209: Chapter 209 Jianglin Interdisciplinary Research Center

On the second floor of the Mathematical Sciences Center, the white label at the bottom right of the doorplate for Jiang Lin's Research Support Unit had curled up at one corner.

The administrative assistant stepped on a folding chair and used the pad of her finger to flatten the label again.

But as soon as her hand let go, those two small characters stubbornly curled up again, curling even higher than before.

[Temporary]

"It expires fifteen hours and four minutes earlier than the proposal." The administrative assistant sighed.

The academic secretary handed out a piece of transparent tape from the office and said, "Just tape it up and make do for now. Before midnight tonight, it's still part of a valid document."

Leaning against the legs of the folding chair were two empty cardboard boxes that the administrative assistant had just gotten from the supply room this morning.

On top of them pressed a "Trial Operation Expiration Asset Disposal Form", half a page of which was checked off in pencil, then mostly and gently erased with an eraser. Beneath it, the printer, paper shredder, three internal phones, and six temporarily added folding chairs all had asset serial numbers pasted on them with sticky notes.

According to protocol, if Tsinghua University decided to terminate the trial operation, the equipment would be uniformly returned to the State-owned Assets Management Office, everyone's access control permissions would be simultaneously canceled, the archived email accounts would be switched to read-only status, and any unprocessed external letters would be returned through their original channels.

The last item was undoubtedly the most troublesome.

Back when the Research Support Unit was first established, it once gathered three hundred and twelve external letters all at once.

The situation back then was still controllable, and most of the emails could still be sorted into a few ready-made slots.

Pure mathematical problems were sent to the Mathematical Sciences Center, discussions on formal verification were forwarded to the Department of Computer Science, media requests were uniformly packaged and sent to the publicity department, and commercial cooperation was directly channeled to the Low Entropy Workshop.

But by the office wall nowadays, there was an extra dark gray thickened file basket with four eye-catching characters pasted on the front.

[Unable to Circulate]

When Jiang Lin pushed open the door and entered, he brought in a gust of early winter chill.

The academic secretary had just used a black pen to write F-014 in the upper right corner of a heavy stack of materials.

Just ten days ago, there were only F-001, F-002, and F-003 in this basket.

F-001: A joint signature from three top European universities, hoping that Jiang Lin would lead a research program spanning mathematics and automated theorem proving over two years.

To show sincerity, the specific setting of the research direction, the list of cooperative teams, and even the physical location of stay were all completely open for him to decide personally.

F-002: From the operating team of a large domestic scientific facility.

The other party inquired whether he would be willing to lead the organization of personnel from the numerical, experimental, and observational sides to establish a joint verification framework for a long-standing, unresolved complex Physics problem.

F-003: Discussing the long-term autonomy problem of multi-robots under complex environments.

This material was the most detailed, with even the three-stage on-site test data, qualifications of cooperative units, and failure exit conditions already prepared, awaiting only the signature of a person in charge.

The subsequent eleven materials each had their own sources. Among them were the formulation of an open benchmark for quantum error causal attribution, long-term maintenance mechanisms for trusted computing kernels, and even seven materials that simply delineated a broad research field, asking him to determine the problems to be tackled himself, with the budget column directly filled in as "Negotiable".

"Already fourteen?"

Jiang Lin took off his coat, casually draped it over the back of the chair near the door, and looked at the basket that was about to be filled to the brim.

"The fourteenth one just arrived this morning, and this one is about the optimization of high-energy Physics computing interfaces." The academic secretary pulled the file basket outward by half a foot to let Jiang Lin see more clearly. "The materials are extremely detailed, but what's holding them back are still accounts, recruitment quotas, and long-term primary responsibility permissions."

Speaking of this, her tone revealed a hint of helplessness: "These invitations span the four major fields of mathematics, Physics, computer science, and engineering. No matter which existing department they are transferred into, the other party can only catch a matching portion of them. The other party explicitly requires Jiang Lin you to lead them for several years, so if we split them up and transfer them out, it would be equivalent to rejecting their core demands on your behalf."

The Research Support Unit could organize cumbersome materials, arrange cross-timezone meetings, and return ambiguous questions with demands to complete the boundaries, but it alone lacked the qualifications to recruit full-time researchers, set up cross-year long-term projects, manage independent tens-of-millions-level funding, let alone promise a research route that needed to last for several years on behalf of Jiang Lin.

It was like an extremely sturdy, well-classified, and well-organized mailbox.

However, the external letters had become so numerous that they began to demand this mailbox set up a post office with dispatching authority right on the spot.

Jiang Lin pulled out F-001 from the front row of the file basket and directly flipped to the budget and staffing page.

The other party had reserved sufficient quotas for postdoctoral fellows, research engineers, and visiting scholars, leaving only the centermost and most core column of the table empty.

[Academic Head: Pending Jiang Lin's Confirmation]

"Don't return them yet." Jiang Lin put the materials back to their original place.

"But the disposal form is due to be finalized at five o'clock this afternoon."

"There will be results by this afternoon."

The academic secretary understood the weight behind this sentence and bent down to peel off the seal that had already been pasted on the side of the cardboard box.

But just as she rolled the discarded seal into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket, the unread number in the upper right corner of the archived email suddenly jumped from sixty-eight to eighty-nine.

Twenty-one emails flooded in in less than a minute, but the titles were surprisingly uniform, all prefixed with the same string of Chinese.

[Interview Request Regarding the Article "A Huge Amount of Knowledge of Unknown Origin"]

Just at this moment, Gu Mingche knocked on the door and walked in.

"Did you see the trending news? Shen Yanqiu made your achievements of this past year into a chart."

"What chart?"

"A chart that makes normal people seriously doubt whether the horizontal axis was underprinted by a few decades after looking at it."

As Gu Mingche spoke, he smoothly handed his phone to Jiang Lin.

The article was published at 7:41 in the morning, with a title consisting of fourteen characters in total, exuding a shocking vibe that made one feel inexplicable awe.

"This Top Student Is Suspected of Having a Huge Amount of Knowledge of Unknown Origin"

At the beginning of the article, Shen Yanqiu first posted a horizontal time chart.

Ranging from Jiangs Brick, PFR and Marton-form entropy bridges, all the way to the 5-state Busy Beaver, EPC evidence retention compression, quantum error causal attribution, six-legged robots, Qingya Tunnel rescue, and the new construction of the unit distance problem.

Hanging beneath each node were corresponding public materials or third-party verification records, including papers, version hashes, report videos, independent recalculations, and participant lists.

Clicking on any of them allowed one to trace all the way back to a knowledge starting point available for anyone to review, just like following a vine to find the melon.

Spanning a full two sections, the article used almost rigorous logic to rule out any possibility of ghostwriting, false claims, hidden ghostwriter teams, and resume packaging.

Jiang Lin had accepted step-by-step questioning that was almost fault-finding from peers in public reports, and had also re-derived key structures from the most primitive definitions in front of different top teams.

As for engineering achievements, there were even dead-angle-free records from design drawings, processing parameters, fatigue tests to on-site operation.

It wasn't until the third section that Shen Yanqiu threw out the truly core question.

["Unknown origin" refers not to the attribution of achievements, but to the path of knowledge accumulation.]

[Why does an eighteen-year-old undergraduate freshman simultaneously know the load-bearing points of combinatorial mathematics, the boundaries of magnetofluid instability, the causal hierarchy of quantum errors that is most easily confused, and where a six-legged robot will break first in muddy water?]

[We can verify every result he makes, yet it is difficult to explain from any public resume why he could see so many paths before even starting.]

The habitual prodigy anecdotes, attic laboratories, and reciting the periodic table at the age of three were all left outside the article by Shen Yanqiu.

The final paragraph only mentioned that Jiang Lin would publicly discuss a Physics preprint regarding the instability threshold of long thin current sheets the next day.

This newly added schedule happened to paint the very last tiny blank space on the time chart into another color belonging to Physics.

Gu Mingche watched Jiang Lin read from beginning to end.

"Is any item written incorrectly?" Gu Mingche asked.

"The webpage warehousing time for the unit distance paper adopts UTC, while the rest of the nodes on the chart uniformly use Beijing time, making a difference of eight hours here." Jiang Lin pointed at a tiny spot of light on the screen.

Gu Mingche was almost choked by his own saliva: "Does eight hours count?"

"Since the public timeline needs to be accurate to the hour, the time zones should be unified; this is basic rigor."

"Anything else?"

"It can be published."

"It has already been published, my brother."

"Then send the time zone explanation to him and have him errata it." Jiang Lin said calmly.

Gu Mingche took back his phone and casually refreshed the page once.

While speaking, the repost count doubled again, and "A Huge Amount of Knowledge of Unknown Origin" had separated from the original title and become an independent buzzword spreading across the entire internet.

It was rapidly disassembled into interview topics for various media outlets, hit posts on university forums, and a row of short video covers being rushed into production.

Someone even recolored that achievement chart according to academic disciplines.

The four colors of mathematics, Physics, computer science, and engineering squeezed all the way from February to November. When it reached the most dense time period, the color blocks overlapped, almost completely obscuring the horizontal axis at the bottom.

In the public world, only these nine fulfilling months could be seen.

But the time Jiang Lin saw was much longer.

In those long years crushed by a short horizontal axis, there were wind turbines stalled in the wind and snow, piles of scrapped batteries, wall panels covered in proofs that were erased countless times, and New Year's Eve dinners eaten silently alone.

There were also boring experiments that had been running quietly for over a dozen years just to wait for the next set of reliable long-term data.

The phone vibrated at this moment.

Zhang Xiufen sent a screenshot of the article title into the family WeChat group.

Zhang Xiufen: [Why does this "unknown origin" look like the tax bureau is auditing accounts?]

Zhang Xiufen: [The text does say the origin is clean.]

Zhang Xiufen: [Since it's clean, why write these four words? Does this reporter even know how to title an article?]

Jiang Jianguo had obviously read the article carefully from beginning to end and sent a pertinent evaluation.

Jiang Jianguo: [The chart is made clearly and the logic is rigorous.]

Zhang Xiufen closely followed up with a question.

Zhang Xiufen: [As for knowledge, should we also make an origin description?]

Jiang Lin: [Not for now; knowledge doesn't need to go to the bank to print a statement of account yet.]

Zhang Xiufen: [Then don't teach your father; he's obsessed now and wants to wait for an official receipt for everything to feel at ease.]

Jiang Jianguo replied with a lonely period, which could be considered reserving his final opinion on this internal family evaluation.

When Jiang Lin put away his phone, the academic secretary had already packaged all twenty-one identical interview requests and transferred them to the university's publicity department.

Afterwards, she single-handedly picked out three emails from the newly flooded ones.

Those three institutions originally only invited Jiang Lin to give a routine report via email.

But after reading this morning's article, they quickly withdrew the original emails, and the newly sent contents were all changed to inquiring whether he would be willing to lead a sub-direction long-term.

The academic secretary wrote F-015, F-016, and F-017 sequentially in the upper right corner of the front page of the three newly printed materials and placed them into the gray file basket.

Now, this originally spacious gray file basket was completely filled up.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, the expiration evaluation meeting started on time in the small meeting room on the same floor.

The text of the three-month operation report for Jiang Lin's Research Support Unit was only a thin eighteen pages, but the appendices behind it forcefully filled up six heavy folders.

The first page still retained the original task from August 25.

Version archiving, email layering, meeting coordination, formal verification interface docking, and isolated processing of media and commercial requests.

But turning to the last page, seventeen long-term research requests that could not be undertaken by any existing single department were prominently listed.

The disposition opinion column on the right was uniformly and completely left blank.

Zhou Wendao pushed those six folders to the center of the conference table.

"This temporary mechanism has brilliantly completed the tasks originally assigned to it, but it has indeed pushed its upper limit of capability."

The head of the university's scientific research management department nodded and opened another document at hand.

The initial date on the cover was November 7th, and the second version was formed on November 17th.

As for the one brought to the table today, it was already the fourth version after repeated wrestling.

That article this morning which caused an uproar was merely understatedly sandwiched at the end of the appendix, taking up two pages of public opinion explanation.

What truly filled the core content of the preceding forty-four pages were the exponentially growing project requests over the past three months, intricate cross-departmental coordination records, and those seventeen blank disposition opinions urgently needing to be filled.

"If we simply continue to extend the trial operation period of the Research Support Unit, the procedures are the simplest."

The person in charge placed the first thin renewal form on the left, "It can help you block daily emails for another three months, and if the budget allows, two more administrative staff members can be added."

Then, he solemnly placed the heavy forty-six-page preparatory plan on the right.

"Yet it can still only block things for you, and cannot catch what you are truly preparing to do."

Right in the center of the plan's cover was printed a line of weighty bold text.

[Tsinghua University Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center (Preparatory)]

The preparation period is tentatively set at six months.

The research center will be directly constructed according to the standards of a university-level scientific research institution, with the university providing an initial three-year startup fund totaling sixty million yuan in one go, fifteen full-time positions unconstrained by departments, and a completely independent financial project account.

The Mathematical Sciences Center will retain its existing office interfaces, and the university will allocate a more spacious project office and shared research space internally.

For practical considerations, large-scale computing power clusters, high-precision experimental devices, and observation data will still be affiliated with the university's existing corresponding platforms according to specific projects.

The original Research Support Unit will be converted as a whole into the preparatory office, and the academic secretary, administrative assistant, and technical liaison will remain in office.

In addition, the university will step forward to recruit a senior executive lead with a high salary, specifically to strip away and handle miscellaneous chores such as personnel, finance, security, and daily operations.

Jiang Lin will officially assume the post of preparatory academic head and chief researcher.

The selection of research directions, the establishment of specific projects, and the final academic evaluation of personnel will all be presided over by him alone.

Those seventeen long-term requests pressed under the document basket finally had a substantive channel through which they could rightfully enter.

Jiang Lin opened the plan and skipped directly to the personnel page.

The fifteen positions only wrote the rank categories and corresponding compensation budgets, without pre-filling any preconceived names.

Mathematics, Physics, computer science, engineering, and scientific research software architecture each retain smooth access entry points.

He continued to flip forward and stopped at page thirty-two.

"The central academic lead here has the final termination right over research projects, which needs to be changed."

"How should it be changed?" The head of the scientific research management department was slightly stunned, but still picked up the pen to prepare to record.

"It is that the scope of authority is mixed together in the text. For exploratory projects independently incubated and established by the center that have not yet formed external legal obligations, I must retain absolute academic termination rights, stopping losses immediately if the path is found unviable. However, projects that have already signed external task descriptions, occupied a large amount of public resources, or formed external contractual commitments cannot be arbitrarily terminated by any single person, including myself."

Jiang Lin turned the document half a circle, pushed it toward the other party, and pointed to the contract liability clause in the next paragraph.

"For the latter type of authority, please change it to the right to suggest adjustments and terminations of academic routes. As long as it involves fund liquidation, production safety, research ethics, and contract breaches, it must be jointly decided according to the university's corresponding procedures."

The person in charge quickly wrote down the modification opinions on the margin of the page, but still couldn't help reminding him: "Dividing it so finely will weaken your absolute control over the research direction in actual operation."

"Directional control does not equal turning other people's contractual obligations into my personal power; rights and responsibilities must be reciprocal."

Zhou Wendao nodded approvingly, turned to the preceding project establishment clauses, and added: "Anyway, the project's access entry point still firmly remains in your hands."

"The entrance must be controlled by me. This center can receive complex problems raised externally and can also cooperate with existing teams inside and outside the university."

Jiang Lin had no intention of backing down on this point.

He glanced at the academic secretary beside him and continued: "Whoever wants to borrow my name to stuff an old project written long ago with a changed cover to be gilded, the preparatory office will return it along the original path and will not accept it under any circumstances."

The academic secretary quickly wrote down this sentence in her notebook and looked up to confirm: "Write the original words word-for-word into the implementation rules?"

Jiang Lin thought for a moment and said: "Delete 'changed cover'."

"Understood, I will preserve a bit of academic decency for the official document in the phrasing."

The meeting continued to move forward.

Jiang Lin turned to page forty, and at the end of the column for achievement attribution and personnel evaluation, he added another sentence with his pen.

[The research center must not use internal institutional positions, resource coordination work, or general guidance relationships to replace substantive academic contributions as the basis for attribution.]

"Since the center is named after your name, the outside world is prone to the halo effect, attributing all participants' work entirely under your name alone." Zhou Wendao saw that line of text clearly and reminded him.

"Precisely because of this, it is all the more necessary to write it down clearly in advance through systems." Jiang Lin put down his pen, "Everyone's independent contribution, paper attribution, and career return must be strictly confirmed in accordance with actual workload and academic increment. We cannot first recruit talent to carry the sedan chair and do hard labor for the center, and finally wipe out their hard work with a light sentence of collective achievement."

The person in charge of scientific research frowned: "Then what about the evaluation of the center? How should the indicators for the number of published papers and short-term achievements be set?"

"During the preparation period, only work records, the advancement progress of the public problem catalog, and stage review reports are evaluated. There must be no indicators of paying wages or calculating performance based on the number of articles."

"Yet three years later, the university will always need an objective standard to judge how well the center is actually doing and whether the funds spent are worth it."

Jiang Lin raised his head, his gaze clear: "Look at whether it has raised problems truly worth doing, and whether it has sent correct theoretical achievements into actual calculations, experiments, and observations for verification. More importantly, whether it has left future generations with open-source tools that can continue to be used, reliable data, and trained talent."

"If these foundations are not well laid, no matter how thick the papers are printed or how high the impact factor is, it is merely binding an operation report to be more expensive and fancy, completely meaningless."

The deputy director in charge of fund accounting lowered his head to take a look at the six attachment folders on the table that were bulging almost to the point of cracking, took a deep breath, picked up his pen, and silently crossed out the recommended value for the annual number of papers in the table.

...

The forty-six-page plan was gone through item by item, and after modifications until the very end, only the core name on the cover had not yet been finally confirmed.

The university had actually prepared two other alternative names before.

One leaned towards basic scientific structures, and the other leaned towards the intersection of cutting-edge computing and engineering.

These two names were steady and well-balanced, not abrupt hanging on the door of any science and engineering university, but precisely because of this, they were completely unable to convey to the outside world which unknown disciplinary waters this center would sail towards in the coming year.

The head of the scientific research management department placed the two alternative covers side by side in front of Jiang Lin, and said earnestly: "Jiang Lin, naming a university-level entity institution after a personal name brings not only honor, but also responsibility. You will bear unlimited joint and several liability for reputation."

Jiang Lin looked at his own name on the paper and nodded.

If the center fails to produce real things while hanging a broad in-system name, the responsibility would easily be diluted layer by layer along departments, committees, and evaluation groups, leaving no one to take responsibility in the end.

But by hanging Jiang Lin's name, the outside world would at least know who to point the spearhead at and who to demand results from.

"Just use this one. Since the university is establishing it around the problems I raised and presided over, changing to a broad name is merely self-deceptively hiding the facts."

Jiang Lin reached out and pushed the other two alternative covers back to the person in charge.

"The honor of the achievement belongs to those who actually completed it, but the responsibility for failure and direction will be borne by me."

The person in charge gave him a deep look, turned the preparation consent page to the last page, and handed over a signature pen: "The university's internal administrative approval procedures will continue to run at full speed. Today, your opinions and preparatory duties will first be confirmed in the form of meeting minutes."

Jiang Lin took the pen and wrote his name at the signature place.

The academic secretary took the newly signed paper, sent it into the scanner, and stored it in the preparatory exclusive archives.

Afterward, she reopened the Trial Operation Expiration Disposal Form in the computer, and tapped to modify the status bars of those seventeen long-term requests that originally had nowhere to be placed one by one.

[Transfer to the Preparatory Research Catalog of the Research Center Preparatory Office]

The asset disposal form originally scheduled to be frozen and finalized at 5 PM was officially withdrawn.

Those three extension phones and six new chairs were able to remain securely in their original places.

The backend settings of the archived mailbox were also urgently changed by the network management center from expired read-only to data migration.

The high-salary recruitment descriptions for the fifteen full-time positions officially entered the drafting and approval process.

The initial ten-million-level funding account lit up a green light in the finance department.

Various relevant experimental platforms and supercomputing centers of the university all received a high-level preparatory interface docking notice at the same time.

At 5:26 PM, the homepage of Tsinghua University's official website published a short and punchy preparation announcement.

[Tsinghua University Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center has launched preparations, with Jiang Lin serving as the preparatory academic lead and chief researcher, and the former Jiang Lin Research Support Unit transformed into the Research Center Preparatory Office.]

In less than five minutes, Shen Yanqiu added the official link of this announcement at the end of the viral article from this morning.

When Jiang Lin finished the meeting and returned to the second-floor corridor, the administrative assistant was standing on the folding chair from this morning.

This time, she did not use clear tape to mend it again, but cleanly and neatly tore off the obnoxious temporary label at the lower right corner of the doorplate in its entirety.

"How should the old plaque be handled?" She turned her head and asked.

"Archive it."

The academic secretary brought a thick kraft paper file bag from the desk, and neatly wrote down the short yet magnificent operational dates of this Research Support Unit on the cover.

"It has finished the things it should do, and can rest."

The administrative assistant put the old doorplate into the paper bag, and then took out a newly film-coated new nameplate from the box beside her.

[Tsinghua University Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center Preparatory Office]