System: Master Your Life-Chapter 653 - 166: Xu Lin’s Paper Ideas (Part 2)

Xu Lin was quite optimistic about publishing in Nature, after all, he was extraordinary; a remarkable memory, a learning talent, those two abilities combined enabled his brain power to far surpass so-called geniuses. As long as he wanted to learn, as long as he was willing to spend the time, there was essentially nothing he couldn’t accomplish.

The night passed without event.

It took Xu Lin more than ten minutes to fall asleep.

Ning Yuhuan fell asleep long before, curled up in Xu Lin’s embrace.

Soon, it was the next morning.

Xu Lin only woke up after nine, while Ning Yuhuan had already gotten up at eight.

Today is Saturday.

After eating, as usual, the two of them went directly to the library.

At the library, Ning Yuhuan was reading and studying.

Xu Lin logged onto the Nature website, planning to see what kind of papers were there and what their research directions were.

Xu Lin spent over half an hour looking at the papers. The titles were impressive, involving research on nerves, cells, cancer, and so on.

All topics of natural science.

"It seems getting a paper published in Nature is a complex task."

"But what direction should I research?"

Xu Lin contemplated.

Physics: Physics, Astronomy, Planetary Science, Material Science, Engineering...

Earth and Environmental Sciences: Climate Science, Ecology, Environmental Science...

Biological Sciences: Genetics, Microbiology, Neuroscience...

Health Sciences: Anatomy, Pathogenesis...

Every major category has several subdivisions.

Xu Lin couldn’t just randomly choose one.

Even with any arbitrary choice, a normal person would have to study for years just to get started.

Even if Xu Lin learned quickly, it would still require a lot of time, and it’d be very tedious, possibly even thankless. Some disciplines require long hours in a lab, repeatedly conducting experiments and collecting data to prove certain results, and afterward, writing tens of thousands of words to form a paper — that process takes a long time and isn’t something one can finish in a week or even a few months.

It’s a massive, systematic project, not something Xu Lin could breeze through just because of his extraordinary abilities.

That wasn’t realistic.

However, Xu Lin wasn’t in a rush.

Publishing papers takes time, it’s not an overnight achievement. Let him write a novel and he could whip up a hundred thousand words in a day.

But a paper, that requires theoretical support, data support, results support, and research value.

On a personal level, it’s your honor, it can propel you to success, it could raise a Ph.D. to an associate professor or even professor status, could make an undergraduate rise rapidly...

On a grander scale, this could be a great achievement propelling human civilization forward, or rather, you’ll be a part of that great achievement, one of the foundation stones. Many years later, when there are revolutionary technology breakthroughs in the scientific field and humanity enters the interstellar age, your work will have contributed to that.

Xu Lin, with nothing to do, read two books related to physics.

"The Nature of Physical Laws" and "The Discovery of Subatomic Particles."

"Physics is still too complex."

That’s how Xu Lin felt, especially with the latter; the author was a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and in the face of the Nobel Prize, particularly in physical and medical natural sciences, even Nature papers pale in comparison—it’s like deities overlooking everything.

After finishing the books, Xu Lin temporarily abandoned the idea of research in physics.

He decided to work on something else.

Xu Lin turned on his computer and called for Classmate Xu.

Xu Lin, usually, though occasionally, would improve Classmate Xu, allowing it to continuously evolve.

Initially, Classmate Xu was just a chatbot, but over time, Xu Lin endowed it with more functions, such as data collection and integration, serving as a work assistant, even with a bit of ability to learn and think.

Hmm.

Learning and thinking.

Very important.

For humans, learning and thinking are the most important abilities, if not the only one.

When humans were still monkeys, the leader of the group was a strong monkey, because only a strong monkey could hunt, capturing more prey, but at that time, their prey was only equal in size and strength to themselves, so they could only look on from a distance at larger and more powerful predators.

Then, as humans reached the time of Homo sapiens, they began hunting larger animals, learning to store food. One day, a Homo sapiens leader thought about how to hunt these larger animals and ultimately figured out that they could use torches to drive elephants and mammoths into a valley, then use pre-positioned giant stones to roll down the mountain, using gravitational acceleration to crush such large animals like mammoths.

Of course, at that time, Homo sapiens didn’t understand gravitational acceleration, but when stones rolled down the mountain, rocks that weighed hundreds of pounds, how much force would it generate? Thus, humans hunted large animals.

All of these were set by Homo sapiens long in advance. Humans learned to think, to hunt giant animals, becoming the true overlords of nature. Even saber-toothed tigers didn’t dare challenge elephants or mammoths, only humans dared.

Later, humans nurtured civilization, even creating social systems.

Thus, through thinking and learning, human civilization continued to develop.

AI mirrors this.

In many years, will AI allow the emergence of Intelligent Life?