The young man, a second-year Electronics student at Tsinghua University, shared his doubts with a professor, who confirmed his suspicions.
Mu Qing, a pseudonym for a second-year Electronics student at Tsinghua University (China), corrected a mistake by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics committee, and received a thank-you response from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the precious award every year, local media reported this Thursday.
Last December, the young man was doing some physics exercises when he detected something that did not fit in the last equation from page eleven of the scientific report on the prestigious award.
The equation in question, related to the quantum entanglementhad two positive and two negative signs, instead of positive signs for the four factors on its right-hand side, although this did not affect the final result of the calculation.
So, Mu decided to ask his professor Wang Xiangbin, who, after carrying out several checks, confirmed that the Nobel committee had made a mistake, so he submitted the correction to the institution. Sara Gustavsson, the academy’s communications officer, responded to Wang by thanking her for notifying them of the bug.
Viral story
This Friday, Tsinghua University shared the story, which went viral on the Asian country’s social networks, where in just two days it accumulated more than eleven million visits on the Weibo microblogging platform.
As a result, the student asked the media to respect his anonymity, arguing that he has not achieved any notable scientific progress. «When I get do something really awesomethen please post my real name“, he declared.
For his part, Wang said his students should learn that in the world of science everyone is equal and there is no absolute authority. “Anyone can ask a legitimate question. That is the beauty of physics and of academia,” he asserted.