23: Chapter 23 University Self-Study Plan

Jiang Lin received a scholarship three days after the mock exam results came out.

Inside the principal's office, the air conditioner was running, and the school motto, "Dedication to Virtue, Perseverance in Learning, Seeking Truth, and Striving for Far-Reaching Goals," hung on the wall. Outside the window was a gray winter sky.

When the principal handed him the envelope containing the scholarship, his smile was broad.

The principal said a lot.

Things like bringing glory to the school.

Things like not having too much pressure.

Things like maintaining the rhythm and creating another glorious achievement in June.

The director of teaching affairs and the head teacher, Lao Liu, stood nearby, smiling cheerfully and looking quite amiable.

The scholarship amount wasn't large.

One thousand yuan.

If it were in those competition-heavy schools, key high schools, or some wealthy private schools, the scholarship for the city's top ranker might be a much more impressive number.

But Jiangcheng No. 7 High School was not that kind of school.

It was just an ordinary high school in the city, and the number of students who could reach the tier-one university admission line in a year was very limited.

Therefore, when Jiang Lin held the envelope in his hands, he was quite pleasantly surprised.

He had originally thought that even if he scored first place in the school, at most he would just get a few certificates and some stationery prizes.

"Thank you, Principal. Thank you, Teacher."

Coming out of the principal's office, the hallway was very cold.

With the end of the semester approaching, most of the windows in the teaching building were tightly shut, yet they still couldn't stop the north wind from drilling through the gaps.

A few students ran past the stairway holding exam papers, shouting that vacation was finally here, their voices echoing back and forth in the empty hallway.

Jiang Lin stuffed the envelope into his schoolbag.

In the upper right corner of his vision, the countdown was still ticking.

[13:7:02:09]

There were still thirteen days left until the fourth teleportation.

In fact, during this period of time, Jiang Lin had been pondering a question.

For the upcoming trip to the Wasteland, besides bringing seeds and farm tools, what else should he bring?

The six major subjects of the Gaokao: Chinese, Mathematics, English, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.

How to break down derivative problems, how to set points for conic sections, how to judge directions in electromagnetic induction, how to draw pedigrees for genetics problems, how to grasp core ions in industrial process problems, how to punctuate classical Chinese, and how to peel apart the structures of long, difficult English sentences.

These things that once blocked his way like walls had now turned into clear paths.

The Gaokao had an examination syllabus.

The test papers had question types.

No matter how difficult it was, in the end, it was just farming in a fenced-off plot of land.

You knew how big this land was, knowing where the functions were, where analytic geometry was, where the electromagnetic field was, and where the genetic laws were.

As long as you were willing to turn over every inch of soil, there would always come a time when it was finished.

Now he had finally finished turning over this land.

On that Wasteland where there were no more living people, a person's sanity would slowly peel away like weathered rock.

He needed a new, unreachable peak to anchor his sanity as a human being and to resist the long and absolute void.

After much thought, Jiang Lin decided to choose self-studying university Physics.

Why Physics?

Because during the nine years in the Wasteland World, he found that he had no real understanding of this physical world.

Why did the acid rain in the Wasteland form?

Why were the heavy metal ions in the dark red soil more active under acidic conditions?

Why did solar panels drop in efficiency under the gray skylight?

Why did batteries degrade?

Why did radiation damage cells?

How could plants slowly change the environment in barren soil?

Many of the problems he had touched with his own hands, seen with his own eyes, and endured in person within the Wasteland could not be fully answered by high school knowledge.

High school Physics told him that the Lorentz force provided the centripetal force.

High school chemistry told him that acids and bases could neutralize, and precipitation could remove impurities.

High school biology told him that plants could undergo photosynthesis, and legumes had rhizobia.

But these were just a very thin layer of skin.

What was beneath the skin?

Why could fields transmit interactions?

Why didn't microscopic particles move according to macroscopic intuition?

Why could thermal phenomena emerge from the statistical behavior of a large number of particles?

Why were materials conductive, insulating, or semiconducting?

Why could civilization turn sand into chips, light into signals, electromagnetic waves into communication, and send a rocket out of the atmosphere?

...

Then he felt as though he saw the true giant mountains.

Advanced Mathematics.

Linear Algebra.

General Physics.

Mathematical Physics Methods.

Theoretical Mechanics.

Electrodynamics.

Quantum Mechanics.

Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics.

Solid State Physics.

Computational Physics.

Modern Physics Experiments.

Fundamentals of Modern Electronic Circuits.

...

These course names were not as friendly as the questions on high school test papers.

They were more like heavy doors.

Behind every door was not just a problem, but an entire set of language, an entire set of ways of thinking, and an entire set of methods for viewing the world.

Looking at them, Jiang Lin suddenly wanted to laugh.

As an ordinary student of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, who had been worried about getting ninety points in mathematics and sixty-something in Physics just a few months ago, he was now actually seriously studying the training plan for a university Physics major.

If this matter were told to others, Sun Ming would probably touch his forehead and ask him if getting first place in the city had caused him to hallucinate.

But Jiang Lin couldn't laugh.

Because he wasn't dreaming.

He really needed a path.

The Wasteland gave him time.

But time didn't automatically turn into knowledge.

Without a direction, ten years would still be ten wasted years.

During the third Wasteland trip, the reason he was able to chew through Gaokao knowledge was because the Gaokao itself had drawn a map for him.

Textbooks, syllabi, test papers, wrong questions, and teachers' explanations were all telling him where to go.

University was different.

The field of Physics was too vast.

So vast that a high school student standing at the door didn't even know where to take the first step.

He couldn't just casually find a few books and chew through them blindly.

He couldn't read about relativity today, quantum entanglement tomorrow, and cosmological pop science the day after.

That might look lively, but in the end, it would only turn into a head full of fancy terms.

What he needed was training.

A training route verified by generations of universities, colleges, teachers, and courses.

What a true Physics undergraduate student should study first, what to study next, which mathematical tools must be mastered in advance, which courses were core, which experiments could not be skipped, and where to retreat when things couldn't be understood.

What he needed was not chicken soup.

Not a genius becoming a god through self-study.

But a step-by-step training plan.

Finally, he stopped in front of the undergraduate training plan page of the School of Physics at Peking University.

If China's top tier of undergraduate Physics students were trained step-by-step according to such a course structure, then this training plan could at least tell him one thing.

How a true Physics student should be shaped.

Jiang Lin wasn't arrogant enough to think that by studying according to this plan, he could become a student of the Peking University Physics department.

He just wanted to know where the road was.

After determining the route, the first thing Jiang Lin did was copy down this plan.

Then, using a ThinkPad bought on Xianyu, he created a new folder.

[Wasteland Fourth Time · University Physics Route]

Inside, he continued to create subfolders.

[00 Training Plan and Course Route]

[01 Mathematical Foundations]

[02 General Physics]

[03 Four Major Mechanics]

[04 Experiments and Electronic Circuits]

[05 Computational Physics]

[06 English Textbooks and Dictionaries]

[07 Exercise Solutions]

[08 Open Course Videos]

[09 Stage Review and General Outline]

Folder after folder lined up on the screen, like a row of unopened doors.

Then he began to fill things into them.

The first thing he downloaded was mathematics.

He was very clear that university Physics did not start with Physics.

Back in high school, no matter how difficult Physics problems were, the mathematical tools were nothing more than trigonometric functions, vectors, derivatives, the shadow of simple integrals, and a little analytic geometry.

Yet in the training plan and course introductions, he repeatedly saw a few words: calculus, Linear Algebra, ordinary differential equations, complex variable functions, and mathematical Physics methods.

These things were the skeleton of Physics.

If the skeleton was unstable, everything afterwards would collapse.

Therefore, he downloaded the Advanced Mathematics textbook, supporting exercises, answer analyses, Linear Algebra lecture notes, ordinary differential equation courseware, complex function introduction, and mathematical Physics methods textbooks one by one.

The download progress bar slowly crawled from one percent to one hundred percent.

Some resources were huge.

Some links were broken.

Some scanned editions were as blurry as if separated by a layer of fog.

He didn't find it troublesome and opened them one by one to check.

Those where formulas could be seen clearly were kept, missing pages were deleted, and versions with too messy layouts were replaced.

When encountering uncertain ones, he downloaded both versions simultaneously and put them into the pending-screening folder.

Then came General Physics.

Mechanics.

Thermodynamics.

Electromagnetism.

Optics.

Atomic Physics.

He downloaded textbooks, lecture notes, exercises, and experimental guidebooks.

When he saw the words General Physics experiments, he paused for a moment.

There were no laboratories in the Wasteland.

There were no air tracks, no oscilloscopes, no Michelson interferometers, no spectrometers, and no photoelectric effect experimental instruments.

Yet he still downloaded the experimental guidebook.

Because he knew that experiments didn't necessarily have to be completely replicated.

At least, he needed to know what real Physics experiments were training.

Measurement.

Error.

Replication.

Controlling variables.

Data processing.

Experimental reports.

When he did problems in the past, he always felt that Physics was just reading the problem, listing formulas, substituting numbers, and calculating the answer.

But the third Wasteland trip made him understand that the world was not a test paper.

Acid rain wouldn't write its pH value in the problem stem, the soil wouldn't tell you what ions it contained, and the drop in solar panel efficiency wouldn't give you a standard answer.

The real world only gave phenomena.

The rest had to be measured by humans.

Therefore, the experimental guidebook had to be brought.

Even if in the end he could only use a rope, a stone, and a stopwatch to do a simple pendulum experiment, he still needed to know what he was measuring, where the errors came from, and how to process the data.

After filling the General Physics folder, Jiang Lin clicked on the Four Major Mechanics.

Theoretical Mechanics.

Electrodynamics.

Quantum Mechanics.

Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics.

When these four names were placed on the screen, his fingers noticeably slowed down.

A full score in high school Physics hadn't brought him much confidence.

On the contrary, the more thoroughly he chewed through high school knowledge, the more he knew how far he was from real Physics.

Theoretical mechanics was no longer just inclined planes and small balls, but Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, and generalized coordinates.

Electrodynamics was no longer just electric field strength and magnetic induction intensity, but Maxwells Equations, boundary conditions, and electromagnetic waves.

Quantum Mechanics was more like a completely unfamiliar dark forest, everywhere filled with wave functions, operators, eigenvalues, state superposition, and measurement.

Thermodynamics and statistical Physics re-disassembled concepts he thought he was familiar with—such as temperature, pressure, and entropy—to understand them within the statistical behavior of a large number of particles.

Jiang Lin looked at these course descriptions, turning them page by page.

His blood didn't boil with excitement.

Nor did he have that arrogance of "I will definitely be able to learn this."

He just silently added textbooks, lecture notes, exercises, solution sets, and open course videos one by one into the download list.

The download list grew longer and longer.

The remaining time in the bottom right corner of the screen went from twenty minutes to one hour, and then to three hours.

The fan started spinning very loudly.

The computer casing became slightly warm.

Jiang Lin didn't turn it off.

He got up to pour a glass of water in the kitchen, and came back to continue organizing.

He created folders of a fixed format for each course.

[Textbooks]

[Lecture Notes]

[Videos]

[Exercises]

[Answers]

[My Own Notes]

That last folder was still empty for now.

But Jiang Lin had created it anyway.

Because he knew that what was truly useful wouldn't be those things downloaded.

Those things were just other people's knowledge.

Only after chewing through them himself, calculating them himself, making mistakes himself, and rewriting them himself would they become his own things.

He opened the English Textbooks and Dictionaries folder.

This was the part he was least willing to face in the past.

English.

Gaokao English was very simple for him now.

But English textbooks and English papers were not Gaokao reading comprehension.

Inside them, there were no controlled sentence lengths to accommodate high school students, no multiple-choice options, and no question-creators highlighting key points for him.

Those sentences might have no pauses for a line and a half, with nouns piled upon nouns, attributives nested within attributives, and formulas sandwiched in the middle of paragraphs, like a wall without a door.

Yet he still began to download.

"The Feynman Lectures on Physics"

"Berkeley Physics Course"

English lecture notes on classical mechanics.

English lecture notes on electromagnetism.

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.

Dictionary of Physics terminology.

English-Chinese Physics glossary.

Mathematics specialized vocabulary list.

He also downloaded offline English dictionaries.

More than one.

There were general dictionaries, academic dictionaries, and Physics dictionaries.

He thought very clearly: there was no network in the Wasteland.

Encountering a word that couldn't be looked up was like a wall.

When there were too many walls, a person would break down.

He couldn't pin his hopes on "we'll talk about it when the time comes."

When that time came, there would be no Baidu.

No forums.

No teachers.

No classmates.

Only himself, and the things prepared in advance across several hard drives.

After downloading the textbooks, he began downloading open courses.

This step was much slower than downloading PDFs.

Video files were too large.

A single course easily amounted to dozens of gigabytes.

The hard drive capacity looked large, but once you actually stuffed university course videos into it, it quickly began to make one anxious.

Jiang Lin wasn't greedy for too much.

He filtered according to the training plan.

Advanced Mathematics, choose one set.

Linear Algebra, choose one set.

General Physics, choose a set with a complete system.

Theoretical Mechanics, choose one set.

Electrodynamics, choose one set.

Quantum Mechanics, choose two sets.

One set leaned towards introductory, and one set leaned towards serious.

Thermal and Statistical Physics, choose one set.

Computational Physics, choose one set.

Python and C language, choose one basic course set for each.

He didn't download those pop science videos with flashy titles.

Things like "Understand Quantum Entanglement in Ten Minutes."

Things like "Explain Relativity in One Go."

Things like "Ordinary People Can Also Understand the Ultimate Mysteries of the Universe."

These things were very tempting.

But he knew that right now he didn't need temptation.

What he needed were dry, complete, sequential things that allowed him to do problems and review repeatedly.

The thing least lacking in the Wasteland was time.

He didn't need to understand it in ten minutes.

He could spend ten years to understand it.

When downloading open courses, Jiang Lin specifically saved the subtitle files as well.

Automatic subtitles had errors.

So he downloaded lecture notes.

Those with lecture notes took priority.

Those with exercises took priority.

Those with reference answers took priority.

He even took screenshots of discussion posts in some course forums to save them.

Because those discussions contained many questions asked by students.

Where mistakes were easily made.

Which chapter was the most difficult.

Which problem had traps.

A teacher might gloss over a sentence in class, but students below would get stuck on it for three days.

These were very important to Jiang Lin.

He was not a genius.

Where others got stuck, he would most likely get stuck too.

Bringing these stumbling blocks in advance was equivalent to leaving signposts for himself in the Wasteland in advance.