it, and he intended to harness this behemoth for his own purposes.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Who says these newly reignited technological pathways I revived in 1960 cannot flourish again in 2020?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The technological pathway Lin Ran most wanted to reactivate was ternary computing.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Although ternary computing was abandoned in history, who could guarantee today, amid the booming field of artificial intelligence, that this pathway wouldn’t be resurrected and revitalized in the AI era?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The so-called advantages of ternary computing—for instance, its logarithmic efficiency in representing numbers exceeds binary: to represent the decimal number 10, ternary needs only three digits (101), while binary requires four (1010), reducing information redundancy by about twenty-five percent.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As chip manufacturing processes grow increasingly difficult, ternary computing might become a promising pathway.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>More crucially, during neural-style computing simulations, ternary logic naturally mimics the activation, inhibition, and resting states of biological neurons, enabling more precise synaptic models for neuromorphic chips.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Similar technological pathways abound—starting with NASA’s resources, then leveraging the entire world’s resources, mobilizing capital, organizations, talent, and commerce to operate according to his will, and feeding the resulting technologies back to 2020—just imagining it was enough to excite Lin Ran.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Such a technological empire, of course, could not be based in America.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Choosing a neutral ground would be an excellent option.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Lin Ran had already fully mapped out his plan: by leveraging Jewish influence and rescuing Kennedy during his assassination, he would secure the Jewish community’s gratitude, his own value, and convince the White House to grant him the highest clearance over rocket control systems.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Eight years later, when the Democrats fell and the Republicans rose to power, he would use the Gate to open his technological empire in Xiangjiang.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And thus, by then, his value wouldn’t be five divisions—it would be five hundred divisions. If China didn’t have something substantial in hand, it truly couldn’t hold onto him.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So when he was ready to sleep, Zhou Shukai had just handed him the pillow—he’d been at a loss for how to establish contact with China.\u003C\u002Fp>",1178,"2026-06-19T21:37:46.551Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","086ee3366189f4bf33463ce9c6ac72a55bb031e3f1d7e2ae68af1442a5689556","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-19","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-17",162,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Ftechnology-invades-the-modern-world-cover.jpg"]