Liangcheng Shangshu Province, Prime Minister's Dushi Hall.
Zhou Jun was sitting in the side hall, flipping through the report sent by Anxi Imperial College.
Jianhong Taixue from Qiuci Town compiled a special academic journal based on the development over the years and handed it to Zhou Jun.
At that time, Jabir, a great food scholar, and Mao Shun, a famous craftsman of the Tang Dynasty, settled in the school as the founders of Jianghong Taixue.
Therefore, Jianhong Taixue established the East and West Colleges.
The west courtyard is home to food scholars, Persian scholars and a small number of Christian scholars who escaped religious persecution, while the east courtyard is the craftsmen and scholars of the Tang Dynasty led by the great craftsman Mao Shun.
In the Western Academy, all scholarship and research are derived from the heritage of classical Western science, including ancient Greek manuscripts and Syriac and Hebrew translations.
Jaber led many scholars to obtain a large number of precious manuscripts from countries along the Mediterranean Sea through land and sea transportation, and translated them into Tang Chinese. These included Euclid, Archimedes,
Famous scholars such as Apollonius, Menelaus, Heron, Ptolemy and Diophantus.
On the basis of these academic theories, Jaber classified them according to disciplines, and successively established mathematics, astronomy, oceanography, geography, chemistry, etc. in the Western Academy of Jianghong Taixue.
Among them, the School of Chemistry of the West Campus was originally the School of Alchemy. In just a few years, it published several works such as "The Grand Canon of Physical Properties", "Seventy Books", "The Art of Furnace", and "Oriental Mercury".
In the field of chemistry, Jaber used distillation, purification, catalysis and other reactions to first prepare nitric acid with higher purity.
Then, he used the method of distilling alum to obtain sulfuric acid, and mixed nitric acid and hydrochloric acid to make aqua regia. Based on this, he produced organic tartaric acid.
Currently, he is leading a team to try to extract arsenic from sulfides with the help of organic tartaric acid.
Among them, arsenic is used as an alloy additive to produce lead bullets. Once successfully manufactured, lead bullets can be used to replace iron bullets and stone bullets. On the one hand, the cost of bullets can be greatly reduced. On the other hand, the barrel used to launch large cannonballs
, with the blessing of arsenic alloy, it can be shrunk, making high-quality, long-life firearms possible.
Compared with the West Courtyard, which focuses on alchemy and chemistry, the East Courtyard, headed by Master Mao Shun, has a completely different situation.
Mao Shun is a craftsman. In terms of craftsmanship, he inherited the Mohist learning in ancient China and is now at the pinnacle.
The East Campus, composed of craftsmen from the Tang Dynasty, offered many new subjects in addition to common subjects such as carpentry, goldsmithing, utensils, and weaving.
Among them, the most interesting are the two disciplines: heaven and earth science and landscape science.
The science of heaven and earth means the creation of heaven and earth, and all things.
This includes tides, flames, hydraulics, magnetism, levers and other phenomena related to the power of objects between heaven and earth.
In the past few years, by firing pottery and smelting metal, the Anxi craftsmen of Dongyuan Tiandi Department accumulated a large amount of thermodynamics knowledge, and invented the Su Steel method based on the original steel filling method.
The so-called Suzhou Steel method is to use wrought iron as the feed iron, place it in the furnace, and place the pig iron plate at the furnace mouth. When the furnace temperature rises to about 1300°C and the pig iron plate begins to melt, use tongs to clamp the pig iron plate.
Move left and right, and constantly turn the iron material to make the iron material evenly pour into the pig iron liquid; in this way, it can not only produce a good carburization effect, but also produce a violent oxidation effect, which separates the iron and slag and produces less slag.
And steel with uniform composition.
Compared with the steel filling method currently used in Anxi, the biggest advantage of the Su Steel Method is that it shortens the smelting time and improves productivity, which greatly improves the manufacturing efficiency of gunpowder weapons.
In addition to improving the steel-making method, Tiandike also used atmospheric pressure to create siphons and pumps, which can draw spring water blocked by high mountains from distant places, greatly improving Anxi's agricultural irrigation conditions.
Another subject of the East Campus, Landscape Science, was also called optics in later schools.
The craftsmen of Guangjingyuan once communicated with the Christian scholars of Xiyuan and learned that there was a treasure in the Papal Library called the "Reading Stone".
According to legend, the reading stone is a product of the ancient Babylonians. It is a huge convex crystal installed on a stone platform. As long as the book is placed under the crystal, the text on the page can be enlarged.
Since there were many old craftsmen with high moral standards but poor eyesight in the academy, after hearing this anecdote, the craftsmen of the Tang Dynasty found a pile of crystal flakes used to make experimental equipment, polished them carefully, and planned to
These crystal pieces were made into reading stones for old craftsmen to use for reading.
There was a craftsman who made some mistakes when polishing the crystal piece. He polished a piece of crystal that was supposed to be a convex lens into a concave lens.
Faced with this defective product, the craftsman was really reluctant to throw it away, so he tried to hang it on a book and found that the text on the page not only did not enlarge, but also shrunk.
The craftsman was puzzled and told others about this phenomenon.
Through repeated experiments, others came to the conclusion that convex lenses can magnify the light scene, and concave lenses can reduce the light scene.
Someone asked, if a convex lens and a concave lens are put together, can the light scene be enlarged first and then reduced?
After some experiments, all the Tang craftsmen were stunned by the results.
By standing a convex lens and a concave lens front and back and pointing them at distant objects, the distant scene can be clearly magnified into the human eye.
The craftsmen did not understand its principle, so they wrote the results of this telescopic imaging in their report.
Zhou Jun was amazed when he saw this.
In the Netherlands in 1608 AD, two children were playing with several lenses in front of the optician Hans Lieber's shop. They put the convex lens in front and the concave lens in the back. They looked at the church in the distance through the front and back lenses.
of the weathercock and found that the image became larger and clearer.
After Li Boer discovered this phenomenon, he ran back to the store and put two lenses in a tube. After many experiments, he invented the telescope.
Unexpectedly, the craftsmen of Jianghong Taixue actually got inspiration from Christian reading stones and created the prototype of the telescope.
Seeing this, Zhou Jun simply wrote to Mao Shun about the ancient method of making glass.
The method is actually not difficult. Remove impurities and purify the sand containing quartz sand, then mix it with alkaline water (natural salt lake), and put it into a blast furnace for calcination to obtain relatively high-quality early glass.
By selecting and polishing these glasses, you can replace crystals to make telescopes.
After writing this letter to Mao Shun, Zhou Jun wrote another letter to Liu Zai, the deputy envoy of Anxi Jiedu, asking the latter to send guards to guard the glass workshop.
After reading Anxi's report, Zhou Jun felt a little emotional.
Jaber, as the most famous food scholar in history, introduced Western classical science to Anxi, while Mao Shun, as the leading craftsman in the Tang Dynasty, carried forward Chinese craftsmanship.
In Anxi's Jianhong Taixue, two different scientific cultures from the East and the West collide with each other, learn from each other, and blend with each other. Who knows what kind of sparks will burst out in the future?